I love this research! Thank you so much for doing it!
My gut reaction to the results is that it’s odd that humans are so high up in terms of their capacity for welfare. Just as an uninformative prior, I would’ve expected us to be somewhere in the middle. Less confidently, I would’ve expected a similar number of orders of magnitude deviation from the human baseline in either direction, within reason. E.g. +/- ~.5 OOM.
Plus, we are humans, so there’s a risk that we’re biased in our favor. It could be simply a bias from our ability to emphasize with other humans. But it could also be the case that there are countless more markers of sentience that humans don’t have (but many other sentient animals do) that we are prone to overlook.
Have you investigated what the sources of this effect might be? There might be any number of biases at work as I mentioned, but perhaps our lives have become so comfy most of the time that we perceive slight problems very strongly (e.g., a disapproving gaze). If then something really bad happens, it feels enormously bad?
(I’ve in the past explicitly assumed that most beings with a few (million) neurons have a roughly human capacity for welfare – not because I thought that was likely but because I couldn’t tell in which direction it was off. Do you maybe already have a defense of the results for people like me?)
In any case, I’ll probably just adopt your results into my thinking now. I don’t expect them to change my priorities much given all the other factors.
Thank you again! <3
Update: When I mentioned this to a friend on a hike, I came up with two ways in which the criteria might be amended to include nonhuman ones: (1) In may cases, we probably have a theory for why a particular behavior or feature is likely to be indicative of conscious experience. Understanding this mechanism, we can look for other systems that might implement the same mechanism, sort of how the eyes of humans, eagles, and flies are very different but we infer that they are probably all for the purpose of vision. (2) Maybe a number of animals that show certain known criteria for consciousness also share suspiciously consistently some other features. One could then investigate whether these features are also indicative of consciousness and whether there are other animals that have these new features at the expense of the older, known ones. (The analysis could cluster features that usually co-occur to not overweight causally related features in cases where many of them are observable.)
I love this research! Thank you so much for doing it!
My gut reaction to the results is that it’s odd that humans are so high up in terms of their capacity for welfare. Just as an uninformative prior, I would’ve expected us to be somewhere in the middle. Less confidently, I would’ve expected a similar number of orders of magnitude deviation from the human baseline in either direction, within reason. E.g. +/- ~.5 OOM.
Plus, we are humans, so there’s a risk that we’re biased in our favor. It could be simply a bias from our ability to emphasize with other humans. But it could also be the case that there are countless more markers of sentience that humans don’t have (but many other sentient animals do) that we are prone to overlook.
Have you investigated what the sources of this effect might be? There might be any number of biases at work as I mentioned, but perhaps our lives have become so comfy most of the time that we perceive slight problems very strongly (e.g., a disapproving gaze). If then something really bad happens, it feels enormously bad?
(I’ve in the past explicitly assumed that most beings with a few (million) neurons have a roughly human capacity for welfare – not because I thought that was likely but because I couldn’t tell in which direction it was off. Do you maybe already have a defense of the results for people like me?)
In any case, I’ll probably just adopt your results into my thinking now. I don’t expect them to change my priorities much given all the other factors.
Thank you again! <3
Update: When I mentioned this to a friend on a hike, I came up with two ways in which the criteria might be amended to include nonhuman ones: (1) In may cases, we probably have a theory for why a particular behavior or feature is likely to be indicative of conscious experience. Understanding this mechanism, we can look for other systems that might implement the same mechanism, sort of how the eyes of humans, eagles, and flies are very different but we infer that they are probably all for the purpose of vision. (2) Maybe a number of animals that show certain known criteria for consciousness also share suspiciously consistently some other features. One could then investigate whether these features are also indicative of consciousness and whether there are other animals that have these new features at the expense of the older, known ones. (The analysis could cluster features that usually co-occur to not overweight causally related features in cases where many of them are observable.)