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Concepts of Existential Catastrophe
Abstract
The notion of existential catastrophe is increasingly appealed to in discussion of risk management around emerging technologies, but it is not completely clear what this notion amounts to. Here, I provide an opinionated survey of the space of plausibly useful definitions of existential catastrophe. Inter alia, I discuss: whether to define existential catastrophe in ex post or ex ante terms, whether an ex ante definition should be in terms of loss of expected value or loss of potential, and what kind of probabilities should be involved in any appeal to expected value.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is said to pose many risks, be they catastrophic, existential and otherwise. This paper discusses whether the notion of risk can apply to AGI, both descriptively and in the current regulatory framework. The paper argues that current definitions of risk are ill-suited to capture supposed AGI existential risks, and that the risk-based framework of the EU AI Act is inadequate to deal with truly general, agential systems.
A new movement is on the scene: effective altruism—the combination of love and efficiency, making the world a better place not just with a bleeding heart and empathy but with a radical focus on reason and evidence and never losing sight of the goal of maximal impact. Its adherents typically stem from strongly secular environments such as elite philosophy departments or Silicon Valley. So far, a religious perspective on this movement has been lacking. What can people of faith learn from effective altruism, how can they contribute, and what must they criticise? This volume offers a first examination of these questions, providing both a Buddhist and an Orthodox Jewish perspective on them, in addition to various Christian contributions. With contributions by Calvin Baker, Lara Buchak, Mara-Daria Cojocaru, Stefan Höschele, Markus Huppenbauer, Robert MacSwain, David Manheim, Kathryn Muyskens, Stefan Riedener, Dominic Roser and Jakub Synowiec.
It is unknown how abundant extraterrestrial life is, or whether such life might be complex or intelligent. On Earth, the emergence of complex intelligent life required a preceding series of evolutionary transitions such as abiogenesis, eukaryogenesis, and the evolution of sexual reproduction, multicellularity, and intelligence itself. Some of these transitions could have been extraordinarily improbable, even in conducive environments. The emergence of intelligent life late in Earth's lifetime is thought to be evidence for a handful of rare evolutionary transitions, but the timing of other evolutionary transitions in the fossil record is yet to be analyzed in a similar framework. Using a simplified Bayesian model that combines uninformative priors and the timing of evolutionary transitions, we demonstrate that expected evolutionary transition times likely exceed the lifetime of Earth, perhaps by many orders of magnitude. Our results corroborate the original argument suggested by Brandon Carter that intelligent life in the Universe is exceptionally rare, assuming that intelligent life elsewhere requires analogous evolutionary transitions. Arriving at the opposite conclusion would require exceptionally conservative priors, evidence for much earlier transitions, multiple instances of transitions, or an alternative model that can explain why evolutionary transitions took hundreds of millions of years without appealing to rare chance events. Although the model is simple, it provides an initial basis for evaluating how varying biological assumptions and fossil record data impact the probability of evolving intelligent life, and also provides a number of testable predictions, such as that some biological paradoxes will remain unresolved and that planets orbiting M dwarf stars are uninhabitable.
Enjoying great popularity in decision theory, epistemology, and philosophy of science, Bayesianism as understood here is fundamentally concerned with epistemically ideal rationality. It assumes a tight connection between evidential probability and ideally rational credence, and usually interprets evidential probability in terms of such credence.
Timothy Williamson challenges Bayesianism by arguing that evidential probabilities cannot be adequately interpreted as the credences of an ideal agent. From this and his assumption that evidential probabilities cannot be interpreted as the actual credences of human agents either, he concludes that no interpretation of evidential probabilities in terms of credence is adequate. I argue to the contrary.
My overarching aim is to show on behalf of Bayesians how one can still interpret evidential probabilities in terms of ideally rational credence and how one can maintain a tight connection between evidential probabilities and ideally rational credence even if the former cannot be interpreted in terms of the latter. By achieving this aim I illuminate the limits and prospects of Bayesianism.
Purpose
This paper aims to formalize long-term trajectories of human civilization as a scientific and ethical field of study. The long-term trajectory of human civilization can be defined as the path that human civilization takes during the entire future time period in which human civilization could continue to exist.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper focuses on four types of trajectories: status quo trajectories, in which human civilization persists in a state broadly similar to its current state into the distant future; catastrophe trajectories, in which one or more events cause significant harm to human civilization; technological transformation trajectories, in which radical technological breakthroughs put human civilization on a fundamentally different course; and astronomical trajectories, in which human civilization expands beyond its home planet and into the accessible portions of the cosmos.
Findings
Status quo trajectories appear unlikely to persist into the distant future, especially in light of long-term astronomical processes. Several catastrophe, technological transformation and astronomical trajectories appear possible.
Originality/value
Some current actions may be able to affect the long-term trajectory. Whether these actions should be pursued depends on a mix of empirical and ethical factors. For some ethical frameworks, these actions may be especially important to pursue.
In the decades to come, advanced bioweapons could threaten human existence. Although the probability of human extinction from bioweapons may be low, the expected value of reducing the risk could still be large, since such risks jeopardize the existence of all future generations. We provide an overview of biotechnological extinction risk, make some rough initial estimates for how severe the risks might be, and compare the cost-effectiveness of reducing these extinction-level risks with existing biosecurity work. We find that reducing human extinction risk can be more cost-effective than reducing smaller-scale risks, even when using conservative estimates. This suggests that the risks are not low enough to ignore and that more ought to be done to prevent the worst-case scenarios.
I argue that there are non-trivial objective chances (that is, objective chances other than 0 and 1) even in deterministic worlds. The argument is straightforward. I observe that there are probabilistic special scientific laws even in deterministic worlds. These laws project non-trivial probabilities for the events that they concern. And these probabilities play the chance role and so should be regarded as chances as opposed, for example, to epistemic probabilities or credences.
The supposition of non-trivial deterministic chances might seem to land us in contradiction. The fundamental laws of deterministic worlds project trivial probabilities for the very same events that are assigned non-trivial probabilities by the special scientific laws. I argue that any appearance of tension is dissolved by recognition of the level-relativity of chances. There is therefore no obstacle to accepting non-trivial chance-role-playing deterministic probabilities as genuine chances.
The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the strong likelihood of alien intelligent life emerging (under a wide variety of assumptions) and the absence of any visible evidence for such emergence. In this paper, we extend the Fermi paradox to not only life in this galaxy, but to other galaxies as well. We do this by demonstrating that travelling between galaxies – indeed even launching a colonisation project for the entire reachable universe – is a relatively simple task for a star-spanning civilisation, requiring modest amounts of energy and resources. We start by demonstrating that humanity itself could likely accomplish such a colonisation project in the foreseeable future, should we want to. Given certain technological assumptions, such as improved automation, the task of constructing Dyson spheres, designing replicating probes, and launching them at distant galaxies, become quite feasible. We extensively analyse the dynamics of such a project, including issues of deceleration and collision with particles in space. Using similar methods, there are millions of galaxies that could have reached us by now. This results in a considerable sharpening of the Fermi paradox.
1] Twenty years ago, the results of climate model simulations of the response to smoke and dust from a massive nuclear exchange between the superpowers could be summarized as ''nuclear winter,'' with rapid temperature, precipitation, and insolation drops at the surface that would threaten global agriculture for at least a year. The global nuclear arsenal has fallen by a factor of three since then, but there has been an expansion of the number of nuclear weapons states, with additional states trying to develop nuclear arsenals. We use a modern climate model to reexamine the climate response to a range of nuclear wars, producing 50 and 150 Tg of smoke, using moderate and large portions of the current global arsenal, and find that there would be significant climatic responses to all the scenarios. This is the first time that an atmosphere-ocean general circulation model has been used for such a simulation and the first time that 10-year simulations have been conducted. The response to the 150 Tg scenario can still be characterized as ''nuclear winter,'' but both produce global catastrophic consequences. The changes are more long-lasting than previously thought, however, because the new model, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE, is able to represent the atmosphere up to 80 km, and simulates plume rise to the middle and upper stratosphere, producing a long aerosol lifetime. The indirect effects of nuclear weapons would have devastating consequences for the planet, and continued nuclear arsenal reductions will be needed before the threat of nuclear winter is removed from the Earth. Citation: Robock, A., L. Oman, and G. L. Stenchikov (2007), Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D13107, doi:10.1029/2006JD008235.
Can material Egalitarianism (requiring, for example, the significant promotion of fortune) include animals in the domain of
the equality requirement? The problem can be illustrated as follows: If equality of wellbeing is what matters, and normal
mice are included in this egalitarian requirement, then normal mice have a much stronger claim to resources than almost any
human. This is because normal mice have a much stronger claim to resources than almost any human. This is because their wellbeing
is much lower than that of normal humans. Thus, equality of wellbeing requires a massive shift of resources away from most
humans to mice. This view, however, seems crazy. I explore this problem and propose a solution.
How should we weigh suffering against happiness? This paper highlights the existence of an argument from intuitively plausible axiological principles to the striking conclusion that, in comparing different populations, there exists some depth of suffering that cannot be compensated for by any measure of well-being. In addition to a number of structural principles, the argument relies on two key premises. The first is the contrary of the so-called Reverse Repugnant Conclusion. The second is a principle according to which the addition of any population of lives with positive welfare levels makes the outcome worse if accompanied by sufficiently many lives that are not worth living. I consider whether we should accept the conclusion of the argument and what we may end up committed to if we do not, illustrating the implications for the question of whether suffering in aggregate outweighs happiness among human and non-human animals, now and in future.
The asymmetry is the view in population ethics that, while we ought to avoid creating additional bad lives, there is no requirement to create additional good ones. The question is how to embed this intuitively compelling view in a more complete normative theory, and in particular one that treats uncertainty in a plausible way. While arguing against existing approaches, I present new and general principles for thinking about welfarist choice under uncertainty. Together, these reduce arbitrary choices to uncertainty‐free ones, regardless of how the latter should be made. I illustrate these principles by developing two theories of the asymmetry, reflecting different views about the non‐identity problem. In doing so, I clarify some other major choice‐points, presenting new arguments that creating additional good lives can justify (but not require) doing harm. Finally, I consider what the developed theories have to say about the importance of extinction risk and the long‐run future.
Catastrophic risks are much greater than is commonly appreciated. Collision with an asteroid, runaway global warming, voraciously replicating nanomachines, a pandemic of gene-spliced smallpox launched by bioterrorists, and a world-ending accident in a high-energy particle accelerator, are among the possible extinction events that are sufficiently likely to warrant careful study. How should we respond to events that, for a variety of psychological and cultural reasons, we find it hard to wrap our minds around? Posner argues that realism about science and scientists, innovative applications of cost-benefit analysis, a scientifically literate legal profession, unprecedented international cooperation, and a pragmatic attitude toward civil liberties are among the keys to coping effectively with the catastrophic risks.
During the twentieth century, many nations – including Russia, Germany, and China – lived under extraordinarily brutal and oppressive governments. Over 100 million civilians died at the hands of these governments, but only a small fraction of their brutality and oppression was necessary to retain power. The main function of the brutality and oppression, rather, was to radically change human behaviour, to transform normal human beings with their selfish concerns into willing servants of their rulers. The goals and methods of these governments were so extreme that they were often described – by friend and foe alike – as ‘total’ or ‘totalitarian’ (Gregor, 2000). The connection between totalitarian goals and totalitarian methods is straightforward. People do not want to radically change their behaviour. To make them change requires credible threats of harsh punishment – and the main way to make such threats credible is to carry them out on a massive scale. Furthermore, even if people believe your threats, some will resist anyway or seem likely to foment resistance later on. Indeed, some are simply unable to change. An aristocrat cannot choose to have proletarian origins, or a Jew to be an Aryan. To handle these recalcitrant problems requires special prisons to isolate dangerous elements, or mass murder to eliminate them. Totalitarian regimes have many structural characteristics in common. Richard Pipes gives a standard inventory: ‘[A]n official all-embracing ideology; a single party of the elect headed by a “leader” and dominating the state; police terror; the ruling party’s control of the means of communication and the armed forces; central command of the economy’. All of these naturally flow from the goal of remaking human nature. The official ideology is the rationale for radical change. It must be ‘all-embracing’ – that is, suppress competing ideologies and values – to prevent people from being side-tracked by conflicting goals. The leader is necessary to create and interpret the official ideology, and control of the means of communication to disseminate it. The party is comprised of the ‘early-adopters’ – the people who claim to have ‘seen the light’ and want to make it a reality.
A comprehensive study of the ethics of killing in cases in which the metaphysical or moral status of the individual killed is uncertain or controversial. Among those beings whose status is questionable or marginal in this way are human embryos and fetuses, newborn infants, animals, anencephalic infants, human beings with severe congenital and cognitive impairments, and human beings who have become severely demented or irreversibly comatose. In an effort to understand the moral status of these beings, this book develops and defends distinctive accounts of the nature of personal identity, the evaluation of death, and the wrongness of killing. The central metaphysical claim of the book is that we are neither nonmaterial souls nor human organisms but are instead embodied minds. In ethical theory, one of the central claims is that the morality of killing is not unitary; rather, the principles that determine the morality of killing in marginal cases are different from those that govern the killing of persons who are self‐conscious and rational. Another important theme is that killing in marginal cases should be evaluated in terms of the impact it would have on the victim at the time rather than on the value of the victim's life as a whole. What primarily matters is how killing would affect that which would be rational for the victim to care about at the time of death. By appealing to various foundational claims about identity, death, and the morality of killing, this book yields novel conclusions about such issues as abortion, prenatal injury, infanticide, the killing of animals, the significance of brain death, the termination of life support in cases of persistent vegetative state, the use of anencephalic infants as sources of organs for transplantation, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and advance directives in cases of dementia. In particular, the book defends the moral permissibility of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia in certain cases and argues that brain death is not the appropriate criterion of death either for a person or a human organism.
According to a prominent view in contemporary philosophical discussions of animal ethics—a view the author calls unitarianism—animals have the same moral status as people do, so that otherwise similar interests of animals and people should be given the very same consideration in moral deliberation. In contrast, this book lays out and defends a hierarchical approach, according to which people count more than animals do, and some animals count more than others. Surprisingly, although this idea is close to being commonsense, for the most part moral theories have not been developed in such a way as to take account of these crucial differences in status. Accordingly, the author both argues for a hierarchical account of morality and explores what suitably status sensitive moral principles might look like. Particular topics examined include the modification of distributive principles to take account of status, whether animals should be given deontological standing, and the moral complications that arise in cases that either involve defending animals or defending people from animals. The book also considers what the basis of moral status might be, and it responds to some of the potentially troubling implications of adopting a hierarchical approach to morality.
Why should we care about what happens to human beings in the future, after we ourselves are long gone? Much of the contemporary philosophical literature on future generations has a broadly utilitarian orientation, and implicitly suggests that our primary reasons for concern about the fate of future generations are reasons of beneficence. This book proposes a different answer. Implicit in our existing values and evaluative attachments are a variety of powerful reasons, which are independent of considerations of beneficence, for wanting the chain of human generations to persist into the indefinite future under conditions conducive to human flourishing. These attachment-based reasons include reasons of love, reasons of interest, reasons of valuation, and reasons of reciprocity. Although considerations of beneficence, properly understood, also have a role to play in our thinking about future generations, some of our strongest reasons for caring about the future of humanity depend on our existing evaluative attachments and on our conservative disposition to preserve and sustain the things that we value.
Cambridge Core - Optimization, OR and risk - An Introduction to Decision Theory - by Martin Peterson
We know that Homo sapiens will not exist forever. Given this, how should our species end? What are the reasons, if any, to delay our extinction? In this paper, I show that the pre-eminent reasons which favour prolonging the existence of the species are partial: they will arise from the particular attachments and projects of the final few generations. While there may also be impartial reasons to prolong the species, these reasons are liable, with time, to reverse their valence: we can be reasonably confident that they will ultimately recommend hastening the demise of the species. Consequently, it is likely that our descendants will eventually face a difficult -- possibly tragic -- conflict, between partial duties that recommend living on, and an impartial duty to extinguish the species.
Suppose you’d like to believe that p (for example, that you are popular), whether or not it’s true. What can you do to help? A natural initial thought is that you could engage in Intentionally Biased Inquiry: you could look into whether p, but do so in a way that you expect to predominantly yield evidence in favour of p. This paper hopes to do two things. The first is to argue that this initial thought is mistaken: intentionally biased inquiry is impossible. The second is to show that reflections on intentionally biased inquiry strongly support a controversial ‘access’ principle which states that, for all p, if p is (not) part of our evidence, then that p is (not) part of our evidence is itself part of our evidence.
The aim of confirmation theory is to provide a true account of the principles that guide scientific argument in so far as that argument is not, and does not purport to be, of a deductive kind. A confirmation theory should serve as a critical and explanatory instrument quite as much as do theories of deductive inference. Any successful confirmation theory should, for example, reveal the structure and fallacies, if any, in Newton’s argument for universal gravitation, in nineteenth-century arguments for and against the atomic theory, in Freud’s arguments for psychoanalytic generalizations. Where scientific judgements are widely shared, and sociological factors cannot explain their ubiquity, and analysis through the lens provided by confirmation theory reveals no good explicit arguments for the judgements, confirmation theory ought at least sometimes to suggest some good arguments that may have been lurking misperceived. Theories of deductive inference do that much for scientific reasoning in so far as that reasoning is supposed to be demonstrative. We can apply quantification theory to assess the validity of scientific arguments, and although we must almost always treat such arguments as enthymematic, the premisses we interpolate are not arbitrary; in many cases, as when the same subject-matter is under discussion, there is a common set of suppressed premisses. Again, there may be differences about the correct logical form of scientific claims; differences of this kind result in (or from) different formalizations, for example, of classical mechanics. But such differences often make no difference for the assessment of validity in actual arguments. Confirmation theory should do as well in its own domain. If it fails, then it may still be of interest for many purposes, but not for the purpose of understanding scientific reasoning.
Many have claimed that unspecific evidence sometimes demands unsharp, indeterminate, imprecise, vague, or interval-valued probabilities. Against this, a variant of the diachronic Dutch Book argument shows that perfectly rational agents always have perfectly sharp probabilities.
This chapter advances a moral misanthropic argument for anti-natalism. This argument points to the dark side of human nature and to the vast amounts of harm that humans cause to other humans, to animals and, via environmental damage, to humans and animals. It suggests that while Homo sapiens may indeed be more of a thinking animal, factors such as the "framing effect" distort our rationality. We are impelled towards conformity and obedience to even cruel and unjust authority, as the "Stanford prison" experiments proved, and we as a species have committed numerous genocides; we also inflict constant animal abuse and destruction on the environment. It is argued that these ground a presumptive duty against creating new humans and that this presumption is almost always not defeated.
Emigrating Beyond Earth puts space colonization into the context of human evolution. Rather than focusing on the technologies and strategies needed to colonize space, the authors examine the human and societal reasons for space colonization. They make space colonization seems like a natural step by demonstrating that if will continue the human species' 4 million-year-old legacy of adaptation to difficult new environments. The authors present many examples from the history of human expansion into new environments, including two amazing tales of human colonization - the prehistoric settlement of the upper Arctic around 5,000 years ago and the colonization of the Pacific islands around 3,000 years ago - which show that space exploration is no more about rockets and robots that Arctic exploration was about boating! © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012. All rights reserved.
Humans will not always be the most intelligent agents on Earth, the ones steering the future. What will happen to us when we no longer play that role, and how can we prepare for this transition?
Existential risks are those that threaten the entire future of humanity. Many theories of value imply that even relatively small reductions in net existential risk have enormous expected value. Despite their importance, issues surrounding human‐extinction risks and related hazards remain poorly understood. In this article, I clarify the concept of existential risk and develop an improved classification scheme. I discuss the relation between existential risks and basic issues in axiology, and show how existential risk reduction (via the maxipok rule) can serve as a strongly action‐guiding principle for utilitarian concerns. I also show how the notion of existential risk suggests a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability.
Policy Implications
Existential risk is a concept that can focus long‐term global efforts and sustainability concerns.
The biggest existential risks are anthropogenic and related to potential future technologies.
A moral case can be made that existential risk reduction is strictly more important than any other global public good.
Sustainability should be reconceptualised in dynamic terms, as aiming for a sustainable trajectory rather than a sustainable state.
Some small existential risks can be mitigated today directly (e.g. asteroids) or indirectly (by building resilience and reserves to increase survivability in a range of extreme scenarios) but it is more important to build capacity to improve humanity’s ability to deal with the larger existential risks that will arise later in this century. This will require collective wisdom, technology foresight, and the ability when necessary to mobilise a strong global coordinated response to anticipated existential risks.
Perhaps the most cost‐effective way to reduce existential risks today is to fund analysis of a wide range of existential risks and potential mitigation strategies, with a long‐term perspective.
A collection of 13 papers by David Lewis, written on a variety of topics including causation, counterfactuals and indicative conditionals, the direction of time, subjective and objective probability, explanation, perception, free will, and rational decision. The conclusions reached include the claim that time travel is possible, that counterfactual dependence is asymmetrical, that events are properties of spatiotemporal regions, that the Prisoners’ Dilemma is a Newcomb problem, and that causation can be analyzed in terms of counterfactual dependence between events. These papers can be seen as a “prolonged campaign” for a philosophical position Lewis calls “Humean supervenience,” according to which “all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact,” with all global features of the world thus supervening on the spatiotemporal arrangement of local qualities.
A collection of 13 papers by David Lewis, written on a variety of topics including causation, counterfactuals and indicative conditionals, the direction of time, subjective and objective probability, explanation, perception, free will, and rational decision. The conclusions reached include the claim that time travel is possible, that counterfactual dependence is asymmetrical, that events are properties of spatiotemporal regions, that the Prisoners’ Dilemma is a Newcomb problem, and that causation can be analyzed in terms of counterfactual dependence between events. These papers can be seen as a “prolonged campaign” for a philosophical position Lewis calls “Humean supervenience,” according to which “all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact,” with all global features of the world thus supervening on the spatiotemporal arrangement of local qualities.
In the form in which it was originally expounded, the anthropic principle was presented as a warning to astrophysical and cosmological theorists of the risk of error in the interpretation of astronomical and cosmological information unless due account is taken of the biological restraints under which the information was acquired. However, the converse message is also valid: biological theorists also run the risk of error in the interpretation of the evolutionary record unless they take due heed of the astrophysical restraints under which evolution took place. After an introductory discussion of the ordinary (`weak') anthropic principle and of its more contestable (`strong') analogue, a new application of the former to the problem of the evolution of terrestrial life is presented. It is shown that the evidence suggests that the evolutionary chain included at least one but probably not more than two links that were highly improbable (a priori) in the available time interval.
From an impersonal, timeless perspective it is hard to identify good reasons why it should matter that human extinction comes later rather than sooner, particularly if we accept that it does not matter how many human beings there are. We cannot appeal to the natural narrative shape of human history for there is no such thing. We have more local and particular concerns to which we can better appeal but only if an impersonal, timeless perspective is abandoned: only from a generation–centred perspective do such concerns help to make sense of our concern for the timing of our own extinction.
Why did the industrial revolution take place in eighteenth-century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? In this convincing new account Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows that in Britain wages were high and capital and energy cheap in comparison to other countries in Europe and Asia. As a result, the breakthrough technologies of the industrial revolution - the steam engine, the cotton mill, and the substitution of coal for wood in metal production - were uniquely profitable to invent and use in Britain. The high wage economy of pre-industrial Britain also fostered industrial development since more people could afford schooling and apprenticeships. It was only when British engineers made these new technologies more cost-effective during the nineteenth century that the industrial revolution would spread around the world.
Despite the uncertainty in future climate-change impacts, it is often assumed that humans would be able to adapt to any possible warming. Here we argue that heat stress imposes a robust upper limit to such adaptation. Peak heat stress, quantified by the wet-bulb temperature T(W), is surprisingly similar across diverse climates today. T(W) never exceeds 31 degrees C. Any exceedence of 35 degrees C for extended periods should induce hyperthermia in humans and other mammals, as dissipation of metabolic heat becomes impossible. While this never happens now, it would begin to occur with global-mean warming of about 7 degrees C, calling the habitability of some regions into question. With 11-12 degrees C warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed. Eventual warmings of 12 degrees C are possible from fossil fuel burning. One implication is that recent estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change are too low unless the range of possible warming can somehow be narrowed. Heat stress also may help explain trends in the mammalian fossil record.
Can there be deterministic chance? That is, can there be objective chance values other than 0 or 1, in a deterministic world? I will argue that the answer is no . In a deterministic world, the only function that can play the role of chance is one that outputs just 0s and 1s. The role of chance involves connections from chance to credence, possibility, time, intrinsicness, lawhood, and causation. These connections do not allow for deterministic chance.
1 Overview
2 Four Arguments for Deterministic Chance
3 Four Conceptions of Deterministic Chance
4 The Role of Chance
5 The Case against Posterior Deterministic Chance
6 The Case against Initial Deterministic Chance
7 Epistemic Chance
With very advanced technology, a very large population of people living happy lives could be sustained in the accessible region of the universe. For every year that development of such technologies and colonization of the universe is delayed, there is therefore a corresponding opportunity cost: a potential good, lives worth living, is not being realized. Given some plausible assumptions, this cost is extremely large. However, the lesson for standard utilitarians is not that we ought to maximize the pace of technological development, but rather that we ought to maximize its safety, i.e. the probability that colonization will eventually occur. This goal has such high utility that standard utilitarians ought to focus all their efforts on it. Utilitarians of a stripe should accept a modified version of this conclusion. Some mixed ethical views, which combine utilitarian considerations with other criteria, will also be committed to a similar bottom line.
“Existential Risk and Existential Hope: Definitions,”
- Cotton-Barratt
“Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice,”
- Nozick
“The Minor Role of Totalism in the Longtermists’ Mathematics,”
- Steele
“The Case for Strong Longtermism,”
- Greaves
“Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?”
- May
“The Uniqueness Thesis,”
- Kopec
“Chilling Out on Epistemic Rationality: A Defense of Imprecise Credences (and Other Imprecise Doxastic Attitudes),”
- Schoenfield