Hi EA Forum,
I'm Luke Muehlhauser and I'm here to answer your questions and respond to your feedback about the report on consciousness and moral patienthood I recently prepared for the Open Philanthropy Project. I'll be here today (June 28th) from 9am Pacific onward, until the flow of comments drops off or I run out of steam, whichever comes first. (But I expect to be avaliable through at least 3pm and maybe later, with a few breaks in the middle).
Feel free to challenge the claims, assumptions, and inferences I make in the report. Also feel free to ask questions that you worry might be "dumb questions," and questions you suspect might be answered somewhere in the report (but you're not sure where) — it's a long report! Please do limit your questions to the topics of the report, though: consciousness, moral patienthood, animal cognition, meta-ethics, moral weight, illusionism, hidden qualia, etc.
As noted in the announcement post, much of the most interesting content in the report is in the appendices and even some footnotes, e.g. on unconscious vision, on what a more satisfying theory of consciousness might look like, and a visual explanation of attention schema theory (footnote 288). I'll be happy to answer questions about those topics as well.
I look forward to chatting with you all!
EDIT: Please post different questions as separate comments, for discussion threading. Thanks!
EDIT: Alright, I think I replied to everything. My thanks to everyone who participated!
(1) To what degree did your beliefs about the consciousness of insects (if insects are too broad a category please just focus on the common fruit fly) change from completing this report and what were the main reasons for those beliefs changing? I would be particularly interested in an answer that covers the following three points: (i) the rough probability that you previously assigned to them being conscious, (ii) the rough probability that you now assign to them being conscious and (iii) the main reasons for the change in that probability.
(2) Do you assign a 0% probability to electrons being conscious?
(3) In section 5.1 you write
David Chalmers seems like an interesting choice for the one long-time “consciousness expert” to receive extensive feedback from. Why was he the only one that you got extensive feedback from? And of the other consciousness experts that you would like to receive extensive feedback from, do you think that most of them would disagree with some part of the report in a similar way, and if you think they would, what would that disagreement or those disagreements be?
(4) A while ago Carl Shulman put out this document detailing research advice. Can you please do the same, or if you already have a document like this can you please point me to it? I would probably find it useful and I would guess some others would too.
Re: (1), I'll focus on the common fruit fly for concreteness. Before I began this investigation, I probably would've given fruit fly consciousness very low probability (perhaps <5%), and virtually all of that probability mass would've been coming from a perspective of "I really don't see how fruit flies could be conscious, but smart people who have studied the issue far more than I have seem to think it's plausible, so I guess I should also think it's at least a little plausible." Now, having studied consciousness a fair bit, I have more speci... (read more)