I mostly do philosophy, global priorities and animal welfare research. My current specific interests include: philosophy of mind, moral weights, person-affecting views, preference-based views and subjectivism, moral uncertainty, decision theory, deep uncertainty and cluelessness, and indirect effects on wild animals.
I’ve also done economic modelling for some animal welfare issues.
Rather than being convinced that cage-free is worse, I’m just not convinced it’s better, so why support it?
I’m not convinced nest deprivation reaches the disabling intensity. It’s definitely possible, and I not very unlikely, but it’s hard to say either way based on the current evidence. And whether or not it does, maybe keel bone fracture inflammation pain could still just be at least few more times intense anyway.
Maybe it’ll help for me to rephrase: if a being has more things it can attend to (be aware of, have in its attention) simultaneously, then it has more attention to pull. It can attend to more, all else equal, for example, if it has a richer/more detailed visual field, similar to more pixels in a computer screen.
We could imagine a very simple creature experience very little pain but be totally focused on it.
If it’s very simple, it would probably have very little attention to pull (relatively), so the pain would not be intense under the hypothesis I’m putting forward.
But if I did, I think this would make me think animal consciousness is even more serious. For simple creatures, pain takes up their whole world.
I also give some weight to this possibility, i.e. that we should measure attention in individual-relative terms, and it’s something more like the proportion of attention pulled that matters.
RP had some arguments against conscious subsystems affecting moral weight very significantly that I found pretty convincing.
I might have written some of them! I still have some sympathy for the hypothesis and that it matters when you reason using expected values, taking the arguments into account, even if you assign the hypothesis like 1% probability. The probabilities can matter here.
In regards to your first point, I don’t see either why we’d think that degree of attention correlates with neuron counts or determines the intensity of consciousness
I believe the intensity of suffering consists largely (maybe not exclusively) in how much it pulls your attention, specifically its motivational salience. Intense suffering that’s easy to ignore seems like an oxymoron. I discuss this a bit more here.
Welfare Footprint Project’s pain definitions also refer to attention as one of the criteria (along with other behaviours):
Annoying pain:
(...) Sufferers can ignore this sensation most of the time. Performance of cognitive tasks demanding attention are either not affected or only mildly affected. (...)
Hurtful pain:
(...) Different from Annoying pain, the ability to draw attention away from the sensation of pain is reduced: awareness of pain is likely to be present most of the time, interspersed by brief periods during which pain can be ignored depending on the level of distraction provided by other activities. (...)
Disabling pain:
(...) Inattention and unresponsiveness to milder forms of pain or other ongoing stimuli and surroundings is likely to be observed. (...)
Excruciating pain seems entirely behaviourally defined, but I would assume effects on attention like disabling pain or (much) stronger.
Then, we can ask “how much attention can be pulled?” And we might think:
having more things you’re aware of simultaneously (e.g. more details in your visual field) means you have more attention to pull, and
more neurons allows you to be aware of more things simultaneously,
so brains with more neurons can have more attention to pull.
I also find RP’s arguments against neuron counts completely devastating.
I worked on some of them with RP myself here.
FWIW, I found Adam’s arguments convincing against the kinds of views he argued against, but I don’t think they covered the cases in point 2 here.
though unlike Eliezer, I don’t come to my conclusions about animal consciousness from the armchair without reviewing any evidence
A bit of nitpick, but I think Eliezer has a very high bar for attributing consciousness and is aware of relevant evidence for that bar, e.g. evidence for theory of mind or a robust self-model.
And this gets into the kind of views to which I’m sympathetic.
I am quite sympathetic to the kind of view Eliezer seems to endorse and the importance of something like a self-model, but my bar for self-models is probably much lower and I think many animals have at least modest self-models, including probably all mammals and birds, but I’m not confident about others. More on this kind of view here and here.
On the other hand, I am also sympathetic to counting anything that looks like pleasure, unpleasantness, desire as motivational salience (an attentional mechanism) or beliefs about betterness/worseness/good/bad, basically any kind of evaluative attitude about anything, or any way of caring about anything. If some system cares about something, I want to empathize and try to care about that in the same way on their behalf.[1] I discuss such attitudes more here and this view more in a draft (which I’m happy to share).
And I’m inclined to count these attitudes whether they’re “conscious” or not, however we characterize consciousness. Or, these processes just ground something worth recognizing as conscious, anyway.
Under this view, I probably end up basically agreeing with you about which animals count, on the basis of evidence about desire as motivational salience and/or pleasure/unpleasantness-like states.
However, there could still be important differences in degree if and because they meet different bars, and I have some sympathy for some neuron count-related arguments that favour brains with more neurons (point 2 here). I also give substantial weight to the possibilities that:
maximum intensities for desires as motivational salience (and maybe hedonic states like pleasure and unpleasantness) are similar,
there’s (often) no fact of the matter about how to compare them.
Focusing on what they care about intrinsically or terminally, not instrumental or derived concerns. And, of course, I have to deal with intrapersonal and interpersonal trade-offs.
Note, from this post:
[The Navigation Fund] has made a non-binding commitment to sustain funding through 2026 for all of the recurring grantees that the OP Farm Animal Welfare Program will no longer be allowed to fund
I suppose this wouldn’t include new orgs in wild animal welfare and invertebrate welfare, though.
THL UK is focusing on meat/broiler chicken welfare, while I’d guess THL is doing a lot of cage-free egg work, which I want to avoid.
Hey @Toby Tremlett🔹 , when people leave their rationales with their votes and they end up as comments here, they often don’t say what they voted for, and it doesn’t show in this thread. So, I don’t know what orgs they’re talking about. Is that intended?
I voted for The Humane League UK (meat/broiler chicken welfare), Fish Welfare Initiative, Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation for cost-effective programs for animal welfare with low risk of backfire. I’m specifically concerned with backfire due to wild animal effects (also here), or increasing keel bone fractures for cage-free hens, so I avoid reducing animal product consumption/production and cage-free work.
If a single consideration dominates, it might be for good reason. The relative insensitivity of WFMs can reflect poor scaling of the score with impact.
(With BOTECs, sometimes the final ranking/conclusion is very dependent on one or two very uncertain or arbitrary criteria.)
I might be inclined to do sensitivity analysis to the parameters and multiple different BOTECs/models in these cases, but that’s also more work. At some point, it’s not really a BOTEC anymore, because the model is too complicated to fit on the back of an envelope. And it can no longer be practical to use the same BOTEC/model structure across interventions that are too different.
Animals like fish are caught and farmed to feed farmed shrimp, increasing the negative welfare effects of shrimp farming
(...)
Develop alternative foods that taste like shrimp to help reduce demand for farmed shrimp
FWIW, given the moral ambiguity of fishing, the catch of wild animals for (shrimp) feed could be good overall for wild (aquatic) animals, instead of bad.
This and the effects of shrimp feed (crop) production on terrestrial wild animals make me somewhat inclined not to try to shift shrimp consumption towards plant-based food (substitutes or general reduction). My best guess is that crop production tends to decrease wild arthropod populations (Attwood et al., 2008, tables 3 and 4; Newbold et al., 2015), and animal products tend to decrease wild terrestrial arthropod populations more than plant-based products due to greater land use for crops per calorie or kg of protein (e.g. Our World in Data, based on Poore & Nemecek, 2018), so shifting towards plant-based would be bad for wild terrestrial arthropods, if they have bad lives or you’re suffering-focused.
However, farmed shrimp/prawns may use less land than plant-based foods per gram of protein, so maybe shifting away from them would be good by reducing wild terrestrial arthropod populations, too. This is something I’d like to look more into. I imagine land use for shrimp/prawns is only so low according to these estimates because they’re assuming a high rate of wild aquatic ingredients (whose impacts are morally ambiguous!). You probably can’t get lower land use than tofu per kg of protein by feeding shrimp almost entirely soy and grains, because of higher losses in feed conversion than in soy processing into tofu (and tofu having similar or less land use than other feed ingredients per kg of protein).
I agree that we should treat credit assignment differently, but when deciding what to fund, we should always be able to reduce the problem to “What maximizes?” or “What’s the best that can be done with my $X?”. I think the relevant question here is something like “If I donate $X to SWP, what happens?” And then you divide the (expected) difference in the counterfactuals by $X to get your cost-effectiveness.
I have three possibilities in mind. 1 is the scenario I expected to actually be the case here. 1 is mutually exclusive with 2 and 3, but 2 and 3 can happen together or either alone.
If the overhead costs are fixed and already fully covered either way, then your donations just go towards non-overhead costs, and the marginal cost-effectiveness should not reflect overhead. This is the scenario I had in mind.
If your donations influence how much overhead is necessary, e.g. because they need to hire more, and some of your donations go to that, then you need to include the extra overhead in the costs and make sure your impact reflects that.
If your donations influence how much overhead costs are covered by the funders covering the overhead, then you need to worry about their counterfactuals, i.e. what they would have otherwise done with their money. That goes into the impact of your donations.
1 could still involve indirect effects to worry about, i.e. you might increase the probability that funders cover overhead in the future like this, for SWP or others, which actually means we get something like 3.
If the overhead is already covered, the marginal cost-effectiveness, what we get from further donations, should just reflect what’s not covered.
Would you be open to taking funding earmarked for one of your specific proposed projects? And generally for a specific department? How might more general funding shift around in that case, i.e. funging?
I’m personally most interested in humane pesticide research, although also interested in shrimp and fish welfare, too. I’d also be interested in pushing humane pesticide research to others I’ve been talking about donation plans with.
After these three projects, what would you do with further funding? Or would you turn away further funding?
How much room for more funding do you have? Or, say, how many more stunners do you expect to be worth buying?
Your brain has a bunch of overlapping subsystems that are each conscious, according to many plausible criteria for consciousness you could use. You could say they’re all minds. I’m not sure I’d say they’re different minds, because if two overlap enough, they should be treated like the same one.
See also the problem of the many on SEP:
As anyone who has flown out of a cloud knows, the boundaries of a cloud are a lot less sharp up close than they can appear on the ground. Even when it seems clearly true that there is one, sharply bounded, cloud up there, really there are thousands of water droplets that are neither determinately part of the cloud, nor determinately outside it. Consider any object that consists of the core of the cloud, plus an arbitrary selection of these droplets. It will look like a cloud, and circumstances permitting rain like a cloud, and generally has as good a claim to be a cloud as any other object in that part of the sky. But we cannot say every such object is a cloud, else there would be millions of clouds where it seemed like there was one. And what holds for clouds holds for anything whose boundaries look less clear the closer you look at it. And that includes just about every kind of object we normally think about, including humans.
(Not speaking for my co-authors or RP.)
I think your brain-Fred is conscious, but overlaps so much with your whole brain that counting them both as separate moral patients would mean double counting.
We illustrated with systems that don’t overlap much or at all. There are also of course more intermediate levels of overlap. See my comment here on some ideas for how to handle overlap:
EAGxVirtual is cheap to attend. I don’t really see much downside to only attending one day. And you can still make connections and meet people after the conference is over.
From my comment above:
But to elaborate, the answer is illusionism about phenomenal consciousness, the only (physicalist) account of consciousness that seems to me to be on track to address the hard problem (by dissolving it and saying there are no phenomenal properties) and the meta-problem of consciousness.
To prevent any misunderstanding, illusionism doesn’t deny that consciousness exists in some form, it just denies that consciousness is phenomenal, or that there are phenomenal properties. It also denies the classical account of qualia, i.e ineffable and so on.