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!
As I mention at one point in the report, “We have begun to collaborate with a programmer on such a project.” That project is only a quick experiment, but once the experiment has hit certain milestones, I’ll have a better guess about which deliverables might be achievable with how much resources. We hope to write about this experiment in the future, at least briefly.
As for catalyzing a paradigm shift in consciousness studies. I’m not sure about that, but I think we could make a lot of progress if we could find 5 great researchers to fund in the paradigm from Appendix B. However, that would require a substantial investment of staff time, and might turn out not to be tractable, and might also compete for scarce talent with other projects that are even more urgent and important (in Open Phil’s estimation, anyway). We're still thinking about whether we want to take a shot at this, though.