Could solipsism destroy the human species?

Does that sound like a bit of an overstatement, an exercise in alarmism or exaggeration? Be careful what you assume. Since a time five years ago, many things have happened which seemed impossible, to those who assume nothing can change. 

But what can REALLY cause the human species to become extinction? That is an important question, to us, and I am glad that there are groups like the Lifeboat Foundation and assorted futurists who really try to remember that question and address it in a serious way. High on the list of things which really threaten the very survival of the species, in a direct and concrete way are still nuclear war (and its aftermath, and perhaps biological warfare as well), but the possibilities for climate change at the fatal level are far greater than most people know as yet, and the Tderminator AI threat is also real. (See www.werbos.com/IT_big_picture.pdf and the loinks at the end to back it up.) 

But at the end of the day, whether these horrid, ever more likely disasters will actually happen depends on how humans respond to the challenges and the threats. That in turn depends on what kinds of assumptions they hard wire both in the symbolic reasoning part of their brains, and in IT systems. We all know already that there are many varieties of solipsism out there -- the belief that there is not objective reality, or that we can safely make it go away by ignoring it. But this morning, a particular form of it comes to mind.

Many people believe that high level decisions all over the world have been made less constructive and intelligent because of a deterioration in the quality of information sources, such as "fake news". The naive, solipsistic approach to that is to build government agencies which stamp out views which are not the truth AS SEEN by political authorities. An objective viewpoint would admit that all of us are fallible, and try to come up with better systems, and make that real. As IT takes over the world .. NOT JUST Terminator robots, but the Internet of Things which has been moving very very quickly... naive solipsistic policies and designs really could kill us, simply because of the lack of real intelligence in the system in the face of complex challenges. 

Easier to say than to fix. Systems design when humans play a central role is not trivial. We now know how to build consciousness, but human survival is a more difficult challenge. 

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That is what I posted this morning to the Vedanta list, after a discussion in the morning with IT people. The design issue really is tricky, with risks of unintended consequences. 

So many complicated aspects beyond what I can type in a few seconds.

"Trust but calibrate."

What it takes to look ahead 20 moves in real logic ... partly knowing logic, partly not flinching the way almost everyone else on earth tends to do. 

Disney's great cartoons about the ostrich burying its head in the sand... and Disney himself, more of a spiritual leader and teacher than 99% of the world knows. 

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But today... after a week of learning more about taxes (ugh! but actually a good thing in the end, and also an exercise in the positive value of not flinching... and not labelling things as negative which weren't... except in certain administrative details...)... it will be great today to calm down, wander a little with Luda, and review some new physics stuff. 

Luda did suggest I do a simple search on Senagtor JOhnson, when I was upset how little followon I saw to the five minutes he got on CNN a few weeks back. The 25 page paper form Wednesday on his web page was not treally encouraging... yet it is consistent with the hypothesis that his informer gave him excellent raw data, even if he didn't know enough to analyze it properly. It was also shocking to me how much this news search rmeinded me of looking up existentialism in the university library in Leningrad in 1968... tons of commentary and evaluation of X, and almost impossible to find out what X actually WAS...