A Possible Great Filter

The Fermi paradox arises from the apparent contradiction between the relatively high likelihood of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of our observed evidence for any. Essentially, if the universe is so vast, and intelligent life is sure to exist elsewhere in it, how come we haven’t seen any aliens? The Great Filter is a proposed possible cause of this observed phenomenon, that somewhere along the development of intelligent life, there inevitably comes a stage that is exceedingly difficult to pass through, that most life forms are “filtered” out from developing further. Great Filters can exist “behind us”, in the sense that we (humans on Earth) have already successfully gone through them. Examples include the spontaneous formation of self-replicating molecules, and the development of sexual reproduction. They can also exist in the present, or “ahead of us”, and I had a thought on such a possible Great Filter.

As civilizations develop and advance, it is inevitable for them to go through a stage during which their thinking is dominated by scientific and rationalist philosophies. This is due to the surprising effectiveness of logic and reason in generating practical solutions in physical reality, in the short term. Yet the world, and the structures required for the coordination of intelligent agents (which is needed to expand the civilization further) are fluid, and pure rationalism alone can not navigate or manage it effectively past a certain scale. Civilizations that don’t realize this at a group level and incorporate it into their fundamental mode of thinking cannot make it through this stage of development. They are instead led astray by the application of some destructive radical rationalist idea and end up destroying themselves. Since it is extremely difficult to make it through this stage of development, especially if scientific and technological progress happens too fast, blinding the civilization to the limitations of rationality, most civilizations don’t manage to succeed.

Characterizations of Our Own Intelligence

What we think human intelligence is (or consists of) may not be what it actually is, because our own point of view may be limiting our study of it. Reasoning about our own intelligence is a form of self, recursive analysis, and we do not know whether any limitations exist, and if so what they could be.

For example, we may see our intelligence as just some complex form of pattern recognition, which many people (especially in AI research) do. In reality it may be a lot more than that, but we could just be missing some meta-perspective, and not seeing anything beyond pattern recognition. Do we think human intelligence is “just pattern recognition” because that’s all we really are, or because that’s all we can see? If we can only recognize patterns, can we perceive the parts of us that are not simply doing pattern recognition, even they existed? This could be another barrier to developing human-level AI, one that we may not even ever know to exist.

Source of Dynamism

Where does dynamism of a society comes from? Dan Wang in his 2019 year-end letter attributes it to the elite taking risks, and the decline in dynamism in some parts of the world to the growing passivity of the local financial elites. But I disagree. The elites were never the ones to take outlandish risks: why take risks when you already have so much? Just as the economy is driven by the flow of capital, dynamism, the “lifeblood of a society” so to speak, comes from the flow of people between the socio-economic classes.

It has always been the inter-socio-economic-class flow, and the promise of its possibility, that drive the people in the middle and lower classes to action. Of course, this is all backed by the elite’s capital, so I don’t want to dismiss their role in driving dynamism. This is the essence of the “American Dream”, and the fluidity between the classes is one of the key reasons that western liberal capitalist societies have faired much better than authoritarian, socialist/communist societies. When you eliminate socio-economic classes or stifle the flow of people between them (through anything other than meritocracy, like nepotism and corruption), dynamism suffers and progress slows.