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!
For others' benefit, what I said in the report was:
By "weakly plausible" I meant that I think I can argue for a ~10% chance of Gazami crab consciousness, and separately for a ~10% chance of chimpanzee non-consciousness.
Such arguments would draw from considerations that are mentioned at least briefly somewhere in the report, but it would bundle them together in a certain way and elaborate certain points.
My argument for ~10% chance of chimpanzee non-consciousness would look something like an updated version of Macphail (1998), plus many of the considerations from Dennett (2017). Or, to elaborate that a bit: given the current state of evidence on animal cognition and behavior, and given what is achievable using relatively simple deep learning architectures (including deep reinforcement learning), it seems plausible (though far from guaranteed) that the vast majority of animal behaviors, including fairly sophisticated ones, are the product of fairly simple (unconscious) learning algorithms operating in environments with particular reward and punishment gradients, plus various biases in the learning algorithms "organized in advance of experience" via evolution. Furthermore, it seems plausible (though not likely, I would say) that phenomenal consciousness depends on a relatively sophisticated suite of reasoning and self-modeling capacities that humans possess and chimpanzees do not (and which may also explain why chimpanzees can't seem to learn human-like syntactically advanced language). I am pretty confident this conjunction of hypotheses isn't true, but I think something like this is "weakly plausible." There are other stories by which it could turn out that chimpanzees aren't conscious, but the story outlined above is (very loosely speaking) the "story" I find most plausible (among stories by which chimpanzees might not be conscious).
My case for a ~10% chance of Gazami crab consciousness would involve pulling together a variety of weak considerations in favor of the "weak plausibility" of Gazami crab consciousness. For example: (1) given the considerations from Appendix H, perhaps phenomenal consciousness can be realized by fairly simple cognitive algorithms, (2) even assuming fairly "sophisticated" cognition is required for consciousness (e.g. a certain kind of self-model), perhaps 100,000 neurons are sufficient for that, and (3) perhaps I'm confused about something fairly fundamental, and I should be deferring some probability mass to the apparently large number of consciousness scholars who are physicalist functionalists and yet think it's quite plausible that arthropods are conscious.