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!
It seems to me (based only on looking through your report and having read one or two books in the field) that the way many of the better theories of consciousness (e.g. multiple drafts) were formed by philosophers was through the following process:
Introspect and notice a phenomena occurring in their conscious experience that they don’t believe to have any known explanation
Propose a cognitive mechanism to explain it
Call this their explanation of consciousness
Firstly, does this seem like an accurate characterisation of how some of the stronger consciousness theories have been produced?
Secondly, do I correctly understand your hypothetical ‘agenda for producing a theory of consciousness’ (from Appendix B) to be iterating the first two steps of this process, with the idea that in the limit it should account for all the explanda of consciousness (whilst significantly improving the process by (a) writing a program that fits the theory (b) using said program to make predictions, and, instead of largely introspecting yourselves (c) gathering the mass introspections of many people)?
I think the strategy you outline is, very roughly, one of the most common strategies for coming up with cognitive theories of consciousness, or at least for coming up with cognitive theories of particular features of consciousness.
However, upon reading a given paper or book of this sort, I'm often left unsure whether the author thinks they've "explained consciousness," or whether they think what they've done so far is more like "gesturing in the right direction." Indeed, Dennett called his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, but even as ... (read more)