My sense is that if youâre weighing nematodes, you should also consider things like conscious subsystems or experience sizes that could tell you larger-brained animals have thousands or millions of times more valenced experiences or more valence at a time per individual organism.
These numbers are already compatible with individual welfare per animal-year proportional to ânumber of neuronsâ^0.5, which has been my speculative best guess. This suggests 1 fully happy human-year has 18.9 k (= 1/â(5.28*10^-5)) times as much welfare as 1 fully happy soil-nematode-year.
Taking expected values over those hypotheses and different possible scaling law hypotheses tends, on credences I find plausible, to lead to expected moral weights scaling roughly proportionally with the number of neurons (see the illustration in the conscious subsystems post).
I have also been updating towards a view closer to this. I wonder whether it implies prioritising microorganisms (relatedly). There are 3*10^29 soil archaea and bacteria, 613 M (= 3*10^29/â(4.89*10^20)) times as many as soil nematodes.
As a side note, what I do not find reasonable is individual welfare per animal-year being proportional to 2^ânumber of neuronsâ.
But nematodes (and other wild invertebrates) could still matter a lot even on proportional weighing, e.g. as you found here.
Agreed. In addition to the estimates in that section for the effects on soil animals as a fraction of those on the target beneficiaries, I havesome for the total welfare of animal populations. For individual welfare per animal-year proportional to the number of neurons, I estimate the absolute value of the total welfare of soil nematodes is 47.6 times that of humans.
Thanks, Michael.
These numbers are already compatible with individual welfare per animal-year proportional to ânumber of neuronsâ^0.5, which has been my speculative best guess. This suggests 1 fully happy human-year has 18.9 k (= 1/â(5.28*10^-5)) times as much welfare as 1 fully happy soil-nematode-year.
I have also been updating towards a view closer to this. I wonder whether it implies prioritising microorganisms (relatedly). There are 3*10^29 soil archaea and bacteria, 613 M (= 3*10^29/â(4.89*10^20)) times as many as soil nematodes.
As a side note, what I do not find reasonable is individual welfare per animal-year being proportional to 2^ânumber of neuronsâ.
Agreed. In addition to the estimates in that section for the effects on soil animals as a fraction of those on the target beneficiaries, I have some for the total welfare of animal populations. For individual welfare per animal-year proportional to the number of neurons, I estimate the absolute value of the total welfare of soil nematodes is 47.6 times that of humans.