Here’s another related hypothesis I’m more sympathetic to, copying from this comment:
The only measures of subjective welfare that seem to me like they could ground interpersonal comparisons are based on attention (and alertness), e.g. how hard attention is pulled towards something important (motivational salience) or “how much” attention is used. I could imagine the “size” of attention, e.g. the number of distinguishable items in it, to scale with neuron counts, maybe even proportionally, which could favour global health on the margin.
But probably with decreasing marginal returns to additional neurons, and I give substantial weight to the number of neurons not really mattering at all, once you have the right kind of attention.
Thanks for noting this possibility—I think it’s the same, or at least very similar, to an intuition Luisa Rodriguez had when we were chatting about this the other day actually. To paraphrase the idea there, even if we have a phenomenal field that’s analogous to our field of vision and one being’s can be bigger than another’s, attention may be sort of like a spotlight that is smaller than the field. Inflicting pains on parts of the body lower welfare up to a point, like adding red dots to a wall in our field of vision with a spotlight on it adds redness to our field of vision, but once the area under the spotlight is full, not much (perhaps not any) more redness is perceived by adding red dots to the shadowy wall outside the spotlight. If in the human case the spotlight is smaller than “the whole body except for one arm”, then it is about equally bad to put the amputee and the non-amputee in an ice bath, or for that matter to put all but one arm of a non-amputee and the whole of a non-amputee in an ice bath.
Something like this seems like a reasonable possibility to me as well. It still doesn’t seem as intuitive to me as the idea that, to continue the metaphor, the spotlight lights the whole field of vision to some extent, even if some parts are brighter than others at any given moment; if all of me except one arm were in an ice bath, I don’t think I’d be close to indifferent about putting the last arm in. But it does seem hard to be sure about these things.
Even if “scope of attention” is the thing that really matters in the way I’m proposing “size” does, though, I think most of what I’m suggesting in this post can be maintained, since presumably “scope” can’t be bigger than “size”, and both can in principle vary across species. And as for how either of those variables scales with neuron count, I get that there are intuitions in both directions, but I think the intuitions I put down on the side of superlinearity apply similarly to “scope”.
Here’s another related hypothesis I’m more sympathetic to, copying from this comment:
Thanks for noting this possibility—I think it’s the same, or at least very similar, to an intuition Luisa Rodriguez had when we were chatting about this the other day actually. To paraphrase the idea there, even if we have a phenomenal field that’s analogous to our field of vision and one being’s can be bigger than another’s, attention may be sort of like a spotlight that is smaller than the field. Inflicting pains on parts of the body lower welfare up to a point, like adding red dots to a wall in our field of vision with a spotlight on it adds redness to our field of vision, but once the area under the spotlight is full, not much (perhaps not any) more redness is perceived by adding red dots to the shadowy wall outside the spotlight. If in the human case the spotlight is smaller than “the whole body except for one arm”, then it is about equally bad to put the amputee and the non-amputee in an ice bath, or for that matter to put all but one arm of a non-amputee and the whole of a non-amputee in an ice bath.
Something like this seems like a reasonable possibility to me as well. It still doesn’t seem as intuitive to me as the idea that, to continue the metaphor, the spotlight lights the whole field of vision to some extent, even if some parts are brighter than others at any given moment; if all of me except one arm were in an ice bath, I don’t think I’d be close to indifferent about putting the last arm in. But it does seem hard to be sure about these things.
Even if “scope of attention” is the thing that really matters in the way I’m proposing “size” does, though, I think most of what I’m suggesting in this post can be maintained, since presumably “scope” can’t be bigger than “size”, and both can in principle vary across species. And as for how either of those variables scales with neuron count, I get that there are intuitions in both directions, but I think the intuitions I put down on the side of superlinearity apply similarly to “scope”.