You don’t really need to read the report to come to this conclusion. Morality / consciousness / valence / qualia are words which don’t have widely agreed definitions because they are trying to point at ideas that arise from confused / magical thinking while still maintaining the respectability of analytical philosophy. So any attempt to precisely measure them will inevitably end up looking a bit silly.
I am a bit cautious of dismissing all of those ideas out-of-hand; while I am tempted to agree with you, I don’t know of a strong case that these words definitely don’t (or even probably don’t point) to anything in the real world. Therefore, while I can’t see a consistent, useful definition of them, it’s still possible that one exists (c.f. Free Will which people often get confused about, but for which there exists a pretty neat solution) so it’s not impossible that any given report contains a perfectly satisfying model which explains my own moral intuitions, extends them to arbitrary minds, and then estimates the positions of various animals in mind-space. Unfortunately this report doesn’t do that, and therefore I update my priors downwards about any similar reports containing such a solution.
You don’t really need to read the report to come to this conclusion. Morality / consciousness / valence / qualia are words which don’t have widely agreed definitions because they are trying to point at ideas that arise from confused / magical thinking while still maintaining the respectability of analytical philosophy. So any attempt to precisely measure them will inevitably end up looking a bit silly.
I am a bit cautious of dismissing all of those ideas out-of-hand; while I am tempted to agree with you, I don’t know of a strong case that these words definitely don’t (or even probably don’t point) to anything in the real world. Therefore, while I can’t see a consistent, useful definition of them, it’s still possible that one exists (c.f. Free Will which people often get confused about, but for which there exists a pretty neat solution) so it’s not impossible that any given report contains a perfectly satisfying model which explains my own moral intuitions, extends them to arbitrary minds, and then estimates the positions of various animals in mind-space. Unfortunately this report doesn’t do that, and therefore I update my priors downwards about any similar reports containing such a solution.