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!
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 have those?" and (ii) in the particular case of small minds (e.g. insects, simple reinforcement learners), whether we try to figure out their mental lives based on objectivist speculation (which, for subjectivists, is misguided) or force ourselves to decide what the mental things we care about are, and then thoughtfully evaluate small minds on that basis. I think evaluating small minds is where the objective/subjective difference really starts to matter.
Also, to a less extent, (iii) how much we listen to "expert" opinion outside of just people who are very familiar with the mental lives of the being in question, and (iv) unknown unknowns and keeping a norm of intellectual honesty, which seems to apply more to discussions of consciousness than of mountains/etc.