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!
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 unit effort). On the present margin, I'm probably more excited about the potential informativeness of (1) computational modeling of the sort I describe in section 6.2.4, (2) certain kinds of studies of human consciousness (Ctrl+F in the report for "perhaps the most promising path forward"), and (3) improvements to tools and techniques of human neuroscience that could help with (2) (Ctrl+F in the report for "we need fundamental breakthroughs").
The "GDAK-inspired cognitive architecture approach" tackles the problem from a different angle. It asks: "What are all the consciousness explananda we can identify and describe in some detail, and which cognitive algorithms might we combine with each other to build a computer program that would exhibit as many of those explananda as possible (including "internally," not just in its "external" behavior), with as much precision as possible?" My current hunch is that further theorizing about the evolution of consciousness wouldn't contribute to that project in an especially direct way, though it might help guide the search process for consciousness explananda, or contribute in some other somewhat indirect way.