[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is longtermism? How does it relate to IC in real?
Rick Rosner: I just learned about it longtermism and probably have a very basic understanding because I’ve only read one article on it but apparently it’s kind of a modernistic philosophy embraced by certain billionaire tech bros that you need to look at the world now as having the potential to, a hundred million years from now, support planets and solar systems full of an expanded humanity. You shouldn’t look at saving the world for our grandchildren; you should look at saving the parts of the world that will make it most likely that will have five quintillion descendants 50 million years from now.
This article criticized that point of view among other things kind of giving people license to say jettison not give a shit about climate change refugees. If you have to lose a billion people to famine and drought and wars because of climate change in the service of increasing the overall odds that humanity survives, implying privileged humanity, then go ahead and do it because the billion lives lost now don’t compare to the five quintillion lives you’ve saved 50 million years from now. I buy the arguments that longtermism if you view it that way is kind of ridiculous and it’s a form of utilitarianism, which I generally have no problem with except that you can’t really imagine what the greatest good for the greatest number of what will be 50 million years from now. But IC allows us to take stabs in the general direction of stuff.
Jacobsen: The way I’ve seen IC develop has been with language only; words, and heuristically rules of them.
Rosner: Yeah but even though it’s just language only and that’s a failing on my part at least, there’s still enough to it that I still believe in it. Among the things that IC postulates or are kind of side postulates is that consciousness pretty much goes along with high level information processing and that consciousness arises not infrequently in the universe, that you have 10 to the 22nd stars even if only one in a trillion solar systems can support life, that still leaves you with 10 billion solar systems that can support life. And out of those, even if only one in a thousand you can go from life to conscious life, that’s still 10 million planets with conscious life scattered throughout the universe which is not a small number. There’s the principle of no upper limit to the size of potentially existent universes. There’s the set of all possible universes which we know and we know that set contains at least one universe and likely accountable Infinity of universes of all countable sizes.
So that reflects on longtermism that even if we fail to create some paradise for a quintillion whatever 50 million years from now, it’s pretty likely that an old highly sophisticated culture/slash technology will survive to do something, that there are cultures out there among the likely millions or billions of planets that have evolved life. There are likely civilizations that are millions of years old. The idea that we have to be ruthless in making sure that distant humanity in the distant future survives at the expense of current or near future humanity seems a little bullshit-ty given that we’re very likely not the only conscious life in the universe. It’s also very unlikely that we’re the pinnacle of conscious beings.
So thinking in terms of what’s best for a quintillion super powerful humans of the future is a failure of imagination because what will be 50 million years in the future will be inherently inconceivable to us. It’s not unreasonable to think that there is a tendency among all the other things that can happen in the universe for complexity, computational complexity, information process and complexity, conscious complexity, to increase. It doesn’t mean that every part of the universe will increase in complexity but it seems very likely that parts do. So, many of these ideas point to long-term futures.
Also one more thing is big bang universe only supports life for trillions of years and then it burns out and it just spreads out, we got a heat death of the universe and that there’s no available energy for life or information processing once the universe is sufficiently spread out and uniform. But the IC universe doesn’t spread out like that. It looks like itself indefinitely into the future which is an optimistic thing for the future of conscious beings that we won’t be obliterated by the heat death of the universe. So anyway, all these things are ideas that involve the far future involved longtermism but not the fairly basic longtermism that I’m slightly familiar with on the basis of one article.
Another idea; the universe fills up with civilizations over time. Now maybe some of these civilizations go away but probably some of these survive. And an idea that I don’t know which side I come down on, do civilizations that are internal to the universe that are built from the material of the universe space-time matter; do these have anything to do with maintaining the universe if the universe itself is a probably conscious information processor? Do the civilizations within the universe facilitate that process?
I guess that it’s not necessary but it’s possible that lately we’ve been talking about combinatorial coding which is embodying thoughts via what’s lit up with the combination of things that are lit up within a system, whether it’s the universe or your brain. And you can have that recall through codes system without any conscious subsystems helping to run it but that doesn’t preclude it. If you’ve got little elves in your system that are helping sharpen your focus making your system work better, maybe that’s part of the increasing order of an information processing system. But it’s a completely open question to the point where you could almost think of it as kind of ridiculous. How could civilizations that originate in galaxies, civilizations that are probably limited to traveling at the speed of light; how could these civilizations have anything to do with the signaling across 10 billion years and 10 billion light years that is involved in the universe’s information processing? If civilizations can get to the huge black holes at the centers of almost all galaxies as far as I know and have be sufficiently technologically advanced to mess with those things, who knows what they could do.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 