Existential Risk: A Chicken and Egg Scenario
In my recent post to my other blog, Existential Risk and the Developmental Conception of Civilization, I distinguished between ontogenic forms of existential risk -- e.g., personal extinction, i.e., death -- and phylogenic forms of existential risk -- e.g., extinction of civilization.
Each of these forms of existential risk can be taken in isolation from each other. An individual will experience personal extinction even while the civilization of which the individual is a representative may continue in existence, or, vice versa, a civilization might go extinct while the individuals who are its representatives might survive it.
While this latter scenario is much less likely than the former scenario (which happens every day), it is nevertheless conceivable that short-lived individuals might outlive a usually long-lived civilization, if the said civilization collapses rapidly. For example, if we allow that there was such a thing as Soviet civilization -- something that was, after all, one of the pretenses of the Soviet regime -- then everyone who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union survived the end of the civilization. (This is a topic I visited early in the history of this blog in The Genocide of Homo Sovieticus, and then again recently in Other People's Ideals.)
While ontogenic and phylogenic existential risk can in theory be treated according to the method of isolation, in actual fact we are likely to find that the two stand in some kind of significant relationship to each other. Given the complexity of human life, individual identity cannot be cleanly separated from social identity, and vice versa.
This suggests that, for example, individuals experiencing permanent stagnation may contribute to the permanent stagnation of the civilization of which they are representatives, or that a civilization experiencing permanent stagnation may contribute to fostering lives of permanent stagnation in the lives of individuals who are its representatives.
Obviously, this is a chicken-and-egg scenario, in which we find ourselves asking, "Which came first, the chicken of civilizational stagnation of the egg of individual stagnation?" (Similar considerations hold, mutatis mutandis, for flawed realization.)
The equally obvious response to this chicken-and-egg scenario is that subtle and incremental changes both in the individual and in the civilization reinforce each other, and the ontogenic and phylogenic trends comes to reinforce each other in a vicious circle.
How does the vicious circle get started? Where does it begin? As I have formulated it previously:
"...if some alien species should examine the remains of our ill-fated species and their archaeologists reconstruct our history, they will no doubt focus on the problem of when we turned the corner from viability to non-viability."
Here the historian's temptation to always find clues deeper in the past may mislead us more than it enlightens us; there are always early signs of any major development, but in determining the moment in which the balance tipped in one direction of the other, we want to try to identify a moment of preponderance, and not the first hints of catastrophe (or triumph).
The moment of preponderance is simply a window of time when multiple developments appeared at a time when separate events were in a position to mutually reinforce one another and therefore to push history in a particular direction thereafter.
This same analytical structure -- a moment of preponderance that appears in a window of opportunity or a window of vulnerability -- can be brought to the relationship between ontogenic and phylogenic existential risk, so that what we must look for is the nearly simultaneous appearance on both ontogenic and phylogenic scales of events that may prove to be mutually reinforcing, therefore pushing both individuals and civilization alike in the direction of viability or non-viability.