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For this month’s Carnival, we shall survey a selection of recent posts that are loosely arranged around the theme of existential threats to contemporary philosophy. I focus on four. Pre-theoretic intuitions seem a little less credible as sources of evidence. Talk about possible worlds seems just a bit less scientific. The very idea of rationality looks as though it is being taken over by cognate disciplines, like cognitive science and psychology. And some of the most talented philosophers of the last generation have taken up arms against a scientific theory that enjoys a strong consensus. Some of these threats are disturbing, while others are eminently solvable. All of them deserve wider attention.

Deviant but not necessarily diseased or dysfunctional minds can demonstrate resistance to all treatment and attempts to change their mind

Maybe they need better treatments. Has anyone asked psychopaths - "How would you convince a psychopath like you to stop doing X?" Has anyone let psychopaths try? Aren't they the master manipulators? They even have a readily available model of a psychopath to test out the theory on. How convenient! Sufficiently motivating a psychopath with rewards for changing the mind of another psychopath might be an effective treatment for the first psychopath. Did they try that treatment?

I don't mean to be pissy, but "resistance to all treatments and attempts to change their mind" strikes me as a huge claim. Ruling out the "it's something I didn't think of" theory is one of the worst cognitive biases.

Runaway ("Venusian") climate change is an existential risk, though most consider that a pretty unlikely scenario.

Hi,

Let me introduce myself: I'm Sean and I work as project manager at FHI (finally got around to registering!). In posts here I won't be speaking on behalf of FHI unless I explicitly state so (although, like Stuart, I imagine I often will be). I'm not involved officially with CSER, but I'm in communication with them and hope to be keeping up to date with them over the coming months.

A few comments on your observations:

2) CSER have done a deliberate and well-orchestrated "media splash" campaign over the last week, but I believe they're finished with this now. They've got some big names involved and a good support structure in place in Cambridge, which helps.

3) My understanding is that CSER hasn't published anything yet because they don't exist yet in a practical sense - they've been founded but nobody's employed, and they're still gathering seed funding.

4) The Sunday Times article's a bit unfortunate and the general feeling at FHI is that we're not too impressed by the journalist's work, but please note that the more "controversial" statements are the journalist's own thoughts (it's not clear in all places if you skim the article like I did at first). CSER has some good people behind it, and at the time of writing the FHI plans to support it and collaborate with it where possible - we think it's a very positive development in the field of Xrisk. Even the term getting out there is a positive!

There were some serious errors in the coverage of this story in The Sunday Times (UK).

Which catastrophic risks does a mars colony mitigate ? Using a list from a recent post by Stuart Armstrong (table by Anders Sandberg) ...

Earth impactors : yes

War : probably. Unlikely that Mars colonies would be valuable or strategically important enough to extended a war to Mars, but possible that the same conditions that led to war on Earth could lead to local war on Mars, or that war on Earth could be exploited by factions on Mars

Famine : yes. Keeping a Mars colony fed might be a major challenge especially at first, but independent of the same challenge on Earth. If famine on Earth is caused by a plant pathogen, it could spread to Mars, but there is the nice long quarantine.

Pandemics : probably. Until there is much more advanced propulsion technology that cuts trip time to days, the trip serves as a natural quarantine period. Also, really nasty features like the ability to persist in the environment, or replicate in non-human hosts, or spread via aerosols, don't present any additional threat on Mars.

Super volcanos : yes. Also, unlike e.g. impactors, there probably isn't an equivalent Martian hazard.

Supernova, GRB : probably ? Unlike impactors, a supernova or GRB would affect both Earth and Mars. However, if the major impact on Earth is deaths by radiation of exposed people and destruction of agriculture by destruction of the ozone layer, then Mars should be much more resilient, since settlements have to be more radiation hardened anyway, and the agriculture would be under glass or under ground.

Climate change : yes

Global computer failure : probably not ? If Mars colony infrastructure is very robustly designed it might survive without computers. I expect that it would not be possible to software quarantine Mars.

Bioweapons : probably. For Mars to be included in a deliberate pandemic attack, you would need to get the agent into each separate Martian settlement, probably simultaneously. Unlike Earth, separate Martian cities could probably enforce effective travel restrictions and quarantines.

Nano weapons : no. Unlike bio weapons, presumably all you would have to do would be get some spores to somewhere on Mars.

Physics threats : depends on scale of disaster. Merely planetary scale ones (e.g. black hole eats Earth quietly), yes. Larger scale, no.

Super intelligence : no

A few of points that occurred while going though the list.

The above is assuming that the Mars colonies are self-sufficient, otherwise a catastrophe on Earth is a catastrophe for Mars.

Eexistential risks are described a causing actual human extinction, or massive mortality and long term curtailment of human progress (e.g. putting human population and society back to the Stone Age). Mars colonies mitigate against the first, and could mitigate against the second if Mars is developed to the point where it is wealthy and has an independent space program - to the point where Mars could offer meaningful aid to Earth.

Mainstream status points to /Eliezer_Yudkowsky-drafts/ (Forbidden: You aren't allowed to do that.)

It is really quite frustrating to discuss the intersection of physics and free will with a man who is capable of posting this (...)

So... Don't?

What objections can be raised against this argument? I'm looking both for good objections and objections that many people are likely to raise, even if they aren't really any good.

I'm not sure if this is an objection many people are likely to raise, or a good one, but in any case, here are my initial thoughts:

Transhumanism is just a set of values, exactly like humanism is a set of values. The feasibility of transhumanism can be shown from a compiling a list of those values that are said to qualify someone as a transhumanist, and the observed existence of people with such values, whom we then slap a label on, and say: Here is a transhumanist!

Half an hour on google should probably suffice to persuade the sceptic that transhumanists do in fact exist, and therefore transhumanism is feasible. And so we're done.

I realize that this is not what you mean when you refer to the feasibility of transhumanism. You want to make an argument for the possiblity of "actual transhumans". Something along the lines of: "It is feasible that humans with quantitatively or qualitatively superior abilities, in some domain, relative to some baseline (such as the best, or the average performance of some collection of humans, perhaps all humans) can exist." Which seems trivially true, for the reasons you mention.

Where are the boundaries of human design space? Who do we decide to put in the plain old human category? Who do we put in the transhuman category — and who is just another human with some novel bonus attribute?

If one goes for such a definition of a transhuman as the one I propose above, are world record holding athletes then weakly transhuman, since they go beyond the previously recorded bounds of human capability in strength, or speed, or endurance?

I'd say yes, but justifying that would require a longer reply. One question one would have to answer is: Who is a human? (The answers one would get to this question has likely changed quite a bit since the label "human" was first invented.)

If one allows the category of things that receives a "yes" in reply to the question "is this one a human?" to change at all, if one allows that category to expand or indeed to grow over time, perhaps by an arbitrary amount. (Which is excactly what seems, to me at least, to have happened, and seems to continue to be the case.) Then, perhaps, there will never be a transhuman. Only a growing category of things which one considers to be "human". Including some humans that are happier, better, stronger and faster than any current or previously recorded human.

In order to say "this one is a transhuman" one needs to first decide upon some limits to what one will call "human", and then decide, arbitrarily, that whoever goes beyond these limits, we will put into this new category, instead of continuing to relax the boundaries of humanity, so as to include the new cases, as is usual.