Longtermism redux

This cockeyed moral philosophy again, and what Sri Aurobindo’s vision of the future offers instead.

If you didn’t read my dispatch of December 12, you probably haven’t heard of longtermism. As Émile Torres, one of its critics, wrote, “longtermism might be one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities and Silicon Valley have ever heard about.” This ideology, which emerged over the past decade, claims that safeguarding a certain future — thousands, millions, and even billions of years from now — is a key moral priority of our time, if not the key priority. Torres has identified two phases in the spreading of longtermism.

Phase One involved infiltrating governments, encouraging people to pursue high-paying jobs to donate more for the cause, and wooing billionaires like Elon Musk. According to Torres, this has already been wildly successful. Longtermists are running for public office, consulting on or authoring major government reports, and even planning to promote their ideology through Hollywood-style action movies. The longtermist Toby Ord “has advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister’s Office, Cabinet Office, and Government Office for Science.” A recent report from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, which Ord contributed to, discusses “existential risks” and specifically references “longtermism.” Elon Musk —said to be the richest man in the world and now owning the world’s loudest megaphone (Twitter) — calls longtermism “a close match for my philosophy.” He has cited the work of leading longtermist Nick Bostrom and has donated millions to the Future of Humanity Institute and the Future of Life Institute, both based out of Oxford. Peter Thiel, the radical libertarian donor, early Trump supporter, and funder of venture capitalist J.D. Vance’s successful US Senate campaign, delivered the keynote address at the 2013 Effective Altruism summit. The Effective Altruism movement itself, from which longtermism emerged, now has some $46 billion in committed funding.

Phase Two encompasses the more recent media blitz promoting longtermism, with articles written by or about William MacAskill, longtermism's poster boy, in outlets like the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Guardian, BBC, and TIME. Ord for his part claims that “his work has been featured more than a hundred times in the national and international media.” Members and supporters are working overtime to sell longtermism to the broader public in hopes of building their movement.

So, what is an “existential risk,” and how should those billions in committed funding be used? Holden Karnofsky, co-CEO of Open Philanthropy, a foundation that researches the best opportunities for philanthropic grant-making, holds that we could be living “at the very beginning of the tiny sliver of time during which the galaxy goes from nearly lifeless to largely populated.” That “tiny sliver of time” began three million years ago give or take, with the first use of tools by our ancestors, and it will end when our descendants — who might by then be “uploads” rather than biological organisms — inhabit the entire galaxy, ushering in a civilization consisting of an enormous number of “people” that would last for tens of billions of years. An “upload,” as defined by Bostrom,

is a mind that has been transferred from a biological brain to a computer that emulates the computational processes that took place in the original biological neural network. A successful uploading process would preserve the original mind’s memories, skills, values, and consciousness. Uploading a mind will make it much easier to enhance its intelligence, by running it faster, adding additional computational resources, or streamlining its architecture. One could imagine that enhancing an upload beyond a certain point will result in a positive feedback loop, where the enhanced upload is able to figure out ways of making itself even smarter; and the smarter successor version is in turn even better at designing an improved version of itself, and so on.

So, if one wants to “do the most good,” then our own good — that of the close to 10^10 people alive today — will count for almost nothing compared to the good of the estimated 10^58 “people” alive in the future. You can see where this is going. Almost any sacrifice of the well-being of our generation and the next should be deemed acceptable as long as it ensures the existence of those zillions of future generations: “A moral case can be made that existential risk reduction is strictly more important than any other global public good” — Nick Bostrom.¹ An existential risk, as defined by Bostrom, is one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic failure of that life to realize its potential.

Even if we use the most conservative estimates, which entirely ignores the possibility of space colonisation and software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater than the value of 10^16 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred times the value of a million human lives. The more technologically comprehensive estimate of 10^54 human brain-emulation subjective life-years (or 10^52 lives of ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly.²

Bostrom has described a “potentially recoverable setback,” such as a “non-existential disaster causing the breakdown of global civilization,” as “a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind.” He even proposed that everyone should permanently wear a device that would monitor everything that you do, 24/7 for the remainder of your life, to guard against the minuscule possibility that you might be part of a plot to destroy humanity. Nick Beckstead, not to be outdone, asserted in his influential 2013 dissertation that we should prioritize saving the lives of people in rich countries over saving the lives of people in poor countries, and Hilary Greaves acknowledged that longtermist logic discourages things that once seemed ethically advisable, such as “transferring resources from the affluent western world to the global poor.” These troubling assertions barely scratch the surface of how longtermism could cause serious harm in the world.

If you wanted to implement a belief structure which justified unimaginable horrors, what sort of views would it espouse? As a good starting point, Ben Chugg suggests “to disable our critical capacities from evaluating the consequences of our actions, most likely by appealing to some vague and distant glorious future lying in wait,” to which he adds that “this tool has been used by many horrific ideologies in the past,” quoting Mao Tse Tung: “Both the name of our Party and our Marxist world outlook unequivocally point to this supreme ideal of the future, a future of incomparable brightness and splendor.” Marx’s vision of communism as the predestined goal of human history also provided Lenin and Stalin with a justification for their crimes. And the promised goal of a “Thousand-Year Reich” was, in the eyes of the Nazis, sufficient reason for exterminating or enslaving those deemed racially inferior.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that longtermism has roots in the quasi-religious ideology of transhumanism, which itself grew out of the Anglo-American eugenics program. Indeed, Bostrom himself identifies “dysgenic pressures” — too many dumb people procreating — as an existential risk no less than thermonuclear war and runaway climate change.

It also doesn’t come as a surprise that longtermism, which sees Western industrial civilization as the pinnacle of human development and holds that more technology will solve the problems created by technology, seems tailor-made to allow tech, finance and philosophy elites to indulge their egomaniacal tendencies while patting themselves on the back for their superior IQs. The future becomes a clean slate where they can pursue their techno-utopian fantasies while flattering themselves that they are still “doing good.”

Centurioscope by Dean Morrissey

My purpose in writing this post goes beyond joining the growing number of pundits who are sounding alarm bells on the dangerous implications of longtermism. Because Sri Aurobindo, too, had much to say about the distant future, it makes sense to point out some of the contrasts between the two conceptions of the future and of our obligations to it in the here and now.

Longtermists are talking much about the value of human lives, which they aim to maximize throughout cosmological time. They treat people as “containers” of such values as pleasure and well-being, and they treat these values as both intensive and extensive quantities — how much value per hour or life and how many hours or lives of value. What in their writings is conspicuous by its absence is any awareness, not to speak of understanding, of the qualitative (sensational or emotional) aspects of the things we value — of what ultimately makes them valuable to us.

Scientists, as Curtis White pointed out here, oftentimes admire, even are in awe of, the beauty of some natural thing — a flower, a mountain range, an image from the Hubble telescope, or else the beauty of a physical theory or a mathematical theorem. They know beauty when they see it, yet they haven’t got the foggiest as to how they know it when they see it. Whence that feeling of admiration or awe? By the same token, whence our appreciation of the taste of ice cream or a cold beer on a hot summer day? How it is that in addition to all that can be explained scientifically, there is this subjective and purely qualitative sense of pleasure or enjoyment, which cannot be so explained?

When you ask a longtermist, a transhumanist, or any other kind of materialist what, in their opinion, is ultimately and irreducibly real, they will of course point to matter, notwithstanding their complete inability to come up with a satisfactory definition of “matter.” The only cogent way to define “matter” to date is to characterize it as “that which satisfied the laws of physics,” and this leaves us in the dark as to what that is.

For Sri Aurobindo, as for the mystics and seers whose experiences are recorded in the Vedas and the Upanishads, what is ultimately and irreducibly real is “a conscious existence the very term of whose being, the very term of whose consciousness is bliss” [LD 98]. This conscious existence — Brahman — is infinite and absolute, and “[a]ll illimitableness, all infinity, all absoluteness is pure delight.”

Even our relative humanity has this experience that all dissatisfaction means a limit, an obstacle, — satisfaction comes by realisation of something withheld, by the surpassing of the limit, the overcoming of the obstacle. This is because our original being is the absolute in full possession of its infinite and illimitable self-consciousness and self-power; a self-possession whose other name is self-delight. And in proportion as the relative touches upon that self-possession, it moves towards satisfaction, touches delight.

The self-delight of Brahman is not limited, however, by the still and motionless possession of its absolute self-being. Just as its force of consciousness is capable of throwing itself into forms infinitely and with an endless variation, so also its self-delight is capable of movement, of variation, of revelling in that infinite flux and mutability of itself represented by numberless teeming universes. To loose forth and enjoy this infinite movement and variation of its self-delight is the object of its extensive or creative play of Force.

In other words, that which has thrown itself out into forms is a triune Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda, whose consciousness is in its nature a creative or rather a self-expressive Force capable of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of its self-conscious being and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. It follows that all things that exist are what they are as terms of that existence, terms of that conscious force, terms of that delight of being. Just as we find all things to be mutable forms of one immutable being, finite results of one infinite force, so we shall find that all things are variable self-expression of one invariable and all-embracing delight of self-existence. In everything that is, dwells the conscious force and it exists and is what it is by virtue of that conscious force; so also in everything that is there is the delight of existence and it exists and is what it is by virtue of that delight. [LD 98–100]

Where consciousness is concerned, longtermists largely rely on a functionalist definition. This allows them, as is does the wider transhumanist community, to envision significant mental improvements through performance-enhancing drugs, genetic engineering, digital implants, etc., and even to fantasize about the possibility of uploading minds from organic brains to functionally equivalent inorganic systems. But it also makes it impossible to envision the emergence of a consciousness beyond mind and its reliance on technology.

If we accept an ultimate reality the nature of which is (subjectively speaking) infinite or absolute bliss and (objectively speaking) infinite or absolute quality or value, and if this ultimate reality has the power to experience and express itself in terms of the relative and the finite, then we must also accept a dynamic link between the absolute and the relative, between the infinite and the finite. And this link cannot be our mental consciousness, which dwells exclusively in the relative and the finite.

Infinite consciousness in its infinite action can produce only infinite results; to settle upon a fixed Truth or order of truths and build a world in conformity with that which is fixed, demands a selective faculty of knowledge commissioned to shape finite appearance out of the infinite Reality. This power was known to the Vedic seers by the name of Maya.... It is by Maya that ... out of the supreme being in which all is all without barrier of separative consciousness emerges the phenomenal being in which all is in each and each is in all for the play of existence with existence, consciousness with consciousness, force with force, delight with delight.

This play of all in each and each in all is concealed at first from us by the mental play or the illusion of Maya which persuades each that he is in all but not all in him and that he is in all as a separated being not as a being always inseparably one with the rest of existence. Afterwards we have to emerge from this error into the supramental play or the truth of Maya where the “each” and the “all” coexist in the inseparable unity of the one truth and the multiple symbol....

This distinction between the lower [mental] and the higher [supramental] Maya is the link in thought and in cosmic Fact which the pessimistic and illusionist philosophies miss or neglect. [LD 123–124]

The pessimistic and illusionist philosophies are of two kinds. One is Western materialism; the other is Indian illusionism (mayavada). The former denies the reality of “one of the most powerful and convincing experiences of which the human mind is capable.” The latter affirms the reality of this experience but is led by it to deny the reality of the world. Both therefore forestall the recognition of an Ultimate Reality expressing and experiencing its intrinsic Quality/Delight in a real world which (as sat or being or substance) it constitutes and (as chit or self or consciousness) it contains. (As for why these relations between Reality Itself and the world aren’t glaringly obvious to us, see this post. The keyword is “involution.”)

In two passages of his magnum opus The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo has attempted to describe this ontologically pivotal experience:

For at the gates of the Transcendent stands that mere and perfect Spirit described in the Upanishads, luminous, pure, sustaining the world but inactive in it, without sinews of energy, without flaw of duality, without scar of division, unique, identical, free from all appearance of relation and of multiplicity, — the pure Self of the Adwaitins,³ the inactive Brahman, the transcendent Silence. And the mind when it passes those gates suddenly, without intermediate transitions,⁴ receives a sense of the unreality of the world and the sole reality of the Silence which is one of the most powerful and convincing experiences of which the human mind is capable. Here, in the perception of this pure Self or of the Non-Being behind it, we have the starting point for a second negation, — parallel at the other pole to the materialistic, but more complete, more final, more perilous in its effects on the individuals or collectivities that hear its potent call to the wilderness, — the refusal of the ascetic.... For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit ... it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of vital energy in an ancient race.... But we have seen that it corresponds to a truth of existence, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very summit of our possibility. [LD 26–27]

[Although the theory of Illusionism] is in itself no more than a mental formulation, the experience it formulates into a philosophy accompanies a most powerful and apparently final spiritual realisation. It comes upon us with a great force of awakening to reality when the thought is stilled, when the mind withdraws from its constructions, when we pass into a pure selfhood void of all sense of individuality, empty of all cosmic contents: if the spiritualised mind then looks at individual and cosmos, they may well seem to it to be an illusion, a scheme of names and figures and movements falsely imposed on the sole reality of the Self-Existent. Or even the sense of self becomes inadequate; both knowledge and ignorance disappear into sheer Consciousness and consciousness is plunged into a trance of pure superconscient existence. Or even existence ends by becoming too limiting a name for that which abides solely for ever; there is only a timeless Eternal, a spaceless Infinite, the utterness of the Absolute, a nameless Peace, an overwhelming single objectless Ecstasy. There can certainly be no doubt of the validity — complete within itself — of this experience; there can be no denial of the overwhelming decisive convincingness with which this realisation seizes the consciousness of the spiritual seeker. [LD 486]

So, to a mental consciousness, either Brahman alone is true and the world is a lie,⁵ or the world alone is real and Brahman is an illusion. That which justifies the reality of Brahman and the reality of the world to each other, is “the supramental play or the truth of Maya” by which “the phenomenal being in which all is in each and each is in all” emerges “out of the supreme being in which all is all without barrier of separative consciousness.” Only the evolution of a supramental consciousness can disabuse the materialist of the notion that there is no such thing as Brahman, and the Mayavadin of the notion that there is no such thing as the world. What is illusory is not the world itself but the mental play of Maya “which persuades each that he is in all but not all in him and that he is in all as a separated being not as a being always inseparably one with the rest of existence.” (For more on the relations and differences between mind and supermind see this post.)

For present purposes, the chief difference between the two consciousnesses (mental and supramental) is that the mind’s characteristic way of acting is through technology, whereas the supermind’s characteristic way of acting is the fiat of creation. To us, matter appears to enjoy a mind-independent reality precisely because mind cannot change the laws of physics; it can only make use of them. By expanding its knowledge of the laws of nature, it can widen the scope of its technology, but it remains limited by its dependence on it. To Brahman, on the other hand, there is nothing that could enjoy an existence independent of supermind, not least because there is nothing that cannot be changed by it. Supermind has no need of technology and therefore cannot be limited by its scope. As it had the power to subject Brahman’s aspects of substance and force to what we call “the laws of physics,” so it has the power to modify, suspend, and even abolish these laws.

As I said, my purpose here is to point out certain contrasts between longtermism and Sri Aurobindo’s conception of a relatively distant future and of what we owe to it. Although Sri Aurobindo is not in the business of making quantitative predictions, we may gather from the following passage that the supramental transformation of the terrestrial world may not be a matter of many thousands let alone millions of years.

The spiritual evolution obeys the logic of a successive unfolding; it can take a new decisive main step only when the previous main step has been sufficiently conquered: even if certain minor stages can be swallowed up or leaped over by a rapid and brusque ascension, the consciousness has to turn back to assure itself that the ground passed over is securely annexed to the new condition. It is true that the conquest of the spirit supposes the execution in one life or a few lives of a process that in the ordinary course of Nature would involve a slow and uncertain procedure of centuries or even of millenniums: but this is a question of the speed with which the steps are traversed; a greater or concentrated speed does not eliminate the steps themselves or the necessity of their successive surmounting. The increased rapidity is possible only because the conscious participation of the inner being is there and the power of the Supernature is already at work in the half-transformed lower nature, so that the steps which would otherwise have had to be taken tentatively in the night of Inconscience or Ignorance can now be taken in an increasing light and power of Knowledge.

The first obscure material movement of the evolutionary Force is marked by an aeonic graduality; the movement of life progress proceeds slowly but still with a quicker step, it is concentrated into the figure of millenniums; mind can still further compress the tardy leisureliness of Time and make long paces of the centuries; but when the conscious Spirit intervenes, a supremely concentrated pace of evolutionary swiftness becomes possible. Still, an involved rapidity⁶ of the evolutionary course swallowing up the stages can only come in when the power of the conscious Spirit has prepared the field and the supramental Force has begun to use its direct influence. All Nature’s transformations do indeed wear the appearance of a miracle, but it is a miracle with a method: her largest strides are taken over an assured ground, her swiftest leaps are from a base that gives security and certainty to the evolutionary saltus.

Longtermists dream of enhanced powers of reasoning, yet as rationalists they cannot conceive of going beyond reason. Sri Aurobindo, on the other hand, insists that “[t]he true knowledge of things is denied to our reason, because that is not our spirit’s greatest essential power but only an expedient, a transitional instrument meant to deal with the appearance of things and their phenomenal process.” [EDH⁷ 164] As mind and reason are transitional and instrumental, so is the being which embodies these powers: “mental man ... is too small and imperfect to be the crown of all this travail of Nature. Man is not final, but a middle term only, a transitional being, an instrumental intermediate creature.” [EDH 166]

“This character of evolution and this mediary position of man,” Sri Aurobindo goes on to say, “are not at first apparent; for to the outward eye it would seem as if evolution, the physical evolution at least, were finished long ago leaving man behind as its poor best result and no new beings or superior creations were to be expected any longer.” Whereas longtermism makes up for the perceived lack of future evolution proper through fantasies about technologies that will transform us into cognitively and even morally enhanced posthumans, Sri Aurobindo lays out in considerable detail the processes and stages by which the goal of evolution proper will eventually be reached. These I intend to consider in an upcoming post.

Again, longtermism is put forward as a moral philosophy. It fails to take into account that ethics, as we have already seen, is but a stage in evolution. As evolution went through non-ethical, infra-ethical, and half-ethical stages, so it will reach a supra-ethical stage — a stage in which there is no need for ethics. This, too, will be the subject of a future post.

And again, longtermism aims to maximize the number of value “containers” and the total value contained in them throughout the hospitable future of the universe. It is therefore prepared to accept and even require significant sacrifices in the near future. “Sacrifice” is also a frequently occurring term in the writings of Sri Aurobindo, so we need to understand what exactly the term signifies. This is yet another subject for future discussion.

Last but not least, it will be worth our while to consider aspects of the more distant future as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo — to the extent this is possible to the human mind.

1. N. Bostrom, Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority, Global Policy 4 (1), February 2013.

2. Ibid.

3. The Vedantic Monists (Sri Aurobindo’s note).

4. As Sri Aurobindo did “not so far from the beginning of [his] Yogic career” (Letters on Himself and the Ashram, pp. 256–257 (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2011).

5. Vivekachudamani, Verse 20.

6. I was much puzzled as to the meaning of “involved rapidity.” I am indebted to Richard Hartz for pointing me to a passage from a book Sri Aurobindo received as automatic writing in 1910 (Yogic Sadhan, reprinted in Record of Yoga, pp. 1377–78, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 2001), where this term is explained:

[T]here are three laws which assist — the law of gradual processes, the law of concentrated processes and the law of involved processes.... [W]hen the man himself becomes God, either in a part of his actions or in the whole, then the law of concentrated processes gives place to the involved processes, when no process at all seems to be used, when the result follows the action instantaneously, inevitably and miraculously. In reality there is no miracle, the process is used but so rapidly, with such a sovereign ease, that all the stages become involved or hidden in what seems a moment’s action. To most men it is enough, if they can reach the second stage; it is only the Avatar or the great Vibhuti who can reach the third.

7. Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 1997).