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!
You reported that you found investigation from the perspective of how consciousness evolved to be wanting. Do you think there might be relatively high potential upside in encouraging more and better theoretical work and discussion of this sort? Based on what you’ve seen in other fields, what might that depend on?
Do you suspect things in that space could be usefully incorporated into a model of progress towards a theory resembling your six step GDAK-inspired cognitive architecture approach?
In spite of concern over just-so stories (and I think anthropic bias may apply here?), might even partial progress on this kind of work be relatively likely to decrease uncertainty for distributions of different probabilities of question-of-suffering scenarios, for various animals?
I'm not sure I'd say the literature on the evolution of consciousness is especially "wanting" — it's just a really hard problem, and so as with theories of how consciousness works, I didn't find any theories of how consciousness evolved that were even moderately persuasive.
In our current state of uncertainty, little bits of "partial progress" can be made from many angles, and the evolution of consciousness is one of those angles. I don't think I'd highlight it as especially promising, though (in terms of reduction of uncertainty per uni... (read more)