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!
The report aims to be a "direct inquiry into moral status," but because it does so from an anti-realist perspective, a certain notion of idealized preferences comes into play. In other words: if you don't think "objective values" are "written into the fabric of the universe," then (according to one meta-ethical perspective) all that exists are particular creatures that value things, and facts about what those creatures would value if they had more time to think about their values and knew more true facts and so on. I won't make the case for this meta-ethical approach here, but I link some relevant sources in the report, in particular in footnote 239.
This is one reason I say at the top of the report that:
And in fact, as I understand it, the people involved in making Open Phil grantmaking decisions about farm animal welfare do have substantial disagreements with my own moral intuitions, and are not making their grantmaking decisions solely on the basis of my own moral intuitions, or even solely on the basis of guesses about what my "idealized" moral intuitions would be.
Why? It's not more widely accepted than realism, and arguably it's decision-irrelevant regardless of its plausibility as per Ross's deflationary argument (http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~jacobmro/ppr/deflation-ross.pdf).
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