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 mentioned many avenues future research could take, but do you have any early sense of prioritization for those research questions?
As mentioned in another comment, I'm perhaps most 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").
But if I spent ~10 hours on each of the suggested research ideas from section 5, I'd probably have a better sense of each suggestion's cost and likely benefits, and my intuitions about prioritization would probably change.