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!
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).
But there are plenty of accounts of anti-realist ethics, and they don't all make everything reducible to preferences or provide this account of what we ought to value. I still don't see what makes this view more noteworthy than the others and why Open Phil is not as interested in either a general overview of what many views would say or a purely empirical inquiry from which diverse normative conclusions can be easily drawn.
I don't see what reason they have to take them into account at all, unless they accept ideal advisor theory and are using your preferences as a heuristic for what their preferences would be if they did the same thing that you are doing. Is ideal advisor theory their view now? And is it also the case for other moral topics besides animal ethics?
Also: can we expect a reduced, empirical-only version of the report to be released at some point?
These are reasonable questions, and I won't be able to satisfactorily address them in a short comment reply. Nevertheless, I'll try to give you a bit more of a sense of "where I'm coming from" on the topic of meta-ethics.
As I say in the report,
... (read more)