Hey there I love the C.S Lewis quote and the sentiment—but I think there is a small world where I can belive that insect suffering is moderately important.
My personal “P-Sentience” (Thanks AI doomers) for most insects might be somewhere between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 100,000,000 (The moral weights project is great but not the gospel). In addition if they are sentient, then I would estimate their experience of pain might be between 0x and 1,000x less important than that of an individual human.
If this was in the ballpark, then insect suffering could be a “moderately important” issue. Still imporant—but in the realm of the importance of human suffering, not a lot more nor a lot less. OF course it being much more or much less important is far more likely.
I agree that most people would have a “P sentience” for insects far higher or far lower than mine, in which case it would be very imoprtant or utterly unimportant.
So I think you’re mostly right, but there is a small-ish possibility of it being moderately important too.
In addition if they are sentient, then I would estimate their experience of pain might be between 1x and 1,000x less important than that of an individual human.
This is the reason why I agree that there’s a non-negligible chance that insect suffering is “only” moderately important, though I think the chance is higher than “small-ish” (despite the fact that I think insects are 100% conscious/sentient). I come at it from a non-materialist physicalist stance on consciousness, assuming that suffering is (super roughly) proportional to the energy of the electromagnetic field in each nervous system times the degree of dissonance/asymmetry in the field (quantified using some metric tbd). Given the size of many insects, the EM field they generate is very weak, so maybe the worst suffering an insect endures is just not too bad (maybe comparable to stubbing one’s toe lightly). But I’m not sure (especially about how suffering scales with size), so I still think there’s some chance the suffering is quite bad.
How did you come to these numbers for the P-sentience ? Why not between 1 in 10 and 1 in 100,000,000,000,000 ?
My personal feeling, while reading these kind of numbers, is that they seem conveniently in the ballpark of ‘wide enough that I recognize I am not really sure about what is causing sentience, but low enough that I don’t have anything to do about it’. Maybe this is not how you came up with them, but this is what I would come up with I had to justify not working on the topic.
I understand that it’s possible that insects may have a lower ability to feel suffering, but I don’t see how we can be confident enough to find it unlikely that they are morally relevant.
Thanks @CB🔸 I’d rather not get into this here in detail (its not what the post is about), but these numbers come from something like starting from the moral weights project numbers then discounting pretty heavily due to skepticism about the methodology being biased towards animals at most junctures. My starting point of 1 in a thousand isn’t far off RPs numbers. Your between 1 in 10 and one in 100 billion is also entirely reasonable.
I’m not at all confident they are morally irrelevant, my point was only that there’s a chance their suffering is relevant on the ballpark of human suffering—not necessarily all or nothing.
Hey there I love the C.S Lewis quote and the sentiment—but I think there is a small world where I can belive that insect suffering is moderately important.
My personal “P-Sentience” (Thanks AI doomers) for most insects might be somewhere between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 100,000,000 (The moral weights project is great but not the gospel). In addition if they are sentient, then I would estimate their experience of pain might be between 0x and 1,000x less important than that of an individual human.
If this was in the ballpark, then insect suffering could be a “moderately important” issue. Still imporant—but in the realm of the importance of human suffering, not a lot more nor a lot less. OF course it being much more or much less important is far more likely.
I agree that most people would have a “P sentience” for insects far higher or far lower than mine, in which case it would be very imoprtant or utterly unimportant.
So I think you’re mostly right, but there is a small-ish possibility of it being moderately important too.
This is the reason why I agree that there’s a non-negligible chance that insect suffering is “only” moderately important, though I think the chance is higher than “small-ish” (despite the fact that I think insects are 100% conscious/sentient). I come at it from a non-materialist physicalist stance on consciousness, assuming that suffering is (super roughly) proportional to the energy of the electromagnetic field in each nervous system times the degree of dissonance/asymmetry in the field (quantified using some metric tbd). Given the size of many insects, the EM field they generate is very weak, so maybe the worst suffering an insect endures is just not too bad (maybe comparable to stubbing one’s toe lightly). But I’m not sure (especially about how suffering scales with size), so I still think there’s some chance the suffering is quite bad.
(Thanks for posting this, @Bentham’s Bulldog! I enjoyed reading it. 🙂)
How did you come to these numbers for the P-sentience ? Why not between 1 in 10 and 1 in 100,000,000,000,000 ?
My personal feeling, while reading these kind of numbers, is that they seem conveniently in the ballpark of ‘wide enough that I recognize I am not really sure about what is causing sentience, but low enough that I don’t have anything to do about it’. Maybe this is not how you came up with them, but this is what I would come up with I had to justify not working on the topic.
I understand that it’s possible that insects may have a lower ability to feel suffering, but I don’t see how we can be confident enough to find it unlikely that they are morally relevant.
Thanks @CB🔸 I’d rather not get into this here in detail (its not what the post is about), but these numbers come from something like starting from the moral weights project numbers then discounting pretty heavily due to skepticism about the methodology being biased towards animals at most junctures. My starting point of 1 in a thousand isn’t far off RPs numbers. Your between 1 in 10 and one in 100 billion is also entirely reasonable.
I’m not at all confident they are morally irrelevant, my point was only that there’s a chance their suffering is relevant on the ballpark of human suffering—not necessarily all or nothing.