EA - Do Brains Contain Many Conscious Subsystems? If So, Should We Act Differently? by Bob Fischer

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: Do Brains Contain Many Conscious Subsystems? If So, Should We Act Differently?, published by Bob Fischer on December 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Key TakeawaysThe Conscious Subsystems Hypothesis (“Conscious Subsystems,” for short) says that brains have subsystems that realize phenomenally conscious states that aren’t accessible to the subjects we typically associate with those brains—namely, the ones who report their experiences to us.Given that humans’ brains are likely to support more such subsystems than animals’ brains, EAs who have explored Conscious Subsystems have suggested that it provides a reason for risk-neutral expected utility maximizers to assign more weight to humans relative to animals.However, even if Conscious Subsystems is true, it probably doesn’t imply that risk-neutral expected utility maximizers ought to allocate neartermist dollars to humans instead of animals. There are three reasons for this:If humans have conscious subsystems, then animals probably have them too, so taking them seriously doesn’t increase the expected value of, say, humans over chickens as much as we might initially suppose.Risk-neutral expected utility maximizers are committed to assumptions—including the assumption that all welfare counts equally, whoever’s welfare it is—that support the conclusion that the best animal-focused neartermist interventions (e.g., cage-free campaigns) are many times better than the best human-focused neartermist interventions (e.g., bednets).Independently, note that the higher our credences in the theories of consciousness that are most friendly to Conscious Subsystems, the higher our credences ought to be in the hypothesis that many small invertebrates are sentient. So, insofar as we’re risk-neutral expected utility maximizers with relatively high credences in Conscious Subsystems-friendly theories of consciousness, it’s likely that we should be putting far more resources into investigating the welfare of the world’s small invertebrates.We assign very low credences to claims that ostensibly support Conscious Subsystems.The appeal of the idea that standard theories of consciousness support Conscious Subsystems may be based on not distinguishing (a) theories that are just designed to make predictions about when people will self-report having conscious experiences of a certain type (which may all be wrong, but have whatever direct empirical support they have) and (b) theories that are attempts to answer the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness (which only have indirect empirical support and are far more controversial).Standard versions of functionalism say that states are conscious when they have the right relationships to sensory stimulations, other mental states, and behavior. But it’s highly unlikely that many groups of neurons stand in the correct relationships, even if they perform functions that, in the abstract, seem as complex and sophisticated as those performed by whole brains.Ultimately, we do not recommend acting on Conscious Subsystems at this time.IntroductionThis is the fifth post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization—i.e., making resource allocation decisions across species. The aim of this post is to assess a hypothesis that's been advanced by several members of the EA community: namely, that brains have subsystems that realize phenomenally conscious states that aren’t accessible to the subjects we typically associate with those brains (i.e., the ones who report their experiences to us; see, e.g., Tomasik, 2013-2019, Shiller, 2016, Muehlhauser, 2017, Shulman, 2020, Crummett, 2022).If there are such states, then we might think that ...