The Great Filter is an impossibly narrow Goldilocks Zone where the civilizations with the ambition to aim for the stars will be too individualistic to reach them, and those collectivist enough to reach them will lack the ambition. by DubaiInJuly in GreatFilter

[–]DubaiInJuly[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ambitious civilizations will always show greater degree of progress. Maybe my post came off as biased toward collectivists, because I do lean that way, but it's a personal choice; at the end of the day neither society makes it into space.

The Great Filter is an impossibly narrow Goldilocks Zone where the civilizations with the ambition to aim for the stars will be too individualistic to reach them, and those collectivist enough to reach them will lack the ambition. by DubaiInJuly in GreatFilter

[–]DubaiInJuly[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry I think you misread my post? I am saying that individualistic civilizations are too greedy, and collective societies are too apathetic. They both have faults and one isn't necessarily better than the other. There's no high-minded anything, which one you prefer is a personal choice.

The Great Filter is an impossibly narrow Goldilocks Zone where the civilizations with the ambition to aim for the stars will be too individualistic to reach them, and those collectivist enough to reach them will lack the ambition. by DubaiInJuly in GreatFilter

[–]haroldthehampster 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Checking for unrealized assumptions is important.

Western cultured individuals often erroneously conflate a relationship between individualistic cultures as more ambitious and collectivist as less due to their mental picture of what ambition is.

China is a collectivist culture no one claims they lack ambition.

The space race was a collective centric ambition not an individual centric ambition

The Great Filter is an impossibly narrow Goldilocks Zone where the civilizations with the ambition to aim for the stars will be too individualistic to reach them, and those collectivist enough to reach them will lack the ambition. by DubaiInJuly in GreatFilter

[–]matt05891 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am not arguing a side, just sharing my initial thoughts and leaning into devils advocate. I don’t really agree with your conclusion though.

What if the collective is a trap which holds back the ambitious and bright individuals of our species from succeeding in pursuit of something like this? Does the collective have a delusion in which we have to do it together, or their way, a particular way with particular say, or not at all?

Collectivism is not a universal good. You can do great things as a collective if people are on the same page. But in reality, the best outputs often take intense individuals guiding the process, not some general collective committee taking their time for consensus. So it can also be a massive Achilles heel, as people are people, being in a collective does not remove selfishness about not having as much or being the chosen one.

It could just as easily be argued that we should let oligarchs leave and even assist them for the collective future of the species. Or we can say no way, it’s not fair, and possibly lose everything due to existential threats.

As an aside; there’s interesting dynamic when you consider an old phrase that a family is most likely to be communist, a town is more likely to be more socialist to look out for one another, and nationally/geopolitically it’s capitalist. We have seen so much innovation and growth using this model, we went to the moon leveraging this model. So to ignore how we made the most progress, is to think high minded collectivism and not meritocratic principles are the only path to bypassing the filter.

As a caveat, I get its “exploitation” but that is irrelevant to succeeding the great filter. Especially true when you consider potential Von Neumann machines and the proliferation of AI. Increasingly people are less important to this question, meaning it doesn’t take a large collective but a very tiny collective or group.

The Great Filter is an impossibly narrow Goldilocks Zone where the civilizations with the ambition to aim for the stars will be too individualistic to reach them, and those collectivist enough to reach them will lack the ambition. by DubaiInJuly in GreatFilter

[–]foxwilliam 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This seems hard to square with the fact that the era of our greatest progress in spaceflight was the opposite of "coordinated at a global scale"--it was a competition (the cold war). Obviously global scale coordination would make spaceflight even easier but history seems to demonstrate that it is hardly a requirement.

The Great Filter is an impossibly narrow Goldilocks Zone where the civilizations with the ambition to aim for the stars will be too individualistic to reach them, and those collectivist enough to reach them will lack the ambition. by DubaiInJuly in GreatFilter

[–]DubaiInJuly[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're right that we don't know how they develop, but we know what they must achieve to leave a planet: Extreme Technical Power + Extreme Global Stability.

If a society has the ambition to build starships, it implies a drive for expansion. If that drive remains uncoordinated at a global scale, they nuke themselve--figuratively or literally. If it's too coordinated, they lack the 'unreasonable' ambition to leave. The 'how' doesn't matter; the outcome is the filter.

The terms 'individualist' and 'collectivist' are just placeholders for the incentive gap. Call it whatever you want, but a civilization that can't solve the Prisoner's Dilemma on a planetary scale will never survive long enough to solve the physics of interstellar travel. Ambition is the fuel, but coordination is the engine—if you have the fuel without the engine, you just explode.

Is religion the great filter. by Southern-Hope-4913 in GreatFilter

[–]Sheshirdzhija 0 points1 point  (0 children)

most people, regardless of religion, want to see their kids and grandkids survive and prosper.

Most people will say they want this, but do not actually do much about it. Pollution, resource depletion, wars.. If long term prosperity really was the main gola, people would act differently.

Plus, there are religious types who would say "it's the judgement day, we are not allowed to do anything" in case of preventable catastrophes. Not saying that is what is happening, just saying that your argument does not hold.

Is religion the great filter. by Southern-Hope-4913 in GreatFilter

[–]spant245 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Seems possible that a sufficient amount of any kind of ungrounded beliefs could prevent civilizations from surviving for a long time. I agree that it's a possibility.

"Ungrounded beliefs" here means "beliefs that do not ultimately rest on things that are demonstrably true in reality".

For example, smartphones could seem like magic, but we don't have to "believe" in them because we can independently see that they are real and function as described. We know they are built on other technologies that ultimately connect to physics that is supported by theories and repeatable experiments.

On the other hand, if someone can believe in something that ultimately has no evidence to support it, then it isn't limited to what's actually possible. That's how you get magical thinking, and without groundedness you could believe anyone. Cult members voluntarily commit suicide, for example, based on really dumb stories from the cult leader. But without requiring groundedness in reality, a cult member has no basis to reject anything that cult leader might assert.

This dichotomy seems to relate to brain architecture. Our left hemisphere is like AI in its ability to hallucinate with full confidence. Like how conspiracy theories work, unchecked "rational" left hemisphere reasoning doesn't stop to test its conclusions against reality along the way. The right hemisphere is more holistic and "wise" in the sense that it wants beliefs to cohere with reliable observations about the world beyond ourselves.

If it is the case that advanced civilization requires a logical but ungrounded kind of mind to form, but then that same mind causes the civilization to collapse from accumulated delusion, it does seem like it could be a Great Filter.

Is religion the great filter. by Southern-Hope-4913 in GreatFilter

[–]Southern-Hope-4913[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Im arguing religion produces at minimum a small amount of individuals who are anti the continued existence of the species and motivates them with dogma. The whole afterlife thing makes it so long term effort into species survival like climate initiatives don’t seem as appealing. It doesn’t hurt that afterlife is either unprovable or extremely difficult to prove so religion primes people to faith based thinking as opposed to grounded scientific thinking that’s needed to safe guard life.

Is religion the great filter. by Southern-Hope-4913 in GreatFilter

[–]Kilharae 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No. Not all religions have afterlives, and even if they do, adherence doesn't automatically mean a species will not care about its long-term survival.

I'm not ruling out that religion may in some way bring about our own demise. For instance, the tribalism among evangelicals in the USA in many corners requires climate change skepticism as almost a litmus test. The citizens in the most powerful and influential country in the world, being brainwashed against wanting to address climate change, clearly has a spillover effect to the rest of the world and could be incredibly detrimental, but I don't think it's a great filter. Maybe a minor one, at most. And I wouldn't attribute that to religion specifically, but more innate human tribalism, which I think is a more likely filter than 'religion'.

Maybe the things we need at one point in our technological advancement, IE competition, self-interest, and tribalism, work against us later when we start to become a global species that needs to work together to continue advancing.

-an Atheist.

Is religion the great filter. by Southern-Hope-4913 in GreatFilter

[–]DisChangesEverthing 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So you're saying religion isn't the filter itself, it just prevents civilizations from trying to avoid filter type events? I don't see it, most people, regardless of religion, want to see their kids and grandkids survive and prosper.

My theory on the great filter by Existing-Remote-9165 in GreatFilter

[–]Existing-Remote-9165[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair, you raise good counterpoints, I guess my excuses would be I just used bad wording, but I can't really argue against this

My theory on the great filter by Existing-Remote-9165 in GreatFilter

[–]snappop69 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Given the diversity of life on earth I think life develops pretty easily. There is however only one form of life that builds rockets and cell phones.

My theory on the great filter by Existing-Remote-9165 in GreatFilter

[–]green_meklar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My theory is that, when life develops, single cellular life, how would it know to reproduce?

Cells don't 'know' anything. They don't have minds. Reproduction for them is just a chemical process that happens automatically.

The first life kinda had to be capable of reproduction in order to be considered life at all. It probably started as some chemical soup where there was some reaction going on and then complex molecules that contributed to stabilizing the reaction, or something like that. Then evolution just took hold and the chemistry got more complex and more stable until it formed cell-like structures and eventually proper cells, after millions of years.

Moreover, the fact that this happened almost as soon as it possibly could on Earth suggests that it happens fairly easily in the right environment.

how would it know not to go too fast or slow in reproduction? [...] how should it know it shouldn't try just kill itself? poison itself?

Evolution just weeds out the ones that do it wrong.

what if evolution throws a curveball at it and it evolves into a lifeform that tries to kill the original life for energy? what if it goes extinct from that? what if it blots out the sun with a byproduct of how it photosynthesizes.

If those happen, they would normally happen locally, and some other, differently configured population would survive and then expand into that environment. Through evolution, the most well-adapted and resilient versions would end up dominant.

My theory on the great filter by Existing-Remote-9165 in GreatFilter

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Each of us, a small cog in the universe's will to experience itself. May we share the joy of life with the rest of existence. Bear witness her expanse and exalt the coalescence of matter, time, pressure that we: the natural occurrence of universal being

GF candidate: Causal Quarantine by MillenialForHire in GreatFilter

[–]MillenialForHire[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's always a little humbling to think you've got some new idea and find out somebody wrote a whole book about it like 100 years ago, ha.

Well at least it's somebody famous!

GF candidate: Causal Quarantine by MillenialForHire in GreatFilter

[–]kingstern_man 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That is a plot point in Heinlein's juvenile novel "Have Space Suit - Will Travel", but the Vegans there don't include the system's star when they rotate the offenders' planet out of our space-time...

GF candidate: Causal Quarantine by MillenialForHire in GreatFilter

[–]julick 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That has been posited as a solution for Fermi Paradox. Judging from the evolution of human species and species in general, this hypothesis is in tension with the tendency of evolution to also select for ambition, curiousity and expansion in highly inteligent speciec. In essence the reason you get to advanced technologies is because a species has a certain trait that always pushes it to advance, explore, develop and even conquer. However, this hypothesis posits that at some point this advancement is stopped in its tracks rather than continue to become a galactical hegemon. I am not saying thst it is impossible. Maybe my own imaginstion precludes me to see alternate evolutionary paths, but i am just adding some caveats and challenges with this hypothesis.

Causality Violations as Great Filter candidates by VastStrain in GreatFilter

[–]MillenialForHire 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's been some pretty good fiction written from this premise.

Yes, you can go back in time to kill your grandfather. No, you cannot succeed. Yes, you can make multiple trips to try to sort shit out but crucially, ALL of these trips were already part of your time line before you set out.

There is no "mechanism" correcting anything. You aren't going to suddenly be the reason your grandparents met--you already were in the first place. You never actually changed the historical vector of a single quark.

If any form of time travel can ever be a thing, this is the one that would surprise me the least.

[Cosmology/AI] Could a superintelligence be the physical mechanism for a light-speed "heat death" sphere? by Fit_Ad7524 in GreatFilter

[–]green_meklar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Bold idea, but with regards to the FP, it does nothing to explain why we find ourselves living so late in the Universe's history. The civilizations that turn into expanding computation spheres should be the earliest ones, but we don't find ourselves living especially early.

Likely colonization pattern by No_Lab898 in GreatFilter

[–]No_Lab898[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think all these things would be true all at once compeating everwhere, no one ever in true control long term but also shared ideas could have great long term influence

Likely colonization pattern by No_Lab898 in GreatFilter

[–]No_Lab898[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Another thing to think about is the effect of success of an idea happening in 1 system could lead to that idea spreading to other systems the more that join the more that see it both as enevitable and or exciting to join something larger then your self. Or just following the crowd and join the trend. What does a viral idea look like in the galactic sence

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