Hmm. I do believe I discount vertebrates much less than I discount insects, however I also think there’s a huge difference between say chickens and chimpanzees or chimpanzees and humans. Even among humans (who have quite similar brains to one another compared to inter-comparisons), I think that the top 10% of Americans probably live lives that I value inherently (by which I mean ignoring the effects that they have on other things and only counting the quality of their conscious life experience) at least one order of magnitude (if not several) more than the bottom 10% of Americans. I believe this is an unpopular view also, but one consideration I might be able to give in support of it is if you reflect on how much you value your own conscious experience during some parts of your life compared to others you may find as I do that some moments or short periods seem to be of much greater value than others of equal duration.
An exercise I tried recently was making a plot of “value realized / time” vs “time” for my own conscious life experience (so again: not including the effects of my actions, which is the vast majority of what I value) and found that there were some years I valued multiple times more than other years and some moments I valued many times more than all years on net. The graph was also all positive value and trending upwards. Sleeping much less than awake. (I don’t think I have very vivid dreams relative to others, but even if I did, I would probably still tend to value waking moments much more than sleeping ones.) Also, remembering or reflecting on great moments fondly can be of high value too in my evaluation. There’s also the problem of not knowing now what certain experiences were like in the past to actually experience them since I’m relying on my memory of what they were like, which for all I know could be faulty. I think in general I choose to value experiences based on how I remember them being rather than how I think they were when I lived them (if there is a discrepancy between the two).
Also note that I’m a moral anti-realist and so I don’t think there are correct answers, so to a certain extent how much I value some periods of my conscious life experience relative to others is a choice, since I don’t believe that there are completely defined definite values that are mine that I can discover either.
A general thing I’d be really interested in seeing is peoples’ estimates of how much they value (whether positively or negatively) the total life experiences of say, mosquitoes, X, Y, Z, chickens, cows, humans (and what that distribution looks like), oneself over time, a typical human over time, etc. And also “What would a graph of (value realized per unit time) vs (time) look like for Earth’s history?” which would answer the question “How much value has been realized since life began on Earth?” (note: I’d ignore estimates of value realized elsewhere in the universe, which may actually be quite significant, for the sake of the question). If you’d like to indulge me on your own views on an of this I would be very interested, but of course no need if you don’t want to. I’ll estimate and write my own answers up sometime.
Hmm. I do believe I discount vertebrates much less than I discount insects, however I also think there’s a huge difference between say chickens and chimpanzees or chimpanzees and humans. Even among humans (who have quite similar brains to one another compared to inter-comparisons), I think that the top 10% of Americans probably live lives that I value inherently (by which I mean ignoring the effects that they have on other things and only counting the quality of their conscious life experience) at least one order of magnitude (if not several) more than the bottom 10% of Americans. I believe this is an unpopular view also, but one consideration I might be able to give in support of it is if you reflect on how much you value your own conscious experience during some parts of your life compared to others you may find as I do that some moments or short periods seem to be of much greater value than others of equal duration.
An exercise I tried recently was making a plot of “value realized / time” vs “time” for my own conscious life experience (so again: not including the effects of my actions, which is the vast majority of what I value) and found that there were some years I valued multiple times more than other years and some moments I valued many times more than all years on net. The graph was also all positive value and trending upwards. Sleeping much less than awake. (I don’t think I have very vivid dreams relative to others, but even if I did, I would probably still tend to value waking moments much more than sleeping ones.) Also, remembering or reflecting on great moments fondly can be of high value too in my evaluation. There’s also the problem of not knowing now what certain experiences were like in the past to actually experience them since I’m relying on my memory of what they were like, which for all I know could be faulty. I think in general I choose to value experiences based on how I remember them being rather than how I think they were when I lived them (if there is a discrepancy between the two).
Also note that I’m a moral anti-realist and so I don’t think there are correct answers, so to a certain extent how much I value some periods of my conscious life experience relative to others is a choice, since I don’t believe that there are completely defined definite values that are mine that I can discover either.
A general thing I’d be really interested in seeing is peoples’ estimates of how much they value (whether positively or negatively) the total life experiences of say, mosquitoes, X, Y, Z, chickens, cows, humans (and what that distribution looks like), oneself over time, a typical human over time, etc. And also “What would a graph of (value realized per unit time) vs (time) look like for Earth’s history?” which would answer the question “How much value has been realized since life began on Earth?” (note: I’d ignore estimates of value realized elsewhere in the universe, which may actually be quite significant, for the sake of the question). If you’d like to indulge me on your own views on an of this I would be very interested, but of course no need if you don’t want to. I’ll estimate and write my own answers up sometime.