EA - Just Look At The Thing! – How The Science of Consciousness Informs Ethics by algekalipso

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Just Look At The Thing! – How The Science of Consciousness Informs Ethics, published by algekalipso on September 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just look at the thing! From Richard Feyman’s talk There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom (1959) Introduction The quote above comes from a lecture Richard Feynman gave, which talked about the challenges and opportunities of studying and interacting with the world on a microscopic scale. Among other things, he touches upon how gaining access to, e.g., good-enough electron microscopes would allow us to answer long-standing questions in biology by just looking at the thing (cf. Seeing Cell Division Like Never Before). Once you start to engage with the phenomenon at a high-enough resolution directly, tackling these questions at the theoretical level would turn out, in retrospect, to be idle armchair speculation. I think that we can make the case that the philosophy of ethics might be doing something like this at the moment. In other words, it speculates about the nature of value at a theoretical level without engaging with the phenomenon of value at a high resolution. Utilitarianism (whether classical or negative), at least as it is usually formulated, may have background assumptions about the nature of consciousness, personal identity, and valence that a close examination would show to be false (or at least very incomplete). Many criticisms of wireheading, for instance, seem to conflate pleasure and reward (more on this soon), and yet we now know that these are pretty different. Likewise, the repugnant conclusion or the question between total vs. mean utilitarianism are usually discussed using implicit background assumptions about the nature of valence and personal identity. This must stop. We have to look at the thing! Without further ado, here are some of the key ways in which an enriched understanding of consciousness can inform our ethical theories: Mixed Valence One ubiquitous phenomenon that I find is largely neglected in discussions about utilitarianism is that of mixed valence states. Not only is it the case that there are many flavors of pleasure and pain, but it is also the case that most states of consciousness blend pleasurable and painful sensations in complex ways. In Principia Qualia (Michael Johnson), the valence triangle was introduced. The valence triangle describes the valence of a state of consciousness in terms of its loadings on the three dimensions of negative, positive, and neutral valence. This idea was extended in Quantifying Bliss, which further enriched it by adding a spectral component to each of these dimensions. Let's work with this valence triangle to reason about mixed valence. To illustrate the relevance of mixed valence states, we can see how it influences policies within the context of negative utilitarianism. Let us say that we agree that there is a ground truth to the total amount of pain and pleasure a system produces. A naïve conception of negative utilitarianism could then be "we should minimize pain." But the pain that exists within an experience that also contains pleasure may matter much less than the pain that exists in an experience without pleasure that "balances it out"! The naïve conception, would thus, not be able to distinguish between the following two scenarios. In Scenario A we have two persons, one suffering from both an intense headache and an intense stomach ache and the other enjoying both a very pleasant sensation in the head and a very pleasant sensation in the stomach. In Scenario B, we switch it up: one person experiences an intense headache while also a very pleasant sensation in the stomach, and the other way around for the other person. But if you have ever experienced a very ple...