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!
Yeah, but what you're doing is antithetical to that. You're basically assuming that you have solved a major debate in philosophy and not paying attention to uncertainty. At the very least, we should know more clearly if Open Phil is going to be an Ideal Advisor Theory grantmaking organization from now on. Meta-ethics is what you use to figure out how to decide what your mission should be in the first place. Introducing it as this stage and in this manner is kind of weird.
To be quite honest it is hard to believe that a significant portion of the assorted staff at Open Phil independently reviewed philosophical arguments and independently arrived at the same relatively niche meta-ethical view. It sounds a lot more like an information cascade.
But that just makes the whole methodology even more confusing since you are talking about meta-ethics and empirical issues at the same time, while not talking about the normative issues in the middle, and then coming to normative conclusions. If you really use ideal advisor theory as a meta-ethical approach then you should use it to determine a model of normative ethics, and then match that with science on consciousness. Two people with the same meta-ethical views could have very different normative views but you're not explicating this possibility. At the same time, you might have the same normative views as someone else but there is no way to tell since you're only talking about meta-ethics.
Ethical views might, but it's not clear how meta-ethical views would.