In Michaelmas term 2015 we ran a seminar series on Big Picture Thinking at FHI. The videos of most seminars are online.
I gave a talk on observer selection effects, and here are my somewhat overdone lecture notes. Covers selection bias, anthropic reasoning, anthropic shadows, nuclear war near misses, physics disasters, the Doomsday Argument, the Fermi Paradox, the Simulation Argument, fine tuning and Boltzmann brains.
My friend Stuart explains why the Death Stars and the Starkiller Base in the Star Wars universe are inefficient ways of taking over the galaxy. I generally agree: even a super-inefficient robot army will win if you simply bury enemy planets in robots.
But thinking about the physics of absurd superweapons is fun and warms the heart.
My biggest problem with the Starkiller Base is the ideal gas law. The weapon works by sucking up a star and then beaming its energy or plasma at remote targets. A sun-like star has a volume around 1.4*1018 cubic kilometres, while an Earthlike planet has a volume around 1012 cubic kilometres. So if you suck up a star it will get compressed by a factor of 1.4 million times. The ideal gas law states that pressure times volume equals temperature times the number of particles and some constant:
1.4 million times less volume needs to be balanced somehow: either the pressure P has to go down, the temperature T has to go up, or the number of particles n need to go down.
Pressure reduction seems to be a non-starter, unless the Starkiller base actually contains some kind of alternate dimension where there is no pressure (or an enormous volume).
The second case implies a temperature increase by a factor of a 1.4 million. Remember how hot a bike pump gets when compressing air: this is the same effect. This would heat the photosphere gas to 8.4 billion degrees and the core to 2.2*1013 K, 22 TeraKelvin; the average would be somewhere between, on the hotter side. We are talking about temperatures microseconds after the Big Bang, hotter than a supernova: protons and neutrons melt at 0.5–1.2 TK into a quark-gluon plasma. Excellent doomsday weapon material but now containment seems problematic. Even if we have antigravity forcefields to hold the star, the black-body radiation is beyond the supernova range. Keeping it inside a planet would be tough: the amount of neutrino radiation would likely blow up the surface like a supernova bounce does.
Maybe the extra energy is bled off somehow? That might be a way to merely get super-hot plasma rather than something evaporating the system. Maybe those pesky neutrinos can be shunted into hyperspace, taking most of the heat with them (neutrino cooling can be surprisingly fast for very hot objects; at these absurd temperatures it is likely subsecond down to mere supernova temperatures).
Another bizarre and fun approach is to reduce the number of gas particles: simply fuse them all into a single nucleus. A neutron star is in a sense a single atomic nucleus. As a bonus, the star would now be a tiny multikilometre sphere held together by its own gravity. If n is reduced by a factor of 1057 it could outweigh the compression temperature boost. There would be heating from all the fusion; my guesstimate is that it is about a percent of the mass energy, or 2.7*1045 J. This would heat the initial gas to around 96 billion degrees, still manageable by the dramatic particle number reduction. This approach still would involve handling massive neutrino emissions, since the neutronium would still be pretty hot.
In this case the star would remain gravitationally bound into a small blob: convenient as a bullet. Maybe the red “beam” is actually just an accelerated neutron star, leaking mass along its trajectory. The actual colour would of course be more like blinding white with a peak in the gamma ray spectrum. Given the intense magnetic fields locked into neutron stars, moving them electromagnetically looks pretty feasible… assuming you have something on the other end of the electromagnetic field that is heavier or more robust. If a planet shoots a star-mass bullet at a high velocity, then we should expect the recoil to send the planet moving at about a million times faster in the opposite direction.
We have also ignored gravity: putting a sun-mass inside an Earth-radius means we get 333,000 times higher gravity. We can try to hand-wave this by arguing that the antigravity used to control the star eating also compensates for the extra gravity. But even a minor glitch in the field would produce an instant, dramatic squishing. Messing up the system* containing the star would not produce conveniently dramatic earthquakes and rifts, but rather near-instant compression into degenerate matter.
(* System – singular. Wow. After two disasters due to single-point catastrophic failures one would imagine designers learning their lesson. Three times is enemy action: if I were the Supreme Leader I would seriously check if the lead designer happens to be named Skywalker.)
There is also the issue of the amount of energy needed to run the base. Sucking up a star from a distance requires supplying the material with the gravitational binding energy of the star, 6.87*1041 J for the sun. Doing this over an hour or so is a pretty impressive power, about 1.9*1038 W. This is about 486 billion times the solar luminosity. In fact, just beaming that power at a target using any part of the electromagnetic spectrum would fry just about anything.
Of course, a device that can suck up a star ought to be able to suck up planets a million times faster. So there is no real need to go for stars: just suck up the Republic. Since the base can suck up space fleets too, local defences are not much of a problem. Yes, you may have to go there with your base, but if the Death Star can move, the Starkiller can too. If nothing else, it could use its beam to propel itself.
If the First Order want me to consult on their next (undoubtedly even more ambitious) project I am open for offers. However, one iron-clad condition given recent history is that I get to work from home, as far away as possible from the superweapon. Ideally in a galaxy far, far away.
During my work on the Paris talk I began to wonder whether Paul Erdős (who I used as an example of a respected academic who used cognitive enhancers) could actually have been shown to have benefited from his amphetamine use, which began in 1971 according to Hill (2004). One way of investigating is his publication record: how many papers did he produce per year before or after 1971? Here is a plot, based on Jerrold Grossman’s 2010 bibliography:
The green dashed line is the start of amphetamine use, and the red dashed life is the date of death. Yes, there is a fairly significant posthumous tail: old mathematicians never die, they just asymptote towards zero. Overall, the later part is more productive per year than the early part (before 1971 the mean and standard deviation was 14.6±7.5, after 24.4±16.1; a Kruskal-Wallis test rejects that they are the same distribution, p=2.2e-10).
This does not prove anything. After all, his academic network was growing and he moved from topic to topic, so we cannot prove any causal effect of the amphetamine: for all we know, it might have been holding him back.
One possible argument might be that he did not do his best work on amphetamine. To check this, I took the Wikipedia article that lists things named after Erdős, and tried to find years for the discovery/conjecture. These are marked with red crosses in the diagram, slightly jittered. We can see a few clusters that may correspond to creative periods: one in 35-41, one in 46-51, one in 56-60. After 1970 the distribution was more even and sparse. 76% of the most famous results were done before 1971; given that this is 60% of the entire career it does not look that unlikely to be due to chance (a binomial test gives p=0.06).
Again this does not prove anything. Maybe mathematics really is a young man’s game, and we should expect key results early. There may also have been more time to recognize and name results from the earlier career.
In the end, this is merely a statistical anecdote. It does show that one can be a productive, well-renowned (if eccentric) academic while on enhancers for a long time. But given the N=1, firm conclusions or advice are hard to draw.
Erdős’s friends worried about his drug use, and in 1979 Graham bet Erdős $500 that he couldn’t stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdős accepted, and went cold turkey for a complete month. Erdős’s comment at the end of the month was “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.” He then immediately started taking amphetamines again. (Hill 2004)
My talk “Morphological freedom: what are the limits to transforming the body?” was essentially a continuation of my original morphological freedom talk from 2001. Now with added philosophical understanding and linking to some of the responses to the original paper. Here is a quick summary:
I began by a few cases: Liz Parrish self-experimenting with gene therapy to slow her ageing, Paul Erdös using drugs for cognitive enhancement, Todd Huffman exploring the realm of magnetic vision using an implanted magnet, Neil Harbisson gaining access to the realm of color using sonification, Stelarc doing body modification and extension as performance art, and Erik “The Lizardman” Sprague transforming into a lizard as an existential project.
It is worth noting that several of these are not typical enhancements amplifying an existing ability, but about gaining access to entirely new abilities (I call it “extension”). Their value is not instrumental, but lies in the exploration or self-transformation. They are by their nature subjective and divergent. While some argue enhancement will by their nature be convergent (I disagree) extensions definitely go in all directions – and in fact gain importance from being different.
Morphological freedom, “The right to modify one’s body (or not modify) according to one’s desires”, can be derived from fundamental rights such as the right to life and the right to pursue happiness. If you are not free to control your own body, your right to life and freedom are vulnerable and contingent: hence you need to be allowed to control your body. But I argue this includes a right to change the body: morphological freedom.
One can argue about what rights are, or if they exist. If there are such things, there is however a fair consensus that life and liberty is on the list. Similarly, morphological freedom seems to be so intrinsically tied together with personhood that it becomes inalienable: you cannot remove it from a person without removing an important aspect of what it means to be a person.
These arguments are about fundamental rights rather than civil and legal rights: while I think we should make morphological freedom legally protected, I do think there is more to it than just mutual agreement. Patrick Hopkins wrote an excellent paper analysing how morphological freedom could be grounded. He argued that there are three primary approaches: grounding it in individual autonomy, in human nature, or in human interests. Autonomy is very popular, but Hopkins thinks much of current discourse is a juvenile “I want to be allowed to do what I want” autonomy rather than the more rational or practical concepts of autonomy in deontological or consequentialist ethics. One pay-off is that these concepts do imply limits to morphological freedom to undermine one’s own autonomy. Grounding in human nature requires a view of human nature. Transhumanists and many bioconservatives actually find themselves allies against the relativists and constructivists that deny any nature: they merely disagree on what the sacrosanct parts of that nature are (and these define limits of morphological freedom). Transhumanists think most proposed enhancements are outside these parts, the conservatives think they cover nearly any enhancement. Finally, grounding in what makes humans truly flourish again produces some ethically relevant limits. However, the interest account has trouble with extensions: at best it can argue that we need exploration or curiosity.
One can motivate morphological freedom in many other ways. One is that we need to explore: both because there may be posthuman modes of existence of extremely high value, and because we cannot know the value of different changes without trying them – the world is too complex to be reliably predicted, and many valuable things are subjective in nature. One can also argue we have some form of duty to approach posthumanity, because this approach is intrinsically or instrumentally important (consider a transhumanist reading of Nietzsche, or cosmist ideas). This approach typically seem to require some non-person affecting value. Another approach is to argue morphological freedom is socially constructed within different domains; we have one kind of freedom in sport, another one in academia. I am not fond of this approach since it does not explain how to handle the creation of new domains or what to do between domains. Finally, there is the virtue approach: self-transformation can be seen as a virtue. By this perspective we are not only allowed to change ourselves, we ought to since it is part of human excellence and authenticity.
Limits to morphological freedom can be roughly categorized as practical/prudential, issues of willingness to change/identity, the ethical limits, and the social limits.
Safety is clearly a constraint. If an enhancement is too dangerous, then the risk outweighs the benefit and it should not be done. This is tricky to evaluate for more subjective benefits. The real risk boundary might not be a risk/benefit trade-off, but whether risk is handled in a responsible manner. The difference between being a grinder and doing self-harm consists in whether one is taking precautions and regard pain and harms as problems rather than the point of the exercise.
There are also obvious technological and biological limits. I did not have the time to discuss them, but I think one can use heuristics like the evolutionary optimality challenge to make judgements about feasibility and safety.
Even in a world where anything could be changed with no risk, economic cost or outside influence it is likely that many traits would remain stable. We express ourselves through what we transform ourselves into, and this implies that we will not change what we consider to be prior to that. The Riis, Simmons and Goodwin study showed that surveyed students were much less willing to enhance traits that were regarded more relevant to personal identity than peripheral traits. Rather than “becoming more than you are” the surveyed students were interested in being who they are – but better at it. Morphological freedom may hence be strongly constrained by the desire to maintain a variant of the present self.
Beside the limits coming from the groundings discussed above, there are the standard constraints of not harming or otherwise infringing on the rights of others, capacity (what do we do about prepersons, children or the deranged?) and informed consent. The problem here is not any disagreement about the existence of the constraints, but where they actually lie and how they actually play out.
There are obvious practical social limits for some morphological freedom. Becoming a lizard affects your career choices and how people react to you – the fact that maybe it shouldn’t does not change the fact that it does.
There are also constraints from externalities: morphological freedom should not unduly externalize its costs on the rest of society.
My original paper has got a certain amount of flak from the direction of disability rights, since I argued morphological freedom is a negative right. You have a right to try to change yourself, but I do not need to help you – and vice versa. The criticism is that this is ableist: to be a true right there must be social support for achieving the inherent freedom. To some extent my libertarian leanings made me favour a negative right, but it was also the less radical choice: I am actually delighted that others think we need to reshape society to help people self-transform, a far more radical view. I have some misgivings about the politics of this, prioritization tends to be nasty business, it means that costs will be socially externalized, and in the literature there seem to be some odd views about who gets to say what bodies are authentic or not, but I am all in favour of a “commitment to the value, standing, and social legibility of the widest possible (and an ever-expanding) variety of desired morphologies and lifeways.”
Another interesting discourse has been about the control of the body. While in medicine there has been much work to normalize it (slowly shifting towards achieving functioning in one’s own life), in science the growth of ethics review has put more and more control in the hands of appointed experts, while in performance art almost anything goes (and attempts to control it would be censorship). As Goodall pointed out, many of the body-oriented art pieces are as much experiments in ethics as they are artistic experiments. They push the boundaries in important ways.
In the end, I think this is an important realization: we do not fully know the moral limits of morphological freedom. We should not expect all of them to be knowable through prior reasoning. This is a domain where much is unknown and hard for humans to reason about. Hence we need experiments and exploration to learn them. We should support this exploration since there is much of value to be found, and because it embodies much of what humanity is about. Even when we do not know it yet.
The ever readable Scott Alexander stimulated a post on Practical Ethics about defaults, status quo, and disagreements about sex. The quick of it: our culture sets defaults on who is reasonable or unreasonable when couples disagree, and these become particularly troubling when dealing with biomedical enhancements of love and sex. The defaults combine with status quo bias and our scepticism for biomedical interventions to cause biases that can block or push people towards certain interventions.
