Aleksei, do you mean they would have sex with the children once and then ask them if they'd like to leave their parents and have sex every day for the rest of their lives? :-)

Anyway, it takes too long for unmodified human children to develop proper minds in order to consent to anything like this. What do you do about pain incurred at the age of a few months? A year?

I'm also bothered that nobody has mentioned non-human animals. Why should cats and chimps and dolphins have to suffer pain and romantic disappointment? The Super Happy People should modify all the higher life forms and completely reshape the ecology.

> How the fluff would they be able to feel all possible types of feelings

They seem to be limited to mapping others' experiences to their own feelings for analogous experiences. For instance, they first mapped giving birth to pleasure. Hardly epic angelic universal empathy powers.

What else is there, though? How do you define the feelings "pleasure" and "pain", distinctly from "goals sought" and "things avoided"? How do you empathize with a really alien intelligence without mapping its behavior and experiences to your own?

> Do babies realize what will happen to them?

I asked about this in yesterday's comments thread, but I guess everyone's moved here since then :-)

My intuition is that selection pressure on young aliens (to do anything it takes not get eaten) would be stronger than most selection pressure adults experience (most adults produce hundreds of offspring <=> only one offspring out of several hundred survives; and in a technological society most if not all adults live to reproduce).

We should see children evolving to escape being eaten. If running faster doesn't work, then by hurting other children to make them run slower. Or by children eating one another themselves. Or by a social organization that lets a few bullies/rulers/... send other children to be eaten in their stead. Or by evolving to be poisonous or at least tasting really bad and having orange-black striping to warn your parents :-)

Also, the period of time from birth to the beginning of (post-winnowing) growth spurt would be compressed to the utter minimum required by their physiology. (The faster you grow up, the smaller the window of danger to be eaten). On that basis, the pre-winnowing children may not have much time to philosophize about being eaten.

Eventually you get is a creature that's born sentient, manages to learn about the day/night cycle (plus whatever inborn "instinct" provides), and then the winnowing takes place at the age of 2 days before the growth spurt can begin. Very stylized, kind of thing.

> I don't think the Pilot is really taking the time to think through all the logical consequences of what he's saying

Indeed, even if he wants to make war, the logical next step would still be to keep talking to the aliens and learning as much as possible about them. Then maybe trying to capture or infiltrate their ship. Or asking for escort to their system and returning with strategic knowledge about that. Preparing a surprise attack. Things like that.

Destroying the first contact alien ship would be stupid.

Also, if some people care so much about this crusade they're willing to go against the rest of human society and risk a huge war, then logically they ought to have mounted a huge operation long ago to sweep the galaxy looking for morally unsuitable aliens. Killing or forcefully transforming any alien species that 1) they judge to be sufficiently intelligent and 2) whose behavior doesn't conform to human morals.

Or they might realize there's no real upper bound on the amount of suffering that might potentially be taking place somewhere out of sight. Especially if you give more weight to the suffering or death of more intelligent individuals. In which case they might want to make an alliance with the Baby Eaters to search the galaxy for cultures so alien that they would be abominations to both species. And only exterminate the Baby Eaters once the galaxy has been swept clean.

Put like that, it seems to me to be a really bad idea. But isn't that what follows from the Pilot's argument? If stopping the Baby Eating is so important they're willing to risk the extermination of humanity for it. (And there's no way they could be sure of the Baby Eaters' potential in a species-wide war just from reading one badly translated and possibly censored alien library for a day. So they're proposing going to war where they can't be sure of victory.)

> Sentience DOES make a difference. You dont frown on your cat for hunting mice, but on your dog for doing it with children.

That's at least partly due to speciesm. How many people have gone on crusades to stop leopards from eating chimpanzees? For that matter, how many people devote their lives to stopping other *humans* from eating chimpanzees?

As for cannibalism, it seems to me that its role in Eliezer's story is to trigger a purely illogical revulsion in the humans who antropomorphise the aliens.

Imagine two completely different alien species living in one (technological) society, where each eats and "winnows" the other's children. This is the natural, evolved behavior of both species, just as big cats eat apes and (human) apes eat antelopes.

No cannibalism takes place, but the same amount of death and suffering is present as in Eliezer's scenario. Should we be less or more revolted at this? Which scenario has the greater moral weight? Should we say the two-species configuration is morally superior because they've developed a peaceful, stable society with two intelligent species coexisting instead of warring and hunting each other?