The trillion year Reich

I had the disconcerting experience this morning of discovering that what is being called by various observers the most important and influential — and certainly by far the best-funded: this part is not debatable — development in current social-philosophical theory is something that I had literally never heard of until about two days ago, when I ran into it in the comment section at LGM.

I present to you longtermism:

To understand the argument, let’s first unpack what longtermists mean by our ‘longterm potential’, an expression that I have so far used without defining. We can analyse this concept into three main components: transhumanism, space expansionism, and a moral view closely associated with what philosophers call ‘total utilitarianism’.

The first refers to the idea that we should use advanced technologies to reengineer our bodies and brains to create a ‘superior’ race of radically enhanced posthumans (which, confusingly, longtermists place within the category of ‘humanity’). Although Bostrom is perhaps the most prominent transhumanist today, longtermists have shied away from using the term ‘transhumanism’, probably because of its negative associations. Susan Levin, for example, points out that contemporary transhumanism has its roots in the Anglo-American eugenics movement, and transhumanists such as Julian Savulescu, who co-edited the book Human Enhancement (2009) with Bostrom, have literally argued for the consumption of ‘morality-boosting’ chemicals such as oxytocin to avoid an existential catastrophe (which he calls ‘ultimate harm’). As Savulescu writes with a colleague, ‘it is a matter of such urgency to improve humanity morally … that we should seek whatever means there are to effect this.’ Such claims are not only controversial but for many quite disturbing, and hence longtermists have attempted to distance themselves from such ideas, while nonetheless championing the ideology.

Transhumanism claims that there are various ‘posthuman modes of being’ that are far better than our current human mode. We could, for instance, genetically alter ourselves to gain perfect control over our emotions, or access the internet via neural implants, or maybe even upload our minds to computer hardware to achieve ‘digital immortality’. As Ord urges in The Precipice, think of how awesome it would be to perceive the world via echolocation, like bats and dolphins, or magnetoreception, like red foxes and homing pigeons. ‘Such uncharted experiences,’ Ord writes, ‘exist in minds much less sophisticated than our own. What experiences, possibly of immense value, could be accessible, then, to minds much greater?’ Bostrom’s most fantastical exploration of these possibilities comes from his evocative ‘Letter from Utopia’ (2008), which depicts a techno-Utopian world full of superintelligent posthumans awash in so much ‘pleasure’ that, as the letter’s fictional posthuman writes, ‘we sprinkle it in our tea.’

The connection with longtermism is that, according to Bostrom and Ord, failing to become posthuman would seemingly prevent us from realising our vast and glorious potential, which would be existentially catastrophic. As Bostrom put it in 2012, ‘the permanent foreclosure of any possibility of this kind of transformative change of human biological nature may itself constitute an existential catastrophe.’ Similarly, Ord asserts that ‘forever preserving humanity as it is now may also squander our legacy, relinquishing the greater part of our potential.’

The second component of our potential – space expansionism – refers to the idea that we must colonise as much of our future light cone as possible: that is, the region of spacetime that is theoretically accessible to us. According to longtermists, our future light cone contains a huge quantity of exploitable resources, which they refer to as our ‘cosmic endowment’ of negentropy (or reverse entropy). The Milky Way alone, Ord writes, is ‘150,000 light years across, encompassing more than 100 billion stars, most with their own planets.’ Attaining humanity’s longterm potential, he continues, ‘requires only that [we] eventually travel to a nearby star and establish enough of a foothold to create a new flourishing society from which we could venture further.’ By spreading ‘just six light years at a time’, our posthuman descendants could make ‘almost all the stars of our galaxy … reachable’ since ‘each star system, including our own, would need to settle just the few nearest stars [for] the entire galaxy [to] eventually fill with life.’ The process could be exponential, resulting in ever-more ‘flourishing’ societies with each additional second our descendants hop from star to star.

But why exactly would we want to do this? What’s so important about flooding the Universe with new posthuman civilisations? This leads to the third component: total utilitarianism, which I will refer to as ‘utilitarianism’ for short. Although some longtermists insist that they aren’t utilitarians, we should right away note that this is mostly a smoke-and-mirrors act to deflect criticisms that longtermism – and, more generally, the effective altruism (EA) movement from which it emerged – is nothing more than utilitarianism repackaged. The fact is that the EA movement is deeply utilitarian, at least in practice, and indeed, before it decided upon a name, the movement’s early members, including Ord, seriously considered calling it the ‘effective utilitarian community’.

This being said, utilitarianism is an ethical theory that specifies our sole moral obligation as being to maximise the total amount of ‘intrinsic value’ in the world, as tallied up from a disembodied, impartial, cosmic vantage point called ‘the point of view of the Universe’. From this view, it doesn’t matter how value – which utilitarian hedonists equate with pleasure – is distributed among people across space and time. All that matters is the total net sum. For example, imagine that there are 1 trillion people who have lives of value ‘1’, meaning that they are just barely worth living. This gives a total value of 1 trillion. Now consider an alternative universe in which 1 billion people have lives with a value of ‘999’, meaning that their lives are extremely good. This gives a total value of 999 billion. Since 999 billion is less than 1 trillion, the first world full of lives hardly worth living would be morally better than the second world, and hence, if a utilitarian were forced to choose between these, she would pick the former. (This is called the ‘repugnant conclusion’, which longtermists such as Ord, MacAskill and Greaves recently argued shouldn’t be taken very seriously. For them, the first world really might be better!)

This insane farrago of the 20th century’s worst intellectual hits, updated for the Techbro Gilded Age (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Bankman-Fried are huge fans) is an almost Platonic illustration of horseshoe theory. In short, it turns out that the most forward-looking, utopian, and “disruptive” intellectual radicalism — colonize the entire Milky Way! Upload our minds into computers to achieve digital immortality! Take a trillion-year perspective on all political and social questions! — turns out to justify the most bog-standard reactionary positions, not, needless to say, in the year 2525 or 252525252525, but right now, today.

Via the dialectics of Berkeley and Hume I have arrived at Schopenhauer’s dictim: ‘The form of the phenomenon of will . . . is really only the present, not the future nor the past. The latter are only in the conception, exist only in the connection of knowledge, so far as it follows the principle of sufficient reason. No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, and is its sure possession which can never be taken from it . . . We might compare time to a constantly revolving sphere; the half that was always sinking would be past, that which was always rising would be the future; but the indivisible point at the top, where the tangent touches, would be the extensionless present. As the tangent does not revolve with the sphere, neither does the present, the point of contact of the object, the form of which is time, with the subject, which has no form, because it does not belong to the knowable, but is the condition of all that is knowable” (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, 54). A Buddhist treatise of the fifth century, the Visuddhimagga (Road to Purity), illustrates the same doctrine with the same figure: “Strictly speaking, the duration of the life of a living being is exceedingly brief, lasting only while a thought lasts. Just as a chariot wheel in rolling rolls only at one point of the tire, and in resting rests only at one point; in exactly the same way the life of a living being lasts only for the period of one thought” (Radhakrishnan: Indian Philosophy, I, 373).

Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time”