For the Rethink Priorities project, why not also look into consciousness in plant species (e.g. mimosa and some carnivorous plants), AI (especially reinforcement learning) and animal/brain simulations (e.g. OpenWorm)? Whether or not they’re conscious (or conscious in a way that’s morally significant), they can at least provide some more data to adjust our credences in the consciousness of different animal species; they can still be useful for comparisons.
I understand that there will be little research to use here, but I expect this to mean proportionately less time will be spent on them.
For the project, we’ve investigated plants, protists, and prokaryotes, all of which are capable of more interesting “behavior” than I would have anticipated. We began a preliminary investigation into a host of non-organic entities, but we discovered that an investigation of that sort is a bit more complicated than we expected. For many of the features we examined, it’s a lot more difficult to ascertain whether a non-organic entity exhibits the feature. Also, many theory-neutral arguments for consciousness in various animal species rely on the species in question having an evolutionary background. It’s of course totally possible that a non-organic entity is conscious, but the way you would argue that such an entity is conscious is often different in subtle but important ways from the way you would argue an organic entity is conscious. In future work we hope to examine this issue more thoroughly.
For the Rethink Priorities project, why not also look into consciousness in plant species (e.g. mimosa and some carnivorous plants), AI (especially reinforcement learning) and animal/brain simulations (e.g. OpenWorm)? Whether or not they’re conscious (or conscious in a way that’s morally significant), they can at least provide some more data to adjust our credences in the consciousness of different animal species; they can still be useful for comparisons.
I understand that there will be little research to use here, but I expect this to mean proportionately less time will be spent on them.
For the project, we’ve investigated plants, protists, and prokaryotes, all of which are capable of more interesting “behavior” than I would have anticipated. We began a preliminary investigation into a host of non-organic entities, but we discovered that an investigation of that sort is a bit more complicated than we expected. For many of the features we examined, it’s a lot more difficult to ascertain whether a non-organic entity exhibits the feature. Also, many theory-neutral arguments for consciousness in various animal species rely on the species in question having an evolutionary background. It’s of course totally possible that a non-organic entity is conscious, but the way you would argue that such an entity is conscious is often different in subtle but important ways from the way you would argue an organic entity is conscious. In future work we hope to examine this issue more thoroughly.