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'm not sure whether the thing you're trying to say is compatible with what I'd say or not. The way I'd say it is this:
The 'weak illusionist' says that while many features of conscious experience can be 'explained away' as illusions, the 'something it's like'-ness of conscious experience is not (and perhaps cannot be) an illusion, and thus must be "explained" rather than "explained away." In contrast, the "strong illusionist" says that even the 'something it's like'-ness of conscious experience is an illusion.
But what might it be for the 'something it's like'-ness to be an illusion? Basically, that it seems to us that there is more to conscious experience than 'zero qualia', but in fact there are only zero qualia. E.g. it seems to us that there are 'diet qualia' that are more than 'zero qualia', but in fact 'diet qualia' have no distinctive features beyond 'zero qualia.'
Now in fact, I think there probably is more to 'zero qualia' than Frankish's "properties of experiences that dispose us to judge that experiences have introspectable qualitative properties that are intrinsic, ineffable, and subjective," but I don't think those additional properties will be difficult for the strong illusionst to adopt, and I don't think they'll vindicate a position according to which there is a distinctive 'diet qualia' option. Speaking of diet qualia vs. zero qualia is very rough: the true form of the answer will be classes of cognitive algorithms (on my view).