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!
My hope was that the Type A-ness / subjectivity of the concept of "consciousness" I'm using would be clear from section 2.3.1 and 2.3.2, and then I can write paragraphs like the one above about fruit fly consciousness, which refers back to the subjective notion of consciousness introduced in section 2.3.
But really, I just find it very cumbersome to write in detail and at length about consciousness in a way that allows every sentence containing consciousness words to clearly be subjective / Type A-style consciousness. It's similar to what I say in the report about fuzziness:
But then, throughout the report, I make liberal use of "normal" phrases about consciousness such as what's conscious vs. not-conscious, "becoming" conscious or not conscious, what's "in" consciousness or not, etc. It's just really cumbersome to write in any other way.
Another point is that, well, I'm not just a subjectivist / Type A theorist about consciousness, but about nearly everything. So why shouldn't we feel fine using more "normal" sentence structures to talk about consciousness, if we feel fine talking about "living things" and "mountains" and "sorting algorithms" and so on that way? I don't have any trouble talking about the likelihood that there's a mountain in such-and-such city, even though I think "mountain" is a layer of interpretation we cast upon the world.
That pragmatic approach makes sense and helps me understand your view better. Thanks! I do feel like the consequences of suggesting objectivism for consciousness are more significant than for "living things," "mountains," and even terms that are themselves very important like "factory farming."
Consequences being things like (i) whether we get wrapped up in the ineffability/hard problem/etc. such that we get distracted from the key question (for subjectivists) of "What are the mental things we care about, and which beings ... (read more)