If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealth…If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealth…
John Leslie
philosopher · 4 mentions across 2 readings
In this course
John Leslie is a Canadian philosopher known for his work on existential risk and the Doomsday Argument, which appears fragmented in these excerpts as part of a broader discussion of humanity's extinction probability relative to posthuman futures. The readings invoke Leslie's formulation of conditional scenarios—premises about whether we're early or late in human history—to interrogate whether advanced civilizations inevitably converge on similar outcomes regarding resource use and ancestor simulation. His anthropic reasoning framework becomes central to how the course grapples with AI futures: if Leslie's logic holds, the existence of wealthy posthumans running simulations constrains the likelihood of our own timeline reaching that stage, a paradox that troubles both deterministic and probabilistic models of technological development.
Mentioned in 2 readings
galaxy rather than its center, and since then billions of galaxies have been discovered beyond our own.[^53]
In the physical universe scenario, all is not lost with respect to the status of humanity. In a universe in which life on Earth is…50. The details of where the atoms of our bodies originate and how they are recycled are detailed in John Gribbin, Stardust: Supernovae and Life—The Cosmic Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). The sentiment is found several …
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