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!
Thanks for doing this AMA. I'm curious for more information on your views about the objectivity of consciousness, e.g. Is there an objectively correct answer to the question "Is an insect conscious?" or does it just depend on what processes, materials, etc. we subjectively choose to use as the criteria for consciousness?
The Open Phil conversation notes with Brian Tomasik say:
(For readers, roughly speaking, Type A physicalism is the view that consciousness lacks an objective definition. Tomasik's well-known analogy is that there's no objective definition of a table, e.g. if you eat on a rock, is it a table? I would add that even if there's something we can objectively point to as our own consciousness (e.g. the common feature of the smell of a mushroom, the emotion of joy, seeing the color red), that doesn't give you an objective definition in the same way knowing one piece of wood on four legs is a table, or even having several examples, doesn't give you an objective definition of a table.)
However, in the report, you write as though there is an objective definition (e.g. in the "Consciousness, innocently defined" section), and I feel most readers of the report will get that impression, e.g. that there's an objective answer as to whether insects are conscious.
Could you elaborate on your view here and the reasoning behind it? Perhaps you do lean towards Type A (no objective definition), but think it's still useful to use common sense rhetoric that treats it as objective, and you don't think it's that harmful if people incorrectly lean towards Type B. Or you lean towards Type A, but think there's still enough likelihood of Type B that you focus on questions like "If Type B is true, then is an insect conscious?" and would just shorthand this as "Is an insect conscious?" because e.g. if Type A is true, then consciousness research is not that useful in your view.
You're right that there's probably not a strict logical relationship between those things. Also, I should note that I have a poor understanding of the variety of different type-B views. What I usually have in mind as "type B" is the view that the connection between consciousness and brain processing is only something we can figure out a posteriori, by noticing the correlation between the two. If you hold that view, it presumably means you think consciousness is a definite thing that we discover introspectively. For example, we can say we're conscious of an... (read more)