Should we priortize cognitive science in EA?
My naive thoughts: Most people in EA agree :”increasing happiness, reducing suffering is the meaning of life”. To accomplish this goal, I think cognitive science is essential for all livings on earth(maybe AI too), but there are some very crucial and basic questions but we aren’t sure about the answer. Like: What’s the ratio of suffering and happiness? How seriously does hedonic treadmill limit happiness? Can things like mindfulness make all people happy? Are there interventions to make others altruistic? Is Hedonistic Imperative possible? (These questions are super hard, its solvability may be low)
A lot of cognitive science technology is developing(like brain neurons mapping). But we still don’t understand the essence of “sentience”. If we answer these questions, lots of moral uncertanties will be solved, we can be more cofidienct in doing right things. Hedonistic transhumanism may turn us to living “perfectly”. But why do these researches seem not to be priortized in EA?
Finally, if you’re choosing a colllege major, what’s the most suitable field to go in for researching these cognitive scienece stuffs (biology&neuropsychology, computer science, philosophy or none of the above.?)
I’m personally skeptical that we’ll ever “solve” what the neural basis of sentience is. That said, I think there are still some promising ways a better understanding of psychology can advance standard EA causes. Here’s a paper that goes into more depth on this issue:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35981321/