Good job with the main idea. However your speculation about past tech civilizations on Earth, artifacts preserved on moon etc. seems only half lucid.
I think that there is 3 ways to present these ideas in more rigorius form.
Use Gott formula to estimate probability distribution P(N) that total number of civilizations on Earth will be N based on the fact that our rank number in all known civilization is n. (And in our case n=1, so N=2 has 50 per cent probability, N=4 has 25 per cent probability etc.) See the same calculation for original Doomsday argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument#Gott.27s_formulation:_.27vague_prior.27_total_population
Use the fact that we don't know anything about past civilizations to put constrains on the informational traces T. T is function of civilisational technological level L and time distance to it t. So T(L,t) must be below some level of noticeability. T function is unknown to us but could be estimated as L/t which means that high tech and recent civilization will be more notable. Any risks from previous civilizations will also decay with time. So we could start to create math model form here.
We could look on existing scientific literature. A lot of literature use observational data trying to explain original Fermi paradox, but it is surprising not true for past civilizations. There is no analog for "SETI search" for rare isotopes changes which could sign of civilization 100 million years from now here on Earth - or I don't know about this literature. I also don't know what is the rate of publishing of theoretically inappropriate results if someone randomly finds something which seems to be strange. There is attempt by late Russian author Kalandadze to collect evidences that some other hominids used fire here: http://www.evolbiol.ru/document/915 The work is controversial. I don't have special knowledge to assess it.
Fermi paradox of human past, and corresponding x-risks
Based on known archaeological data, we are the first technological and symbol-using civilisation on Earth (but not the first tool-using species).
This leads to an analogy that fits Fermi’s paradox: Why are we the first civilisation on Earth? For example, flight was invented by evolution independently several times.
We could imagine that on our planet, many civilisations appeared and also became extinct, and based on mediocre principles, we should be somewhere in the middle. For example, if 10 civilisations appeared, we have only a 10 per cent chance of being the first one.
The fact that we are the first such civilisation has strong predictive power about our expected future: it lowers the probability that there will be any other civilisations on Earth, including non-humans or even a restarting of human civilisation from scratch. It is because, if there will be many civiizations, we should not find ourselves to be the first one (It is some form of Doomsday argument, the same logic is used in Bostrom's article “Adam and Eve”).
If we are the only civilisation to exist in the history of the Earth, then we will probably become extinct not in mild way, but rather in a way which will prevent any other civilisation from appearing. There is higher probability of future (man-made) catastrophes which will not only end human civilisation, but also prevent any existence of any other civilisations on Earth.
Such catastrophes would kill most multicellular life. Nuclear war or pandemic is not that type of a catastrophe. The catastrophe must be really huge: such as irreversible global warming, grey goo or black hole in a collider.
Now, I will list possible explanations of the Fermi paradox of human past and corresponding x-risks implications:
1. We are the first civilisation on Earth, because we will prevent the existence of any future civilisations.
If our existence prevents other civilisations from appearing in the future, how could we do it? We will either become extinct in a very catastrophic way, killing all earthly life, or become a super-civilisation, which will prevent other species from becoming sapient. So, if we are really the first, then it means that "mild extinctions" are not typical for human style civilisations. Thus, pandemics, nuclear wars, devolutions and everything reversible are ruled out as main possible methods of human extinction.
If we become a super-civilisation, we will not be interested in preserving biosphera, as it will be able to create new sapient species. Or, it may be that we care about biosphere so strongly, that we will hide very well from new appearing sapient species. It will be like a cosmic zoo. It means that past civilisations on Earth may have existed, but decided to hide all traces of their existence from us, as it would help us to develop independently. So, the fact that we are the first raises the probability of a very large scale catastrophe in the future, like UFAI, or dangerous physical experiments, and reduces chances of mild x-risks such as pandemics or nuclear war. Another explanation is that any first civilisation exhausts all resources which are needed for a technological civilisation restart, such as oil, ores etc. But, in several million years most such resources will be filled again or replaced by new by tectonic movement.
2. We are not the first civilisation.
2.1. We didn't find any traces of a previous technological civilisation, yet based on what we know, there are very strong limitations for their existence. For example, every civilisation makes genetic marks, because it moves animals from one continent to another, just as humans brought dingos to Australia. It also must exhaust several important ores, create artefacts, and create new isotopes. We could be sure that we are the first tech civilisation on Earth in last 10 million years.
But, could we be sure for the past 100 million years? Maybe it was a very long time ago, like 60 million years ago (and killed dinosaurs). Carl Sagan argued that it could not have happened, because we should find traces mostly as exhausted oil reserves. The main counter argument here is that cephalisation, that is the evolutionary development of the brains, was not advanced enough 60 millions ago, to support general intelligence. Dinosaurian brains were very small. But, bird’s brains are more mass effective than mammalians. All these arguments in detail are presented in this excellent article by Brian Trent “Was there ever a dinosaurian civilisation”?
The main x-risks here are that we will find dangerous artefacts from previous civilisation, such as weapons, nanobots, viruses, or AIs. And, if previous civilisations went extinct, it increases the chances that it is typical for civilisations to become extinct. It also means that there was some reason why an extinction occurred, and this killing force may be still active, and we could excavate it. If they existed recently, they were probably hominids, and if they were killed by a virus, it may also affect humans.
2.2. We killed them. Maya civilisation created writing independently, but Spaniards destroy their civilisation. The same is true for Neanderthals and Homo Florentines.
2.3. Myths about gods may be signs of such previous civilisation. Highly improbable.
2.4. They are still here, but they try not to intervene in human history. So, it is similar to Fermi’s Zoo solution.
2.5. They were a non-tech civilisation, and that is why we can’t find their remnants.
2.6 They may be still here, like dolphins and ants, but their intelligence is non-human and they don’t create tech.
2.7 Some groups of humans created advanced tech long before now, but prefer to hide it. Highly improbable as most tech requires large manufacturing and market.
2.8 Previous humanoid civilisation was killed by virus or prion, and our archaeological research could bring it back to life. One hypothesis of Neanderthal extinction is prionic infection because of cannibalism. The fact is - several hominid species went extinct in the last several million years.
3. Civilisations are rare
Millions of species existed on Earth, but only one was able to create technology. So, it is a rare event.Consequences: cyclic civilisations on earth are improbable. So the chances that we will be resurrected by another civilisation on Earth is small.
The chances that we will be able to reconstruct civilisation after a large scale catastrophe, are also small (as such catastrophes are atypical for civilisations and they quickly proceed to total annihilation or singularity).
It also means that technological intelligence is a difficult step in the evolutionary process, so it could be one of the solutions of the main Fermi paradox.
Safety of remains of previous civilisations (if any exist) depends on two things: the time distance from them and their level of intelligence. The greater the distance, the safer they are (as the biggest part of dangerous technology will be destructed by time or will not be dangerous to humans, like species specific viruses).
The risks also depend on the level of intelligence they reached: the higher intelligence the riskier. If anything like their remnants are ever found, strong caution is recommend.
For example, the most dangerous scenario for us will be one similar to the beginning of the book of V. Vinge “A Fire upon the deep.” We could find remnants of a very old, but very sophisticated civilisation, which will include unfriendly AI or its description, or hostile nanobots.
The most likely place for such artefacts to be preserved is on the Moon, in some cavities near the pole. It is the most stable and radiation shielded place near Earth.
I think that based on (no) evidence, estimation of the probability of past tech civilisation should be less than 1 per cent. While it is enough to think that they most likely don’t exist, it is not enough to completely ignore risk of their artefacts, which anyway is less than 0.1 per cent.
Meta: the main idea for this post came to me in a night dream, several years ago.
R. Posner in his book "Catastrophe" has tried to create such model for asteroid impact risks and also for collider risks.
The book was written by a judge and he study a lot legal and economic aspect of preventing human extinction.
For example he shows that typically human life costs 3 mln USD, and it could help us to compare risks and benefits of certain technologies.
While it was interesting reading, I don't think it has much practical value. https://www.amazon.com/Catastrophe-Risk-Response-Richard-Posner/dp/0195306473
The map of natural global catastrophic risks
There are many natural global risks. The greatest of these known risks are asteroid impacts and supervolcanos.
Supervolcanos seem to pose the highest risk, as we sit on the ocean of molten iron, oversaturated with dissolved gases, just 3000 km below surface and its energy slowly moving up via hot spots. Many past extinctions are also connected with large eruptions from supervolcanos.
Impacts also pose a significant risk. But, if we project the past rate of large extinctions due to impacts into the future, we will see that they occur only once in several million years. Thus, the likelihood of an asteroid impact in the next century is an order of magnitude of 1 in 100 000. That is negligibly small compared with the risks of AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.
The main natural risk is a meta-risk. Are we able to correctly estimate natural risks rates and project them into the future? And also, could we accidentally unleash natural catastrophe which is long overdue?
There are several reasons for possible underestimation, which are listed in the right column of the map.
1. Anthropic shadow that is survival bias. This is a well-established idea by Bostrom, but the following four ideas are mostly my conclusions from it.
2. It is also the fact that we should find ourselves at the end of period of stability for any important aspect of our environment (atmosphere, sun stability, crust stability, vacuum stability). It is true if the Rare Earth hypothesis is true and our conditions are very unique in the universe.
3. From (2) is following that our environment may be very fragile for human interventions (think about global warming). Its fragility is like fragility of an overblown balloon poked by small needle.
4. Also, human intelligence was best adaptation instrument during the period of intense climate changes, which quickly evolved in an always changing environment. So, it should not be surprising that we find ourselves in a period of instability (think of Toba eruption, Clovis comet, Young drias, Ice ages) and in an unstable environment, as it help general intelligence to evolve.
5. Period of changes are themselves marks of the end of stability periods for many process and are precursors for larger catastrophes. (For example, intermittent ice ages may precede Snow ball Earth, or smaller impacts with comets debris may precede an impact with larger remnants of the main body).
Each of these five points may raise the probability of natural risks by order of magnitude in my opinion, which combined will result in several orders of magnitude, which seems to be too high and probably is "catastrophism bias".
(More about it is in my article “Why anthropic principle stopped to defend us” which needs substantial revision)
In conclusion, I think that when studying natural risks, a key aspect we should be checking is the hypothesis that we live in non-typical period in a very fragile environment.
For example, some scientists think that 30 000 years ago, a large Centaris comet broke into the inner Solar system, split into pieces (including Encke comet and Taurid meteor showers as well as Tunguska body) and we live in the period of bombardment which has 100 times more intensity than average. Others believe that methane hydrates are very fragile and small human warming could result in dangerous positive feed back.
I tried to list all known natural risks (I am interested in new suggestions). I divided them into two classes: proven and speculative. Most speculative risks are probably false.
Most probable risks in the map are marked red. My crazy ideas are marked green. Some ideas come from obscure Russian literature. For example, an idea, that hydro carbonates could be created naturally inside Earth (like abiogenic oil) and large pockets of them could accumulate in the mantle. Some of them could be natural explosives, like toluene, and they could be cause of kimberlitic explosions. http://www.geokniga.org/books/6908 While the fact of kimberlitic explosion is well known and their energy is like impact of kilometer sized asteroids, I never read about contemporary risks of such explosions.
The pdf of the map is here: http://immortality-roadmap.com/naturalrisks11.pdf

It would be interesting to make Null experiment, which will consist only of two control groups, so we will know what is the medium difference between two equal groups. It would also interesting to add two control groups in each experiment, as we will see how strong is the effect.
For example if we have difference between main and control in 10 per cent, it could looks like strong result. But if we have second control group, and it has 7 per cent difference from first control group, our result is not so strong after all.
I think that it is clear that can't do it just splitting existing control group in two parts, as such action could be done in many different ways and researcher could choose most favorable, and also because there could be some interactions inside control group, and also because smaler statistic power.
Did Zuckerberg make the right choice by a Berkeley, Stanford, and University of California collaboration decide how to spend their money? I guess BioHub will be similar than the NIH is how it allocates funding.
Zuckerberg could also have funded Aubrey de Grey. They could have funded research on how to make medical research better the way the Laura and John Arnold Foundation does.
TechCrunch:
The technologies Zuckerberg listed were “AI software to help with imaging the brain…to make progress on neurological diseases, machine learning to analyze large databases of cancer genomes,
Last year we made progress in understanding that the brain contains lympahtic tissue because a surgeon fund it. All the standard imaging didn't bring us forward. Using machine learning to analyze large databases of cancer genomes is also a well funded research area.
Funding AI technology to create <1000$ bodyscans based on technology like Walabot would likely bring us much further in understanding our bodies than the kind of research that's already well funded like brain imagining and genome analysis.
He didn't not. Also Buck institute of aging is underfunded.
There's a guy named Donald D. Hoffman whom I saw on YouTube; unlike you, he is sort of "consciousness monist" (if I understand him correctly), that is, he claims that the most basic part of reality is consciousness and, in fact, reality is a network of relations between these basic particles.
I guess that if you can find some sort of an identity between this basic particle and a mathematical object we get your idea (If I understand your ideas correctly).
I also sort of remember him claiming that he could deduce the rules of quantum mechanics, but I'm not 100% sure.
You might want to check his ideas out.
Cheers
Thanks for lead. I think that I could be "conscious monist" after all, but I prefer not to use term consciousness, and use "qualia" as it is better defined.
I guess you ask "why" when something is unobvious or unexpected.
The first one is relative, where obvious for a smart person might not be obvious to a less-smart one. So, like you said, it is not obvious why the null hypothesis does not obtain, and anyone who says that existence is obvious is fooling himself.
The second is less relative, for example, if a monkey randomly types Hamlet then it is unexpected, but if he just typed pure gibberish, it is not. Thus, a universe which is a totally chaotic will be more expected than a universe like ours (so not only need we ask why something exists, but why it is so ordered). However, I don't know if we can say that the null-hypothesis is more expected.
I guess, in a clumsy manner, I meant to say that the real question is what would a satisfying explanation be. Some people are satisfied with God, others with MUH, others with Suskind's landscape and others will never be.
Now, about "something" equal to existence. That's tricky, is a square circle something? Is a possible world something? If they are, do they "exist"?
I agree with you that the only type of existence that we are 100% sure about is our own (i.e. our consciousness). Now, if you are not a solipsist, then, as you said, you are willing to grant "existence" to things that you can interact with, but then would you deny it from causally independent realms of existence? Does a universe without observers, like the sound of the proverbial tree in the forest, really exist? I think Wheeler thought so, and I am sympathetic to that position, but who knows.
Furthermore, do the objects in our physical theories exist--like quarks, strings, other universes in Linde's chaotic realm--they might explain a lot, but their existence is always indirectly inferred or is a conclusion of some useful theory.
So to (sort of) answer your question, I don't think I can give an intensional definition of existence, but its extensional one will include consciousness; it might include other things but I think we'll need to know the intensional one first...
As for all logically consistent structures (or something like that) existing. Maybe, who knows. It's a bit like Lewis's and Tegmark's ideas, no? Also, I'm not an expert, but I think that theorems by Tarski(?) show that there isn't any universal notion of "Truth."
And what is "A"? A proposition? A sentence in first order logic? A sentence in set theory? A second order sentence?
What if A says about itself "I do not exist"? If it's true then it doesn't exist, if it is not then it does.
My head is starting to ache, so I'll better stop.
Cheers.
I am trying to be bayesian in such complex questions. That means that I create a field of all possible hypethesis, and based on known evidence, corespondent field of probabilities of all hypothesis. Such approach will probably never result in one truth, that is in the situation where probability field is like (1,0,0,0,0) on field of (MUH, CUH, LUH, etc).
But we could gain knowledge about the topic without ever coming to one final truth. Creating more and more complex maps is an instrument to gain knowledge. I think that one approach which may work - is to create mathematical theory of qualia. If we do it, and we prove that qualia is a type of mathematical objects, we will get something like "MUH with qualia" as final theory.
The first thing in such theory should be idea that qualia can't depend on anything. Everything which explains red must be red. So they are like mathematical axioms. It also explain their ability to be self-born. So it explains how universe appear from nothing, but don't explain orderness of observations.
The second thing we have to do is to explain, how qualia are able to merge between themselves into experiences. We can't just say that there is sets of different qialia, as it would result into something like "qualia Bolzmann brains" dominations.
And even if we could explain how they are able to merge, we have to return to normality and explain how it all results in the observable universe with its QM laws. This could be most difficult part of all construction. (One way to start here is to see that there is direct connection between qualia and anthropic principle, and more, if we know types of qualia a being has, we could reconstruct types of its observations and laws of the universe he lives. E.g. if he has 2 dimensional color qualia he probably lives in 3 dimensional universe with some form of radiation.)
All I said above is just sketch of a theory which I hope to create some day, but which doesn't have high priority now.
Oh, no i haven't seen this one! I'll check it out.
What software do you use to make these?
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Worth noting:
Rudimentary grain cultivation has been pushed back at least 23k years ago, well into the last glacial maximum and probably older: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131422
Cooked grain flour has been observed in Italy over 30k years ago, no information on the plants it came from.
Possibly indicating that the end of the last glaciation rather than new invention drove the more or less simultaneous large-scale agricultural transitions that occurred all across the old and new world ~10k years ago.
Interesting.