John Leslie is Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph’s Philosophy Department. He’s also associated with the Lifeboat Foundation and has written about and studied metaphysics and cosmology.

He’s done a lot of writing on existential risks. This interview was a bit unusual for me, as normally I line up the interview and then develop the questions. In this case I had some questions in mind that I wanted to ask somebody and when I came across John’s writing on the internet I realized he’d be the person to ask. I contacted him he agreed and hey presto here you have it.
I love blogging!

Here’s our exchange:

MT: A lot of your work is highly interdisciplinary. Have the recent “culture wars” had an impact on people’s receptiveness to ideas that jump disciplines between metaphysics, religion and science?

JL: I’ve little idea about the extent of any “culture wars” impact. But it is getting ever more obvious to clever folk that disciplines are best tackled by people who aren’t totally ignorant about interdisciplinary links.

MT: You’ve done quite a bit of writing and analysis of existential risks. Despite the fact that acceptance of Global Warming is growing in polls do you think people in Canada and the United States understand the potential seriousness of the problem? And if not, why?

JL: Many people do, but the average person doesn’t. I think there are two main problems. the first is that many people are little interested in disasters that could await the human race perhaps seventy years from now. (”won’t happen to me! let ‘em fry!”) The second is that most politicians have very, very little interest in anything which won’t happen before the next election. They are therefore eager to give the impression that the experts are evenly divided between those who believe in global warming and those who don’t. In actual fact, almost every single expert recognizes that global warming is happening and that it is, at the very least, quite a severe threat. It could quite easily exterminate the human race, I think, once runaway feedback loops came into play.

MT: The idea that reality may be simulated or the result of some kind of computational process has been gaining ground in recent years. Have these theories informed any of your thinking lately?

JL I’ve never thought it at all likely that the world in which you and I seem to exist is a simulated reality. On the other hand, I’ve published an article arguing that there are no conclusive reasons against thinking this. Note that if we in fact exist in a simulated reality, then we’ve perhaps no very good reason for thinking that the genuine reality which is producing the simulation is ruled by laws of physics that we’d recognize, and has galaxies and planets and computers made of silicon chips. My recent book Infinite Minds (Oxford University Press 2001, paperback 2003) argues that our world is a pattern inside an infinite mind which contemplates all the patterns that are worth contemplating. This follows if you take seriously the platonic theory that the reason why there is anything in existence, not just a blank, is that this is good. It is ethically necessary, that is to say, and the ethical necessity could itself be creatively effective, explaining why there is an infinite mind. It would be quite wrong to see patterns inside such a mind as merely simulated realities.

MT: Outside of your field which advances excite you the most?

JL: Advances in computing. Unless something such as global warming shuts down all advances very shortly, computers will be far more intelligent than humans. However, I argued both in “Infinite Minds” and in “The End of The World” that computers would have no worthwhile consciousness unless they were quantum computers. Quantum computation occurs in the human brain. It is what allows all the elements of a human thought to be fused into a single existent whose parts are only abstractions comparable to the mass or the length of a table, or to the grin on a face. Quantum theory tells us that single entities can be extremely complex, and consciousness of our own mental states tells us the same thing.

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