This whole conversation makes me deeply uncomfortable. I expect to strongly disagree at pretty low levels with almost anyone else trying to have this conversation, I don’t know how to resolve those disagreements, and meanwhile I worry about people seriously advocating for positions that seem deeply confused to me and those positions spreading memetically.
For example: why do people think consciousness has anything to do with moral weight?
why do people think consciousness has anything to do with moral weight?
Is there anything that it seems to you likely does have to do with moral weight?
I feel pretty confused about these topics, but it’s hard for me to imagine that conscious experience wouldn’t at least be an input into judgments I would endorse about what’s valuable.
For anyone who is curious, I cite much of the literature arguing over criteria for moral patienthood/weight in the footnotes of this section of my original moral patienthood report. My brief comments on why I’ve focused on consciousness thus far are here.
why do people think consciousness has anything to do with moral weight?
One of my strongest moral intuitions is that suffering is bad, meaning that it’s good to help other minds not-suffer. Minds can only suffer if they are conscious.
Interesting, that is not a terribly strong intuition for me. I’m willing to suffer some amount for some causes, so at least it’s not fundamental and universal.
The intuition that feels more fundamental is that joy should be maximized, and suffering is (in many cases) a reduction in joy. Which gets to “useless suffering is bad”, but that’s a lot weaker than “suffering is bad”.
Anyhow, I suspect this difference in intuition is a deep enough disagreement that it makes it difficult to fully agree on moral values. Both are about consciousness, though, so we at least agree there. I wonder what the moral intuitions are that make one thing consciousness is not central.
Yeah, “suffering is bad” doesn’t mean that I would never accept trades which involved some amount of suffering. Especially since trying to avoid suffering tends to cause more of it in the long run, so even if you only cared about reducing suffering (which I don’t), you’d still want to take actions involving some amount of suffering.
Compare that even if you want to have a lot of money, never spending any money (on e.g. investments) isn’t a very good strategy, even though your stated goal implies that spending money is bad.
Hmm, the money analogy misses me too. I’d never say “spending money is bad”, even as shorthand for something, as it’s simply not a base-level truth. I think of money as a lifetime flow rather than an instantaneous stock, and failing in your goals when you have unspent money is clearly a mistake.
I suspect we do agree on a lot of intuitions, but also disagree on the modeling of which of those are fundamental vs situational.
This whole conversation makes me deeply uncomfortable. I expect to strongly disagree at pretty low levels with almost anyone else trying to have this conversation, I don’t know how to resolve those disagreements, and meanwhile I worry about people seriously advocating for positions that seem deeply confused to me and those positions spreading memetically.
For example: why do people think consciousness has anything to do with moral weight?
Is there anything that it seems to you likely does have to do with moral weight?
I feel pretty confused about these topics, but it’s hard for me to imagine that conscious experience wouldn’t at least be an input into judgments I would endorse about what’s valuable.
For anyone who is curious, I cite much of the literature arguing over criteria for moral patienthood/weight in the footnotes of this section of my original moral patienthood report. My brief comments on why I’ve focused on consciousness thus far are here.
(You have to press space after finishing some markdown syntax to have it be properly parsed. Fixed it for you, and sorry for the confusion.)
One of my strongest moral intuitions is that suffering is bad, meaning that it’s good to help other minds not-suffer. Minds can only suffer if they are conscious.
Interesting, that is not a terribly strong intuition for me. I’m willing to suffer some amount for some causes, so at least it’s not fundamental and universal.
The intuition that feels more fundamental is that joy should be maximized, and suffering is (in many cases) a reduction in joy. Which gets to “useless suffering is bad”, but that’s a lot weaker than “suffering is bad”.
Anyhow, I suspect this difference in intuition is a deep enough disagreement that it makes it difficult to fully agree on moral values. Both are about consciousness, though, so we at least agree there. I wonder what the moral intuitions are that make one thing consciousness is not central.
It’s not clear to me, from what’s written here, that you two even disagree at all. Kaj says, “suffering is bad.” You say, “useless suffering is bad.”
Are you sure Kaj wouldn’t also agree that suffering can sometimes be useful?
Yeah, “suffering is bad” doesn’t mean that I would never accept trades which involved some amount of suffering. Especially since trying to avoid suffering tends to cause more of it in the long run, so even if you only cared about reducing suffering (which I don’t), you’d still want to take actions involving some amount of suffering.
Compare that even if you want to have a lot of money, never spending any money (on e.g. investments) isn’t a very good strategy, even though your stated goal implies that spending money is bad.
Hmm, the money analogy misses me too. I’d never say “spending money is bad”, even as shorthand for something, as it’s simply not a base-level truth. I think of money as a lifetime flow rather than an instantaneous stock, and failing in your goals when you have unspent money is clearly a mistake.
I suspect we do agree on a lot of intuitions, but also disagree on the modeling of which of those are fundamental vs situational.