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 was confused by the issue regarding diet qualia. Does the argument reduce to answering this question: “Is it the case that explaining away all the individuals properties of conscious experience could ever add up to a completed explanation-away of consciousness”? (In my understanding, the weak illusionists say that it wouldn’t, the strong illusionists say that it would, and the not-illusionists say that this process can’t even get started.)
I'm not sure whether the thing you're trying to say is compatible with what I'd say or not. The way I'd say it is this:
The 'weak illusionist' says that while many features of conscious experience can be 'explained away' as illusions, the 'something it's like'-ness of conscious experience is not (and perhaps cannot be) an illusion, and thus must be "explained" rather than "explained away." In contrast, the "strong illusionist" says that even the 'something it's like'-ness of conscious experience is an illusion.
But what might it... (read more)