# Contested concept: possibility

_**What you are reading**: one contested-concept page in Deliberus's deliberation graph. Deliberus maps human reasoning — including claims that are contested, mistaken, or extreme — so that disagreement can be examined precisely. A claim's presence here is not an endorsement: the graph records that someone argued it, how it connects to other reasoning, and how far scrutiny has gotten. The metadata on this page describes the state of that scrutiny, not the truth of the claim._

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- **Contestedness**: criterion
- **Diagnosis**: The diagram turns on a distinction the debate usually elides: a coherent possibility and a high probability are different claims, and the author says each side collapses them in opposite directions. His own sections are careful about which one they assert — I2 is a possibility, I4 is a probability — and the arrow between them is the one he marks as weakest.
- **Canonical**: `/concept/possibility` (data: `/concept/possibility.json`)

## Senses in use
- **a coherent causal route exists, without any claim about how likely it is** — used in 2 claim(s)
- **a route likely enough to act on, with probability assigned to each link** — used in 2 claim(s)

## Claims using this term
- [The real disagreement about AI catastrophe is not whether a mechanism exists, but how much probability to assign to each link and how corre…](/claim/claim_doom_crux.md) _(sense: a route likely enough to act on, with probability assigned to each link)_
- [Serious loss of human control over AI systems is a coherent possibility.](/claim/claim_doom_i2.md) _(sense: a coherent causal route exists, without any claim about how likely it is)_
- [There are multiple coherent causal routes from loss of control to catastrophe.](/claim/claim_doom_i3.md) _(sense: a coherent causal route exists, without any claim about how likely it is)_
- [A plausible pathway to catastrophe implies a nontrivial probability of irreversible catastrophe.](/claim/claim_doom_i4.md) _(sense: a route likely enough to act on, with probability assigned to each link)_