others have speculated that animals with simpler nervous systems have characteristically much more intense experiences than humans. For example in his blog post “Is Brain Size Morally Relevant?” Brian Tomasik explores the idea that “to a tiny brain, an experience activating just a few pain neurons could feel like the worst thing in the world from its point of view.”
I didn’t intend to suggest that small brains have characteristically greater intensities, but just that it would take fewer pain neurons to achieve the same (subjectively relative) intensity as in a larger brain.
In my opinion, the best way to argue for giving more moral weight to larger brains is not that larger brains have more intense experiences but that we just care more about them because they’re more complex. As an analogy, we might care more if a very large painting was destroyed than if a small one was, not because the large painting is more “intense” but just because there’s more of it. So I would say that
intrinsic value = duration * intensity * (how much we care about the brain),
where the last factor can be based on its complexity. (BTW, I didn’t read most of this post, so sorry if you already discussed such things.)
Thanks for these astoundingly detailed posts. :)
Just to clarify on this:
I didn’t intend to suggest that small brains have characteristically greater intensities, but just that it would take fewer pain neurons to achieve the same (subjectively relative) intensity as in a larger brain.
In my opinion, the best way to argue for giving more moral weight to larger brains is not that larger brains have more intense experiences but that we just care more about them because they’re more complex. As an analogy, we might care more if a very large painting was destroyed than if a small one was, not because the large painting is more “intense” but just because there’s more of it. So I would say that
intrinsic value = duration * intensity * (how much we care about the brain),
where the last factor can be based on its complexity. (BTW, I didn’t read most of this post, so sorry if you already discussed such things.)
Thanks for the clarification, Brian!