One of the most important points raised by the sequences is that not all minds are like humans. In quite a few places, people have discussed minds with slight changes from human minds, which seem altogether different. However, a lot of this discussion has been related to AI, as opposed to minds created by evolution. I'm trying to think of ways that minds which evolved, and are effective enough to start a civilization, could differ from humans'.
Three Worlds Collide would seem like an excellent starting point, but isn't actually very useful. As far as I recall, the Babyeaters might have learned their baby eating habits as a result of societal pressure. The main difference in their society seemed to be the assumption that people who disagreed with you were simply mistaken: this contrasts to humans' tendency to form rival groups, and assume everyone in the rival groups is evil. The Super-Happies had self modified, and so don't provide an example of an evolved mind.
So here are my ideas so far.
- A species could have the same neural pathways for wanting and liking. This would lead to far less akrasia.
- A species could have a different set of standards for boredom. This seems to be one of the most precarious values in the human mind.
Do you mean what Eliezer calls the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis? (That is, human intelligence evolved via runaway sexual selection--people who were politically competent were more reproductively successful, and as people got better and better at the game of politics, so too did the game get harder and harder, hence the feedback loop.)
Perhaps a species could evolve intelligence without such a mechanism, if something about their environment is just dramatically more complex in a peculiar way compared with ours, so that intelligence was worthwhile just for non-social purposes. The species' ancestors may have been large predators on top of the food chain, where members are typically solitary and territorial and hunt over a large region of land, with its ecosystem strangely different from ours in some way that I'm not specifying (but you'd need a pretty clever idea about it to make this whole thing work).
These aliens wouldn't be inherently social the way humans are, but they wouldn't be antisocial either--they would have noticed that cooperation allows them to solve even more difficult problems and get even more from their environment. (Still in a pre-technological stage. Remember, something about this environment is such that it provides a nearly smooth, practically unbounded (in difficulty) array of puzzles/problems to solve with increasing rewards.) Eventually, they may build a civilization just to more efficiently organize to obtain these benefits, which will also allow them to advance technologically. (I'm probably drawing too sharp of a distinction between technological advancement and interaction with their strangely complex environment.)
They might lack the following trait that is very central to human nature: affection through familiarity. When we spend a lot of time with a person/thing/activity/idea, we grow fond of it. They might not have this, or they might not have it in such generality (e.g. they might still have it for, say, mates, if they reproduce sexually). They might also be a lot less biased than we are by social considerations, for the obvious reason, but perhaps they have less raw cognitive horsepower (their environment being no substitute for the human pastimes of politics and sex).
Recklessly speculative, obviously, but I gather that's all we can hope to offer to Solvent.