If I understand you correctly, the argument is not “autopoietic systems have persisted for billions of years” but more specifically “so far each new ‘type’ of such systems has persisted, so we should expect the most recent new type of ‘information-based civilization’ to persist as well”.
This is an interesting argument I hadn’t considered in this form.
(I think it’s interesting because I think the case that it talks about a morally relevant long future is stronger than for the simple appeal to all autopoietic systems as a reference class. The latter include many things that are so weird—like eusocial insects, asexually reproducing organisms, and potentially even non-living systems like autocatalytic chemical reactions—that the argument seems quite vulnerable to the objection that knowing that “some kind of autopoietic system will be around for billions of years” isn’t that relevant. We arguably care about something that, while more general than current values or humans as biological species, is more narrow than that.
[Tbc, I think there are non-crazy views that care at least somewhat about basically all autopoietic systems, but my impression is that the standard justification for longtermism doesn’t want to commit itself to such views.])
However, I have some worries about survivorship bias: If there was a “failed major transition in evolution”, would we know about it? Like, could it be that 2 billion years ago organisms started doing sphexual selection (a hypothetical form of reproduction that’s as different from previous asexual reproduction as sexual reproduction but also different from the latter) but that this type of reproduction died out after 1,000 years—and similarly for sphexxual selection, sphexxxual selection, … ? Such that with full knowledge we’d conclude the reverse from your conclusion above, i.e. “almost all new types of autopoietic systems died out soon, so we should expect information-based civilization to die out soon as well”?
(FWIW my guess is that the answer actually is “our understanding of the history of evolution is sufficiently good that together with broad priors we can rule out at least an extremely high number of such ‘failed transitions’”, but I’m not sure and so I wanted to mention the possible problem.)
If there were lots of failed major transitions in evolution, that would also update us towards there being a greater number of attempted transitions than we previously thought, which would in turn update us positively on information-based civilization emerging eventually, no? Or are you assuming that these would be too weird/different from homo sapiens such that we wouldn’t share values enough?
Furthermore, sexual selection looks like a fairly simple and straightforward solution to the problem ‘organisms with higher life expectancy don’t evolve quickly enough’, so it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of space left for any alternatives.
If I understand you correctly, the argument is not “autopoietic systems have persisted for billions of years” but more specifically “so far each new ‘type’ of such systems has persisted, so we should expect the most recent new type of ‘information-based civilization’ to persist as well”.
This is an interesting argument I hadn’t considered in this form.
(I think it’s interesting because I think the case that it talks about a morally relevant long future is stronger than for the simple appeal to all autopoietic systems as a reference class. The latter include many things that are so weird—like eusocial insects, asexually reproducing organisms, and potentially even non-living systems like autocatalytic chemical reactions—that the argument seems quite vulnerable to the objection that knowing that “some kind of autopoietic system will be around for billions of years” isn’t that relevant. We arguably care about something that, while more general than current values or humans as biological species, is more narrow than that.
[Tbc, I think there are non-crazy views that care at least somewhat about basically all autopoietic systems, but my impression is that the standard justification for longtermism doesn’t want to commit itself to such views.])
However, I have some worries about survivorship bias: If there was a “failed major transition in evolution”, would we know about it? Like, could it be that 2 billion years ago organisms started doing sphexual selection (a hypothetical form of reproduction that’s as different from previous asexual reproduction as sexual reproduction but also different from the latter) but that this type of reproduction died out after 1,000 years—and similarly for sphexxual selection, sphexxxual selection, … ? Such that with full knowledge we’d conclude the reverse from your conclusion above, i.e. “almost all new types of autopoietic systems died out soon, so we should expect information-based civilization to die out soon as well”?
(FWIW my guess is that the answer actually is “our understanding of the history of evolution is sufficiently good that together with broad priors we can rule out at least an extremely high number of such ‘failed transitions’”, but I’m not sure and so I wanted to mention the possible problem.)
If there were lots of failed major transitions in evolution, that would also update us towards there being a greater number of attempted transitions than we previously thought, which would in turn update us positively on information-based civilization emerging eventually, no? Or are you assuming that these would be too weird/different from homo sapiens such that we wouldn’t share values enough?
Furthermore, sexual selection looks like a fairly simple and straightforward solution to the problem ‘organisms with higher life expectancy don’t evolve quickly enough’, so it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of space left for any alternatives.