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!
One thing I found extremely nice about your report is that it could serve EAs (and people in general) as a basis for shared terminology in discussions! If two people from different backgrounds wanted to have a discussion about philosophy of mind or animal consciousness, which texts would you recommend they both read in order to prepare themselves? (Not so much in terms of familiarity with popular terminology, but rather useful terminology.) Can you think of anything really good that is shorter than this report?
Unfortunately, the literature on consciousness is in even greater terminological disarray than many other fields, for understandable reasons: (1) to an unusual degree, we still don't know what we're talking about w.r.t. consciousness, and as a result, (2) consciousness studies is an extremely interdisciplinary "field," with contributions from scholars of nearly non-overlapping professional backgrounds. So, I'm not sure what a useful source on "useful terminology" would look like. Possibly a broad and shallow survey like my report or Weisberg (2014) is the best we can do at this stage.