Reeently I have started to read more and more articles discussing a philosophy called longtermism. I can distinguish between two different versions of longtermism:
(1) What we may call reasonable-sounding longtermism, in which longtermism is defined as something like the belief that future people matter as much as currently living people. A philosopher named William MacAskill defines longtermism as "the view that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time." A recent New York Times guest essay by the same person is entitled "The Case for Longtermism." What we read about sounds pretty reasonable. No mention is made of interstellar colonization or computer-simulated lives. MacAskill's essay has a moral tone.
(2) A far more imaginative form of longtermism, what we may call sci-fi longtermism. This version is based on extremely far-out speculations, some of which are very goofy. The speculations seem like outgrowths of the hazardous speculations of Nick Bostrom, the father of the morally destructive "simulation hypothesis," that we humans are living in a computer simulation created by extraterrestrials.
Let me explain why Bostrom's simulation hypothesis is morally destructive, and how it evolved into sci-fi longtermism. Bostrom's simulation hypothesis was based on the idea that human conscious experience such as you and I are now having can be generated by computers. There was never any warrant for this speculation. While human experience can be influenced by computers generating visual content that humans interact with, there has never been the slightest shred of evidence that a computer is capable of generating conscious experience like humans have. The idea that a computer can generate conscious experience has always been as silly as the idea that your TV set can not merely show you dinosaur images, but also generate dinosaurs, so that physical dangerous dinosaurs leap out from your TV screen.
Despite a lack of any warrant for the claim that computers can generate conscious experience, Bostrom advanced the simulation hypothesis, speculating that maybe all of our lives are produced by some computer simulation. But how could we be part of such a simulation, when no computer known to man has ever produced a speck of anything like conscious experience? Bostrom's answer was that maybe the computers generating our conscious experience are produced by super-advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that originated eons ago.
Many people warmed up to this idea, but I think very few of them realized how morally perilous such a speculation is. The moral hazards of believing in this simulation theory seem almost as bad as the moral hazards of believing in solipsism, the idea that your mind is the only mind in the universe. If your life was merely something produced in some computer of an extraterrestrial civilization, there is no reason we can think of why such extraterrestrials would tend to arrange things so that every person you saw in your conscious experience would actually be a conscious person. It would be much easier to just arrange some simulation so that human bodies appearing in a simulation might be imaginary constructs (like in video games) without corresponding minds.
When I play Star Wars: Battlefront II on my Playstation 4, as I am very enjoyably doing these days, I can destroy as many shiny white imperial stormtroopers as I want, without any moral feelings, thinking, "They're just detailed shapes in the simulation." And anyone believing that his life is just some computer simulation produced by extraterrestrials might without guilt kill people, thinking, "They're just detailed shapes in the simulation."
So once a person believes in some simulation hypothesis, he may feel free to maim, rape, steal and kill as much as he wants, while thinking, "I didn't really harm anyone, because they were just human shapes generated by the computer simulation in which I'm living." Bostrom's simulation hypothesis was a form of poisonous nonsense. A good rule to follow is: never leave your children or your money or your property in the hands of someone believing in Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, because such a person's moral behavior is unpredictable. For example, such a person might harm your money or your children or your property in any way that pleases him, while thinking, "These are just shapes being generated by the computer simulation set up by extraterrestrials."
How does the simulation hypothesis relate to sci-fi longtermism? The proponents of sci-fi longtermism do not as a rule believe that we humans are now living in a computer simulation created by extraterrestrials. But proponents of sci-fi longtermism tend to maintain that in the far future humans will be able to create "computer-simulated lives" rather in the way that Bostrom imagined extraterrestrials doing.
What is going on is that these proponents of sci-fi longtermism are imagining scenarios under which humans spread throughout the galaxy, while setting up computer servers all over the galaxy dedicated to generating computer-generated lives. We read about this in an article entitled "Against Longtermism" by Emile P. Torrez. He says this:
"This is why longtermists are obsessed with calculating how many people could exist in the future if we were to colonise space and create vast computer simulations around stars in which unfathomably huge numbers of people live net-positive lives in virtual-reality environments. I already mentioned Bostrom’s estimate of 1054 future people, which includes many of these ‘digital people’, but in his bestseller Superintelligence (2014) he puts the number even higher at 1058 people, nearly all of whom would ‘live rich and happy lives while interacting with one another in virtual environments’. Greaves and MacAskill are similarly excited about this possibility, estimating that some 1045 conscious beings in computer simulations could exist within the Milky Way alone. That is what our ‘vast and glorious’ potential consists of: massive numbers of technologically enhanced digital posthumans inside huge computer simulations spread throughout our future light cone. It is for this goal that, in Häggström’s scenario, a longtermist politician would annihilate Germany. It is for this goal that we must not ‘fritter … away’ our resources on such things as solving global poverty. It is for this goal that we should consider implementing a global surveillance system, keep pre-emptive war on the table, and focus more on superintelligent machines than saving people in the Global South from the devastating effects of climate change (mostly caused by the Global North). In fact, Beckstead has even argued that, for the sake of attaining this goal, we should actually prioritise the lives of people in rich countries over those in poor countries, since influencing the long-term future is of ‘overwhelming importance’, and the former are more likely to influence the long-term future than the latter. "
How could anyone come up with such inflated figures, by estimating a total of 1058 future people? There are currently about 140 million people born per year. Rounding this up to 1 billion per year after assuming large levels of some space colonization, and very optimistically assuming that the human race could survive for a billion years, we can get a very optimistic estimate of 1018 humans living in the future. How are these sci-fi longtermists coming up with an estimate more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger, an estimate of 1058 future people? It is by assuming that most of the lives will be computer-generated lives.
In another article describing sci-fi longtermism, we read this:
"Longtermism is a quasi-religious worldview, influenced by transhumanism and utilitarian ethics, which asserts that there could be so many digital people living in vast computer simulations millions or billions of years in the future that one of our most important moral obligations today is to take actions that ensure as many of these digital people come into existence as possible. In practical terms, that means we must do whatever it takes to survive long enough to colonize space, convert planets into giant computer simulations and create unfathomable numbers of simulated beings. How many simulated beings could there be? According to Nick Bostrom —the Father of longtermism and director of the Future of Humanity Institute — there could be at least 1058 digital people in the future, or a 1 followed by 58 zeros."
This is all very big nonsense. Human conscious experience cannot be generated by computers. The posts of this blog provide the strongest evidence for rejecting all claims that human conscious experience has any material explanation. Neuroscientists are unable to provide credible explanation for how brains could produce any of the main aspects of human experience, things such as:
- self-hood
- abstract idea creation
- appreciation
- memory formation
- moral thinking and moral behavior
- instantaneous memory recall
- instantaneous creation of permanent new memories
- memory persistence for as long as 50 years or more
- refined emotions such as romantic love
- speaking in a language
- understanding spoken language
- creativity
- insight
- beliefs
- intellectual pleasure
- reading ability
- writing ability
- ordinary awareness of surroundings
- visual perception
- recognition
- auditory perception
- attention
- fascination and interest
- the correct recall of large bodies of sequential information (such as when someone playing Hamlet recalls all his lines correctly)
- eyes-closed visualization
- extrasensory perception (ESP)
- dreaming
- volition
- out-of-body experiences
The idea that something like conscious human experience can arise from a computer is as silly as the idea that squeezing rocks can produce goblins. Human minds with all their diverse powers and aspects cannot arise from any "bottom up" effect, either neural or mechanical, but we can credibly believe they arise from some "top-down" effect involving a mysterious unfathomable metaphysical source of minds and souls. Such a source may also be involved in the origin of individual human bodies, because the progression from a speck-sized zygote cell at the beginning of pregnancy to the vast hierarchical organization of an adult human body (not at all specified by DNA) is a wonder of origination a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists. So rather than deluding yourself by thinking that some person you see across the street is merely some detailed shape produced by an extraterrestrial computer simulation, say to yourself: that person is a soul like myself, who I should treat with respect, like all souls.
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