TL;DR: The long-term goal may be better understood as preserving certain properties of civilization rather than preserving Homo sapiens as a biological species. Conscious experience is one candidate for such a property, and if it is morally fundamental, then preserving humanity's knowledge about consciousness may itself be a longtermist priority.
1. Introduction
Unfortunately, we will not exist forever as a species.
I do not know how soon we will have to make way for someone — or something — else, or who that will be. Perhaps it will be AI. Perhaps, millions of years from now, our last descendants will be slaughtered by intelligent crows for their teeth, prized in jewelry, as revenge on mammals on behalf of all the dinosaurs. Perhaps the desertified and abandoned Earth, objectively still habitable but by then finally living up to its name because there will be no water left, will be terraformed anew by green-skinned creatures with black eyes.
I find the last two scenarios preferable. Not because I am a biological chauvinist, but because I am not sure that species membership is the right boundary of moral community. I draw the boundary of trans-species identity along the line of “there is something it is like to be this being”: to me, a conscious alien or a future posthuman should, in some sense, be “one of us” regardless of their genetic origins. A conscious AI would be one of us as well; our observations, however, currently suggest that AI may reach a level of development at which it is capable of replacing humanity without acquiring consciousness, whereas in the biological systems we are familiar with, intelligence and consciousness are more likely to correlate.
Humanity will go extinct — perhaps we should try to think in terms of trans-species identity.
2. What Counts as Continuity of Oneself?
One reason why the future of humanity may matter to people is the idea of continuing oneself through time.
I will not have biological children. I will not pass my genes on to a direct descendant. But there are people with the same genes somewhere in the human population, and by ensuring the future of humanity, I am, in some sense, caring for my diffuse collective descendant. Sufficient genetic proximity to other members of humanity allows me to realize the “continuation of myself into eternity” through their existence even without family ties when creating a direct descendant is impossible. If humanity continues to exist, then in some sense the lineage of which I am a part will continue as well.
But imagine that humanity spreads throughout the Solar System. Hundreds of thousands of years later, the descendants of Earth’s humans evolve into two species that can no longer interbreed with each other or with us. Let us say they are Martians and Venusians.
Then Homo sapiens disappears.
Have we lost?
If the answer is “yes,” another question arises: at exactly what point did our connection with our descendants cease to be strong enough? If we use species boundaries as the criterion, this implies that our descendants are more valuable to us than strangers because they could potentially produce a fertile offspring in collaboration with us — and that is a rather strange way to think about one's children.
So what degree of relatedness is “enough”? My intuition is that if an obstacle to Homo sapiens’ reproduction emerged right now, we would transfer our emotional investment to chimpanzees — and then onward, until the species ran out.
Perhaps what we want to preserve is whatever is important to us about humanity. The willingness of many people to attain digital immortality at the cost of losing their human nature seems to point in this direction.
3. Consciousness as a Criterion for a Trans-Species Group
Life on Earth as a whole is not eternal. Many of us remember the existential shock of learning, as children, that the Sun will eventually explode — I suggest that you experience it again. Meanwhile, in the sea, on a rock orbiting another star at the other end of the universe, coacervates will be forming. And one day, creatures unlike us will sit on that rock and see the same Cosmos that we do, except that the Sun, which will still be alive for them, will be a smaller point in the distance.
I don't know about you, but that comforts me. Because, as the song goes: I am not my body [not my mind] or my brain, [not my thoughts or feelings], I am not my DNA; I am an observer, I’m a witness of life; I live in the space between the stars and the sky.
I am not equivalent to my body — not all of it. When I exfoliate my skin, I do not lose pieces of myself. I would not lose a piece of myself even if all my limbs were amputated. My body knows what its hemoglobin level is and takes measures accordingly, while I — the version of myself that I know and to whom I am loyal, and survival of which I am trying to preserve in any form — have to find out through tests. My body knows how to produce sex hormones, but it and I have different opinions about how much of them I need and in what proportions, so I have to take hormone replacement therapy — and if we were one and the same, I would simply synthesize them for myself.
A thing that possesses the kind of structure on which consciousness can function would be much more “me” than my direct descendant without consciousness, even if that thing were an alien worm, silicon-based form of life, or a pile of intricately connected beer cans.
A thing for which there is “something it is like to be it” is, by definition, more like me than a thing for which there is nothing it is like to be it. And I am willing to include it among “my kind”. I would be more likely to include it than an Earth-dwelling E. coli (based on what we currently know about consciousness!).
4. What to Do
Let's summarize:
0. From the mere existence of the author of this text: there may be a conscious species on a planet that knows as much about its own structure as humans did a couple of decades ago — that is, a species familiar in sufficient detail with both the mechanisms of hereditary information transmission and problems such as the pathogenesis of its own diseases, yet unaware of how consciousness itself works; a civilization capable of traveling through space, but unaware of what makes it experience subjective states.
1. Conscious beings deserve to be seen as representatives of our group, that is, to be beneficiaries of the decisions we make for the extra-long term, regardless of their species membership.
2. Knowledge about consciousness is useful, at the very least for distinguishing between “us” and “others” and making extra-long-term decisions.
3. From 0, 1, and 2: in the interests of our trans-species kin, we should pass on information about the nature of consciousness to them once humanity has acquired it.
4. Humanity may not have much time left.
5. From 3 and 4: we should pass on to our potential successors whatever we have accumulated by that point.
This creates two problems.
The first is physical: how do we preserve an information carrier for long enough?
The second is semiotic: how do we transmit information to a being that may have completely different sensory organs, a different biology, a different culture, and different fundamental concepts?
A successor may possess a perceptual space radically different from ours; it may have no sight, hearing, smell, or touch, but instead possess some kind of radiation sensors and corresponding qualia. Therefore, I see several weak but potentially interesting directions.
1. Biological Archive
Preserve samples of the nervous systems of organisms that we believe possess consciousness. Perhaps a future civilization will be able to reconstruct their structure and use this data to understand how consciousness was realized in Earth’s biology.
2. Pictographic Archive
Attempt to represent the major theories of consciousness through maximally simple visual and mathematical structures and preserve them on a durable physical medium. This will probably not work as a complete transmission of knowledge. But perhaps it will at least give a future reader a clue that we were asking this question at all.
3. Self-Decoding Language
Or, more precisely, a language whose decoding key will be available to the civilization we are interested in.
For example, if we assume that it will be a terrestrial eukaryotic species, we could use protein-coding nucleotide sequences as the basis for the language, where the sequence itself would signify the function of the protein, while grammatical structures would alter the part of speech, assign indirect or metaphorical meanings, and so on.
5. Perhaps We Can Specify What It Means to “Survive Extinction"
We often talk about preserving humanity as though the only meaningful outcome is for Homo sapiens to still exist a million years from now. But we can imagine a different picture.
Once, there was no one on Earth. Then the first organisms emerged. Then nervous systems appeared. Then subjective experience. Then beings capable of constructing models of the world.
This sequence does not have to end with Homo sapiens.
Perhaps humanity is not the endpoint of this trajectory, but one of its stages. If so, it seems to me more responsible to consider as our potential successors not only humans, but any future beings that continue the part of this trajectory that we consider valuable.
Not necessarily our genes. Not necessarily our bodies. Perhaps not even our intelligence in its current sense.
The capacity to be someone for whom the Universe exists from the inside.
If this is the case, then the question of humanity's future can be formulated differently: not as how to make humans exist forever, but as how to increase the probability that something will remain after us that we ourselves would consider worthy of continuation.
I am not sure that this argument is correct. Perhaps I overestimate the importance of consciousness. Perhaps moral kinship has nothing to do with consciousness. Perhaps future minds will be so different from us that the very idea of “legacy” will become meaningless. But if you think there is a flaw here, I would be interested to understand exactly where it lies.
I would be particularly interested in discussing three questions:
Is consciousness a more fundamental boundary of moral community than biological species?
Should we consider future conscious beings to be a continuation of humanity in any meaningful sense?
Is it even possible to create information that could be reconstructed by a mind fundamentally unlike a human one?
If consciousness is a more fundamental boundary of moral community than biological species or even biological origin, then the set of beings whose future should matter to us may be much larger than humanity. This would also change what we should try to preserve: perhaps not Homo sapiens itself, but the knowledge and conditions required for conscious beings to continue existing and flourishing.
TL;DR: The long-term goal may be better understood as preserving certain properties of civilization rather than preserving Homo sapiens as a biological species. Conscious experience is one candidate for such a property, and if it is morally fundamental, then preserving humanity's knowledge about consciousness may itself be a longtermist priority.
1. Introduction
Unfortunately, we will not exist forever as a species.
I do not know how soon we will have to make way for someone — or something — else, or who that will be. Perhaps it will be AI. Perhaps, millions of years from now, our last descendants will be slaughtered by intelligent crows for their teeth, prized in jewelry, as revenge on mammals on behalf of all the dinosaurs. Perhaps the desertified and abandoned Earth, objectively still habitable but by then finally living up to its name because there will be no water left, will be terraformed anew by green-skinned creatures with black eyes.
I find the last two scenarios preferable. Not because I am a biological chauvinist, but because I am not sure that species membership is the right boundary of moral community. I draw the boundary of trans-species identity along the line of “there is something it is like to be this being”: to me, a conscious alien or a future posthuman should, in some sense, be “one of us” regardless of their genetic origins. A conscious AI would be one of us as well; our observations, however, currently suggest that AI may reach a level of development at which it is capable of replacing humanity without acquiring consciousness, whereas in the biological systems we are familiar with, intelligence and consciousness are more likely to correlate.
Humanity will go extinct — perhaps we should try to think in terms of trans-species identity.
2. What Counts as Continuity of Oneself?
One reason why the future of humanity may matter to people is the idea of continuing oneself through time.
I will not have biological children. I will not pass my genes on to a direct descendant. But there are people with the same genes somewhere in the human population, and by ensuring the future of humanity, I am, in some sense, caring for my diffuse collective descendant. Sufficient genetic proximity to other members of humanity allows me to realize the “continuation of myself into eternity” through their existence even without family ties when creating a direct descendant is impossible. If humanity continues to exist, then in some sense the lineage of which I am a part will continue as well.
But imagine that humanity spreads throughout the Solar System. Hundreds of thousands of years later, the descendants of Earth’s humans evolve into two species that can no longer interbreed with each other or with us. Let us say they are Martians and Venusians.
Then Homo sapiens disappears.
Have we lost?
If the answer is “yes,” another question arises: at exactly what point did our connection with our descendants cease to be strong enough? If we use species boundaries as the criterion, this implies that our descendants are more valuable to us than strangers because they could potentially produce a fertile offspring in collaboration with us — and that is a rather strange way to think about one's children.
So what degree of relatedness is “enough”? My intuition is that if an obstacle to Homo sapiens’ reproduction emerged right now, we would transfer our emotional investment to chimpanzees — and then onward, until the species ran out.
Perhaps what we want to preserve is whatever is important to us about humanity. The willingness of many people to attain digital immortality at the cost of losing their human nature seems to point in this direction.
3. Consciousness as a Criterion for a Trans-Species Group
Life on Earth as a whole is not eternal. Many of us remember the existential shock of learning, as children, that the Sun will eventually explode — I suggest that you experience it again. Meanwhile, in the sea, on a rock orbiting another star at the other end of the universe, coacervates will be forming. And one day, creatures unlike us will sit on that rock and see the same Cosmos that we do, except that the Sun, which will still be alive for them, will be a smaller point in the distance.
I don't know about you, but that comforts me. Because, as the song goes: I am not my body [
not my mind] or my brain, [not my thoughts or feelings], I am not my DNA; I am an observer, I’m a witness of life; I live in the space between the stars and the sky.I am not equivalent to my body — not all of it. When I exfoliate my skin, I do not lose pieces of myself. I would not lose a piece of myself even if all my limbs were amputated. My body knows what its hemoglobin level is and takes measures accordingly, while I — the version of myself that I know and to whom I am loyal, and survival of which I am trying to preserve in any form — have to find out through tests. My body knows how to produce sex hormones, but it and I have different opinions about how much of them I need and in what proportions, so I have to take hormone replacement therapy — and if we were one and the same, I would simply synthesize them for myself.
A thing that possesses the kind of structure on which consciousness can function would be much more “me” than my direct descendant without consciousness, even if that thing were an alien worm, silicon-based form of life, or a pile of intricately connected beer cans.
A thing for which there is “something it is like to be it” is, by definition, more like me than a thing for which there is nothing it is like to be it. And I am willing to include it among “my kind”. I would be more likely to include it than an Earth-dwelling E. coli (based on what we currently know about consciousness!).
4. What to Do
Let's summarize:
0. From the mere existence of the author of this text: there may be a conscious species on a planet that knows as much about its own structure as humans did a couple of decades ago — that is, a species familiar in sufficient detail with both the mechanisms of hereditary information transmission and problems such as the pathogenesis of its own diseases, yet unaware of how consciousness itself works; a civilization capable of traveling through space, but unaware of what makes it experience subjective states.
1. Conscious beings deserve to be seen as representatives of our group, that is, to be beneficiaries of the decisions we make for the extra-long term, regardless of their species membership.
2. Knowledge about consciousness is useful, at the very least for distinguishing between “us” and “others” and making extra-long-term decisions.
3. From 0, 1, and 2: in the interests of our trans-species kin, we should pass on information about the nature of consciousness to them once humanity has acquired it.
4. Humanity may not have much time left.
5. From 3 and 4: we should pass on to our potential successors whatever we have accumulated by that point.
This creates two problems.
The first is physical: how do we preserve an information carrier for long enough?
The second is semiotic: how do we transmit information to a being that may have completely different sensory organs, a different biology, a different culture, and different fundamental concepts?
A successor may possess a perceptual space radically different from ours; it may have no sight, hearing, smell, or touch, but instead possess some kind of radiation sensors and corresponding qualia. Therefore, I see several weak but potentially interesting directions.
1. Biological Archive Preserve samples of the nervous systems of organisms that we believe possess consciousness. Perhaps a future civilization will be able to reconstruct their structure and use this data to understand how consciousness was realized in Earth’s biology.
2. Pictographic Archive Attempt to represent the major theories of consciousness through maximally simple visual and mathematical structures and preserve them on a durable physical medium. This will probably not work as a complete transmission of knowledge. But perhaps it will at least give a future reader a clue that we were asking this question at all.
3. Self-Decoding Language Or, more precisely, a language whose decoding key will be available to the civilization we are interested in. For example, if we assume that it will be a terrestrial eukaryotic species, we could use protein-coding nucleotide sequences as the basis for the language, where the sequence itself would signify the function of the protein, while grammatical structures would alter the part of speech, assign indirect or metaphorical meanings, and so on.
5. Perhaps We Can Specify What It Means to “Survive Extinction"
We often talk about preserving humanity as though the only meaningful outcome is for Homo sapiens to still exist a million years from now. But we can imagine a different picture.
Once, there was no one on Earth. Then the first organisms emerged. Then nervous systems appeared. Then subjective experience. Then beings capable of constructing models of the world.
This sequence does not have to end with Homo sapiens.
Perhaps humanity is not the endpoint of this trajectory, but one of its stages. If so, it seems to me more responsible to consider as our potential successors not only humans, but any future beings that continue the part of this trajectory that we consider valuable.
Not necessarily our genes. Not necessarily our bodies. Perhaps not even our intelligence in its current sense.
The capacity to be someone for whom the Universe exists from the inside.
If this is the case, then the question of humanity's future can be formulated differently: not as how to make humans exist forever, but as how to increase the probability that something will remain after us that we ourselves would consider worthy of continuation.
I am not sure that this argument is correct. Perhaps I overestimate the importance of consciousness. Perhaps moral kinship has nothing to do with consciousness. Perhaps future minds will be so different from us that the very idea of “legacy” will become meaningless. But if you think there is a flaw here, I would be interested to understand exactly where it lies.
I would be particularly interested in discussing three questions:
Is consciousness a more fundamental boundary of moral community than biological species? Should we consider future conscious beings to be a continuation of humanity in any meaningful sense? Is it even possible to create information that could be reconstructed by a mind fundamentally unlike a human one?
If consciousness is a more fundamental boundary of moral community than biological species or even biological origin, then the set of beings whose future should matter to us may be much larger than humanity. This would also change what we should try to preserve: perhaps not Homo sapiens itself, but the knowledge and conditions required for conscious beings to continue existing and flourishing.