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!
Re: (1), I'll focus on the common fruit fly for concreteness. Before I began this investigation, I probably would've given fruit fly consciousness very low probability (perhaps <5%), and virtually all of that probability mass would've been coming from a perspective of "I really don't see how fruit flies could be conscious, but smart people who have studied the issue far more than I have seem to think it's plausible, so I guess I should also think it's at least a little plausible." Now, having studied consciousness a fair bit, I have more specific ideas about how it might turn out to be the case that fruit flies are conscious, even if I think they're relatively low probabilitiy, and of course I retain some degree of "and maybe my ideas about consciousness are wrong, and fruit flies are conscious via mechanisms that I don't currently find at all plausible." As reported in section 4.2, my current probability that fruit flies are conscious (as loosely defined in section 2.3.1 is 10%.
Re: (2). This question raises issues related to Pascal's Mugging. I don't pretend to have a solution, but some especially relevant discussions are Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence, Why we can’t take expected value estimates literally (even when they’re unbiased), Modeling Extreme Model Uncertainty, and Sequence thinking vs. cluster thinking. As mentioned here, the Open Philanthropy Project remains eager to get more clarity on how we should think about making decisions under different kinds of uncertainty, and we expect to write more about this issue in the future.
In the meantime, the possibility of electron consciousness does not currently inform my actions.
Re: (3). You're right that Chalmers is "an interesting choice" for me to get feedback from. For example, Chalmers is a property dualist and panpsychist, which in some ways is about as different a position on consciousness from mine as you could find. On the other hand, Chalmers is (in my opinion) an unusually sharp thinker about consciousness, and also he has a deserved reputation for his ability to give critical feedback to others from the perspective of their own view. And, as hoped, Chalmers' feedback on an earlier draft of my report was very helpful, and I invested dozens of hours improving the draft in response to his feedback alone.
There were a few other consciousness researchers (whom I won't name) that I had hoped to get feedback from, but they weren't interested to give it. That's not surprising, since my report is so different from the type of work that consciousness researchers typically engage with.
My report makes so many claims (or at least, "guesses") that I have no doubt that if other consciousness experts gave extensive feedback on it, they would find plenty with which they disagree. In some cases, I know from their writing some specific things they would disagree with. But in many cases, I'm not sure where they would disagree, both because I haven't read all their works on consciousness, and because most consciosuness experts have only written about a tiny portion of the issues covered (at least briefly) in my report.
Re: (4). This question is beyond the scope of the intended purpose of this AMA, but I'll make a couple brief comments. It would take a lot of work for me to write a similar document that usefully complements Carl's, but I may do so one day. An old post of mine on this general topic is Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently, but it's pretty narrow in scope.