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!
Are you aware of any "hidden" (nociception-related?) cognitive processes that could be described as "two systems in conflict?" I find the hidden qualia view very plausible, but I also find it plausible that I might settle on a view on moral relevance where what matters about pain is not the "raw feel" (or "intrinsic undesirability" in Drescher's words), but a kind of secondary layer of "judgment" in the sense of "wanting things to change/be different" or "not accepting some mental component/input." I'm wondering whether most of the processes that would constitute hidden qualia are too simple to fit this phenomenological description or not...
I probably have thoughts on this, but first: Can you say more about what would count as "two systems in conflict"? E.g. would a mere competition among neural signals count? Or would it have to be something more "sophisticated," in a certain way? Also, is the "secondary layer" you're talking about also meant to be "hidden", or are you talking about a "phenomenally conscious" second layer?