EA - The Possibility of Microorganism Suffering by Elias Au-Yeung

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: The Possibility of Microorganism Suffering, published by Elias Au-Yeung on August 7, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Thanks to Brian Tomasik and an anonymous reviewer for their comments. It was through reading Brian's writings that the topic was first brought to my attention. Epistemic status: Establishing knowledge about other minds requires both science and philosophy. The scientific details should mostly be correct. The philosophical component uses plausible ideas – but it’s necessarily intuition-dependent whether we decide to accept or reject such reasoning. Note that this subjectivity isn’t specific to thinking about microorganisms, but is rather general to speculating about the experiences of any mind other than one’s own. Summary Massive numbers of microorganisms, and their counteractive responses to various threats – in some respects similar to other organisms – suggest a possibility of immense suffering and an ongoing moral catastrophe. Despite this, few have seriously investigated the possibility of microorganism suffering. This post looks at the topic through both scientific and philosophical lenses. Before evaluating scientific findings, I generate, and highlight the importance of generating, criteria for such evaluation. To demonstrate why microorganism suffering seems possible, I show that starting from ‘common sense’ ideas of what evidence of mind and suffering means, physically speaking, we can reach (to use Brian Tomasik’s words) ‘cosmopolitan views’ of evidence of mind and suffering that include systems that are more different. And it seems if we already accept ‘common sense’ views, we should consider ‘cosmopolitan views’ somewhat plausible. This is especially so if we have uncertainties with our subjective judgment – we might be compelled to assign at least some credence to ‘cosmopolitan views’, given some acceptance of ‘common sense’ positions. Additionally, uncertainty might suggest that we cannot be so confident in only ‘common sense’ positions as to rule out similar ‘cosmopolitan views’. That said, whether we accept or reject these arguments also seems intuition-dependent. I note some examples of microbial behaviors and mechanisms that fit the cosmopolitan criteria. If my arguments are successful, forcing us to place some credence in cosmopolitan views, then there may be significant amounts of microorganism suffering in expectation. We may have reason to try and understand more about how we can reduce such suffering. A video showing two paramecia eaten by amoeba: Introduction At any given moment, around 1030 (one thousand billion billion billion) microorganisms exist on Earth. Many have very short lives, resulting in massive numbers of deaths. Rough calculations suggest 1027 to 1029 deaths per hour on Earth. Microorganisms display aversive reactions, escape responses, and/or physiological changes against various fitness-threatening phenomena: harmful chemicals, extreme temperatures, starvation, sun damage, mechanical damage, and predators and viruses. It’s no exaggeration to say that if microorganisms can suffer, such suffering is immense in quantity. Even if microorganism suffering is unlikely, we might still argue that it is extremely large in expectation. This possibility of large-scale suffering may warrant further exploration. Yet, aside from a few exceptions, the topic has been severely neglected. My first impression is that reducing microorganism suffering is a cause that some should potentially prioritize, from the perspectives of many non-speciesist, welfarist views. I won’t be investigating cause prioritization in detail here. Instead, in this piece, I only aim to explain why I think microorganism suffering is at least a possibility. By ‘possibility’ I mean not astronomically lower in probability compared to the existence of suf...