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'll use the terms "nociception" and "pain" as defined in Appendix D:
Often, it's assumed that if animals are conscious, then it's likely that they experience pain in conjunction with the types of nociceptive processing that, in humans, would be accompanied by conscious pain — or at least, this seems likely for the animals that are fairly similar to us in their neural architecture (e.g. mammals, or perhaps all vertebrates). And likewise, it seems that if we limit the nociception that occurs in their bodies, then this will also limit the conscious pain they experience if they are conscious at all.
Unfortunately, humans also experience pain without nociception, e.g. (as my report says) "neuropathic pain, and perhaps also… some cases of psychologically-created experiences of pain, e.g. when a subject is hallucinating or dreaming a painful experience." Assuming whichever animals are conscious are also capable of non-nociceptive pain, this means that conscious animals may be capable of suffering in ways that are difficult for us to detect.
Even still, I think we can study the mechanisms of nociception (and other triggers for conscious pain) independently of studying consciousness, and this could lead to interventions that (probably) address the usual causes of conscious pain even if we don't know whether a given animal is conscious or not.
However, I'm not sure this is quite what you meant to be asking; let me know if there was a somewhat different question you were hoping I'd answer.