The thought is that we think of the Conscious Subsystems hypothesis as a bit like panpsychism: not something you can rule out, but a sufficiently speculative thesis that we aren’t interested in including it, as we don’t think anyone really believes it for empirical reasons. Insofar as they assign some credence to it, it’s probably for philosophical reasons.
Anyway, totally understand wanting every hypothesis over which you’re uncertain to be reflected in your welfare range estimates. That’s a good project, but it wasn’t ours. But fwiw, it’s really unclear what that’s going to imply in this particular case, as it’s so hard to pin down which Conscious Subsystems hypothesis you have in mind and the credences you should assign to all the variants.
we don’t think anyone really believes it for empirical reasons
Arguably every view on consciousness hinges on (controversial) non-empirical premises, right? You can tell me every third-person fact there is to know about the neurobiology, behavior, etc. of various species, and it’s still an open question how to compare the subjective severity of animal A’s experience X to animal B’s experience Y. So it’s not clear to me what makes the non-empirical premises (other than hedonism and unitarianism) behind the welfare ranges significantly less speculative than Conscious Subsystems. (To be clear, I don’t see much reason yet to be confident in Conscious Subsystems myself. My worry is that I don’t have much reason to be confident in the other possible non-empirical premises either.)
Sorry if this is addressed elsewhere in the post/sequence!
Fair, but there are degrees here, right? Some hypotheses are fairly tightly tied to empirical evidence while others involve many more speculative premises.
But as I said, totally makes sense to want an all-in estimate. I’ve been thinking about how to do that and hope to have something concrete to say eventually.
Makes sense, thanks. I think I just want to highlight that hypotheses that are “tightly tied to empirical evidence” still do sneak in some non-empirical premises, mostly about how to do induction, though of course some such premises can be more controversial than others. (Related post.)
If what you mean to say is something like the following, I’m sympathetic: Conscious Subsystems is more speculative in the sense that it violates Occam’s razor — we’re positing lots of extra minds we can never verify. Whereas, a principle like “if two animals’ pain-related brain regions have the same neuron-firing rate, we should expect the intensity of their suffering to be the same all else equal” seems privileged by Occam, even if we can’t empirically verify this either.
((ETA: Feel free to ignore if the above misses your point, I don’t mean to put words in your mouth!) I might quibble about how we cash out “all else equal.” In practice, I’d think we don’t have nearly fine-grained enough neurobiological evidence to apply that principle. So I’d worry that many of our inferences about comparisons of suffering intensity hinge on somewhat arbitrary judgment calls.)
The thought is that we think of the Conscious Subsystems hypothesis as a bit like panpsychism: not something you can rule out, but a sufficiently speculative thesis that we aren’t interested in including it, as we don’t think anyone really believes it for empirical reasons. Insofar as they assign some credence to it, it’s probably for philosophical reasons.
Anyway, totally understand wanting every hypothesis over which you’re uncertain to be reflected in your welfare range estimates. That’s a good project, but it wasn’t ours. But fwiw, it’s really unclear what that’s going to imply in this particular case, as it’s so hard to pin down which Conscious Subsystems hypothesis you have in mind and the credences you should assign to all the variants.
Thanks for explaining!
Arguably every view on consciousness hinges on (controversial) non-empirical premises, right? You can tell me every third-person fact there is to know about the neurobiology, behavior, etc. of various species, and it’s still an open question how to compare the subjective severity of animal A’s experience X to animal B’s experience Y. So it’s not clear to me what makes the non-empirical premises (other than hedonism and unitarianism) behind the welfare ranges significantly less speculative than Conscious Subsystems. (To be clear, I don’t see much reason yet to be confident in Conscious Subsystems myself. My worry is that I don’t have much reason to be confident in the other possible non-empirical premises either.)
Sorry if this is addressed elsewhere in the post/sequence!
Fair, but there are degrees here, right? Some hypotheses are fairly tightly tied to empirical evidence while others involve many more speculative premises.
But as I said, totally makes sense to want an all-in estimate. I’ve been thinking about how to do that and hope to have something concrete to say eventually.
Makes sense, thanks. I think I just want to highlight that hypotheses that are “tightly tied to empirical evidence” still do sneak in some non-empirical premises, mostly about how to do induction, though of course some such premises can be more controversial than others. (Related post.)
If what you mean to say is something like the following, I’m sympathetic: Conscious Subsystems is more speculative in the sense that it violates Occam’s razor — we’re positing lots of extra minds we can never verify. Whereas, a principle like “if two animals’ pain-related brain regions have the same neuron-firing rate, we should expect the intensity of their suffering to be the same all else equal” seems privileged by Occam, even if we can’t empirically verify this either.
((ETA: Feel free to ignore if the above misses your point, I don’t mean to put words in your mouth!) I might quibble about how we cash out “all else equal.” In practice, I’d think we don’t have nearly fine-grained enough neurobiological evidence to apply that principle. So I’d worry that many of our inferences about comparisons of suffering intensity hinge on somewhat arbitrary judgment calls.)
Thanks for the productive exchange!