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!
Section 2.2.2 and its many footnotes survey the suggested options briefly but fairly thoroughly, I think. My sense is that even theories of moral patienthood (or "moral status", or "full moral status", or other related but not always identical concepts) which don't emphasize phenomenal consciousness as a necessary condition do, upon closer inspection, include phenomenal consciousness as a necessary condition. For example, in one case a theory (I can't remember which one, now) emphasized "self-awareness" but didn't mention consciousness, but upon reading further, it turned out that their notion of "self-awareness" required phenomenal consciousness, and that they would not think that a system that was "self-aware" without being phenomenally conscious was a moral patient.
That said, it is common for theorists to add additional requirements beyond phenomenal consciousness, especially "valenced experience" / "sentience", but also many other properties such as self-awareness, desires, and the other things listed in the bullet list of section 2.2.2. For elaborations, see the sources cited in the footnotes in that bullet list.
Of course, one might also have a meta-ethical approach that doesn't make use of ideas of "moral patienthood" at all. For example, see the sources cited in the footnote after the phrase "As with many framing choices in this report, this is far from the only way to approach the question…"