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!
I do suspect it’s possible for long-term meditation practitioners to have observations about the “internal” explananda of consciousness that non-practitioners (such as myself) can’t have. Susan Blackmore may be one such person. Of course, before taking any particular report seriously I’d want to check whether the reporting practitioner seems to be a reliable and clear reporter of their internal experience, whether their reports can be replicated by others in a certain way, etc.
As for determining the “true nature” of conscious experience: that’s more a matter of normal science, and especially of proposing cognitive algorithms that would instantiate the observed explananda of consciousness, and the meditation practitioners who are helpful for increasing our understanding of the explananda of consciousness might or might not happen to also be useful for doing the scientific work of coming up with strong explanations of those explananda.