Now we could consider other earthly life to be a "close genetic relative" I suppose, but if we're capable of making that extension of our concept of self, then why not also extend it to other intelligent life?
Us humans, we've eliminated or learned to protect most of the fauna that poses any danger to us. But if we would be realistically worried, that tomorrow the bears or wolves might start carrying firearms or beam weapons, we'd wipe them out to the last, out of justified sense of self-preservation.
More importantly I guess is this question: Why is our conception of "self" in the meaning of "self-preservation" exactly the size of our species for the purposes of Dark Forest? Why is it not narrower or broader?
P.S.: I further disagree that your sense of self-preservation would be justification. We do not consider pre-emptive strikes to be justified for a reason.
Except when we do. See e.g. historical killing of enemies and their families, to preempt retaliation.
> Intelligent beings can be reasoned with.
Except when they can't. As the orthogonality thesis states, intelligence is orthogonal to values. You could imagine smart bears whose values and ways of thinking could be completely alien to us (though evolving in the same environment would probably make us and them more alike than us and aliens). There's a term for that coined by Orson Scott Card[0] - varelse. "They may or may not be sentient beings, but are so foreign that no meaningful communication is possible with the subject." Except perhaps math. Which, in this case, mostly means game theory.
> Why is our conception of "self" in the meaning of "self-preservation" exactly the size of our species for the purposes of Dark Forest? Why is it not narrower or broader?
I'd argue, because of the first axiom: inability to establish trust due to communication delays. The clustering of "sameness" is determined by the speed of light[1]. And in the case of armed bears, "sameness" would too be determined by inability to establish mutual trust, this time given by communication problems caused by differences of minds.
> We do not consider pre-emptive strikes to be justified for a reason.
Except when we do.
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[0] - https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Hierarchy_of_Foreignness
[1] - if we kindly ignore the existence of whatever quantum shenanigan communications Sophons were using, as apparently the author did. IMO, Sophons ruin the self-consistency of the rules of book's universe.
> Except when we do.
Strike out "when", at least for the U.S.
The U.S. lawmakers obviously believe in importance of the U.S. being able to do no-notice preemptive nuclear strike and the proof is that the bills to "prohibit the President from using the Armed Forces to conduct a first-use nuclear strike" are "read" but then nothing happens afterwards:
Read Jan 2017:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/669
Read Jan 2019:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/669
Coverage Jan 2019:
https://homelandprepnews.com/stories/32314-sen-markey-rep-li...
"because of our deeply flawed and dangerous system, if the president decides to launch a nuclear weapon, no one can stop him. It is high time for Congress to add a check on this or any future president’s ability to start a nuclear war."
September 2019:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/10/donald-tr...
"Trump also has absolute authority to order the first use of nuclear weapons with no checks or balances from anyone: not his advisors, and not the Congress."
Yes, sometimes. Dark Forest seems predicated on the idea that it is mathematically impossible to ever not be committing genocide because it is the one and only correct answer. Yet here we are existing in a world where genocide is not the goal of every living being.
> As the orthogonality thesis states, intelligence is orthogonal to values. You could imagine smart bears whose values and ways of thinking could be completely alien to us
Irrelevant to their ability to reason. They will undoubtedly value something, else they will not have motivation to take up arms in the first place. Sure, it is possible that they value our extinction as their highest priority, but that seems incredibly unlikely because it would mean that their own survival is less important. If they at least value their own survival higher than our demise, then there is basis for reason.
> I'd argue, because of the first axiom: inability to establish trust due to communication delays.
What does that have to do with trust? Communication delays are equivalent to distance, and being far away from potential dangers has a way of making them less threatening, not more. At interstellar distances you can afford to be patient.
The biggest problem with the Dark Forest concept is that it is predicated on this insane notion that the most important thing in the entire universe to anyone is the continuation of self -- and where mentioned before that self is defined to encompass exactly your own species and no more or less --, which is directly contradicted by both the long history of human and animal behavior and by the fact that everything dies including the universe. In other words, if continuation of self is your highest priority, and you're forward thinking enough to see other species lightyears away as a potential threat, then you're also forward thinking enough to see quite plainly that you have a 100% chance of failure in the long run.
No, Dark Forest is predicated on the idea that those who don't commit genocide against potential threats first eventually have someone commit genocide against them.
> Yet here we are existing in a world where genocide is not the goal of every living being.
Dark Forest doesn't hold that that calculus applies between all living beings, just to beings in the specific circumstance that physical law appears to dictate must exist between intelligent species arising on different worlds.
There's a very brief historical window where killing all men of military age plus the infirm, making younger men menial slaves, and forcing women into reproductive servitude hasn't been the overtly accepted norm of warfare, and where preventive (as well as even outright aggressive) warfare hasn't been seen as legitimate. But even if overt norms have changed, actual behavior in war has changed less than the overt norms has on all those grounds. Ethnic cleansing remains a common practice in war.
Moreover, much of that is a acheived in the wake of war, and quite arguably deliberately so, through factors like political subjugation and economic coercion even when the overt norms are adhered to in direct terms during the conflict.
And aliens aren't likely to be logistically compatible enough to make good menial slaves, or reproductively compatible enough for that form of servitude.
> We do not consider pre-emptive strikes to be justified for a reason.
Pre-emption is generally considered justified in just war theory, preventive war is not. OTOH, all actual war is at least preventive if not nakedly aggressive on at least one side, and war still happens not infrequently, so the overt norms are not the same as actual behavior.
The way I see it, it's similar to efficient market hypothesis. That is, as long as the axioms are reasonably met, you'd expect the system to reach and stay in the determined state over time. Incidentally, in the books both humans and Trisolarians are examples of local, temporary deviation from rules of Dark Forest. Spoiler alert: it ends up badly for both, and the Dark Forest asserts itself over time.
The idea isn't that they all come to the conclusion, but that the ones that it is game-theoretically optimal and those that fail to do so (as well as some that do not) are destroyed by the ones that do.