1 00:00:00,890 --> 00:00:09,980 I'm going to talk about the moral status of conscious subjects and the idea for the talk is something like this in the abstract. 2 00:00:09,980 --> 00:00:18,860 So I'll talk for about two thirds of the talk about some theoretical considerations related to the grounds of moral status. 3 00:00:18,860 --> 00:00:24,230 And I want to I'll be going over some things I said in a recent book, maybe tweaking some of them slightly. 4 00:00:24,230 --> 00:00:27,530 But what I want to really do is work towards the last third of the talk where 5 00:00:27,530 --> 00:00:30,710 I want to try to begin to build some bridges towards some practical things. 6 00:00:30,710 --> 00:00:34,730 Thinking about it, implement a certain view about the grounds of moral status. 7 00:00:34,730 --> 00:00:40,420 And hopefully when I get to that part, we'll see some. 8 00:00:40,420 --> 00:00:43,420 Some things I want to say are congenial to what Ruth and Tom we're talking about, 9 00:00:43,420 --> 00:00:48,520 so I was very excited by some of the things they said, and so we'll see how that goes. 10 00:00:48,520 --> 00:00:54,640 Now I'm going to focus mostly on the value of consciousness when I deal with the theoretical considerations. 11 00:00:54,640 --> 00:00:59,800 So when someone like Nabokov says of the marvel of consciousness, 12 00:00:59,800 --> 00:01:07,450 that sudden windows swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of being, I think, well, that's a bit effusive for analytic philosophy. 13 00:01:07,450 --> 00:01:14,660 But it resonates with me, and it seems to me that consciousness is something can be something that's highly valuable. 14 00:01:14,660 --> 00:01:19,480 And so in a book that came out last year called Consciousness and Moral Status, 15 00:01:19,480 --> 00:01:24,400 I offer an account of what what I call non derivative value within a mental life. 16 00:01:24,400 --> 00:01:32,080 And at the centre of the account is phenomenal consciousness. So I'm going to talk mostly about that for the next few minutes. 17 00:01:32,080 --> 00:01:37,660 Now there is a view on which that connects to moral status, and I don't have a ton to say about that here in the talk. 18 00:01:37,660 --> 00:01:43,090 But the basic idea here is non derivative value is at least one ground of moral status. 19 00:01:43,090 --> 00:01:50,260 So if we can identify sources of non derivative value, we'll kind of get some of the way towards thinking about moral status now. 20 00:01:50,260 --> 00:01:54,550 I don't mean to give a full account of moral status with this link between non derivative values, 21 00:01:54,550 --> 00:02:00,220 so I'm happy to allow room for non derivative value to be elsewhere in non mental parts of the world. 22 00:02:00,220 --> 00:02:05,140 I'm not saying that's true. I'm just not saying it's not true. I have some friends that live in Colorado, 23 00:02:05,140 --> 00:02:10,090 and they want to think about wilderness as having non derivative value in ecosystems as having moral status, 24 00:02:10,090 --> 00:02:12,220 and I just don't want to argue against that. 25 00:02:12,220 --> 00:02:17,950 I'm also happy to allow for other grounds for moral status, although I won't say anything in particular about them here. 26 00:02:17,950 --> 00:02:23,380 It's just to say I'm not trying to be imperialistic with what I say about moral status here. 27 00:02:23,380 --> 00:02:30,700 So there's a going assumption it's in society. I think it's certainly in philosophy of mind where I do a lot of work. 28 00:02:30,700 --> 00:02:34,270 It's to some degree in practical ethics. Although practical ethicists have have more to say. 29 00:02:34,270 --> 00:02:40,300 That's not just depending upon the assumption, but the idea is at least with respect to some experiences, 30 00:02:40,300 --> 00:02:49,720 especially violent experiences like pleasure and pain. These kinds of experiences bear value, and they ground some degree of moral status. 31 00:02:49,720 --> 00:02:56,830 So if we were to find out that some type of entity, some animal experiences pain for the first time, we find this out. 32 00:02:56,830 --> 00:03:03,520 A lot of people get worried and there's think pieces about whether we ought to eat them or whether it's OK to kill them. 33 00:03:03,520 --> 00:03:11,200 So I take it that people are they're reacting based upon this kind of assumption, and I think it's a pretty good assumption. 34 00:03:11,200 --> 00:03:17,080 There's a worry associated with the assumption, which is if this is all we have to go on when we think about the value of consciousness, 35 00:03:17,080 --> 00:03:21,430 we're just focussing on the kind of most simplistic, hypnotic states. 36 00:03:21,430 --> 00:03:26,020 We can look committed to a kind of crude hedonism. And I take it that most of us aren't crude hedonist. 37 00:03:26,020 --> 00:03:32,170 Some of us might be sophisticated hedonist, and that might be the best way to go about the non derivative value that's in consciousness. 38 00:03:32,170 --> 00:03:38,500 Or, as I call it, phenomenal value just for short. But actually, I'm not even a sophisticated hedonist, I don't think. 39 00:03:38,500 --> 00:03:43,420 And so my aim in the book and part and part of this talk was at least to try to make 40 00:03:43,420 --> 00:03:48,460 some of the options more transparent for how to think about the value of consciousness. 41 00:03:48,460 --> 00:03:51,340 And here I'm doing something similar to what David was doing earlier, 42 00:03:51,340 --> 00:03:56,170 just presenting a kind of picture because I don't have time to defend every single bit of it. 43 00:03:56,170 --> 00:04:03,790 So when you think about trying to articulate the value of a non derivative value that consciousness might bear, 44 00:04:03,790 --> 00:04:11,680 you run into the following kind of fact. And the fact is that our conscious mental lives are complex variegated. 45 00:04:11,680 --> 00:04:16,750 So our conscious experience at any given time is rich with different sensory modalities. 46 00:04:16,750 --> 00:04:20,800 Humans have a set of these. Some animals have very different ones from us. 47 00:04:20,800 --> 00:04:27,830 These are often integrated in really interesting ways. So a lot of what we experience about the world is the result of multisensory integration. 48 00:04:27,830 --> 00:04:31,330 Sometimes this multi-sensory integration gets combined with other things, 49 00:04:31,330 --> 00:04:38,410 so memory and attention and imagery and reasoning can moderate the stream of consciousness or the conscious field, or however you want to think of it. 50 00:04:38,410 --> 00:04:42,070 There's all sorts of sorts of other things going on, too. So emotions are there. 51 00:04:42,070 --> 00:04:49,090 There can be moods and background levels of arousal that influence the kind of experience you have at any one time. 52 00:04:49,090 --> 00:04:55,900 So it can seem to be kind of a difficult task to try to carve up this space in terms of the value that's there. 53 00:04:55,900 --> 00:05:01,320 So I want to ask just a series of questions and then report some of the answers I've tried to defend. 54 00:05:01,320 --> 00:05:10,990 So the first question and this has come up in a couple of other talks today are all aspects of conscious experience, valuable or only some valuable. 55 00:05:10,990 --> 00:05:14,440 And I'm open to further discussion and disagreement about this. 56 00:05:14,440 --> 00:05:18,790 But but in my view, it's not all aspects. It is only some. 57 00:05:18,790 --> 00:05:22,630 So consider the following client. I apologise because it's a bit of a mouthful, 58 00:05:22,630 --> 00:05:27,970 but the claim says it's necessary and sufficient for the presence of some non 59 00:05:27,970 --> 00:05:32,410 derivative value in a conscious experience that the experience has evaluative, 60 00:05:32,410 --> 00:05:38,800 phenomenal properties that essentially contain affective properties. Now I really apologise for that's terrible writing. 61 00:05:38,800 --> 00:05:46,620 So what I was trying to. Do with that, evaluative properties that essentially contain affective properties is get affecte into the mix, 62 00:05:46,620 --> 00:05:49,260 and what I'm really doing is I'm gesturing towards it, 63 00:05:49,260 --> 00:05:56,970 ostensibly so in the philosophy of mind plus and cognitive science, there's no real agreement on a kind of taxonomy for different property types. 64 00:05:56,970 --> 00:05:59,070 I mean, people have tried to do this. 65 00:05:59,070 --> 00:06:04,500 So when I talk about affective properties, I really am just hoping you recognise the things that I'm gesturing towards. 66 00:06:04,500 --> 00:06:09,480 So things like painful ness and pleasantness count, but other things count as well. 67 00:06:09,480 --> 00:06:16,440 The kind of gut located unease you might feel during food poisoning, chess centred home first love or even second or third love. 68 00:06:16,440 --> 00:06:23,190 If you're so lucky, the kind of strong urge to move in the quickening of attention when you're suddenly frightened that can be affected, 69 00:06:23,190 --> 00:06:32,310 the gnawing of boredom, the bubbling frustration of reading bad philosophy or hearing an impossibly abstruse talk in philosophy. 70 00:06:32,310 --> 00:06:35,100 All these things are kind of can be affective. 71 00:06:35,100 --> 00:06:42,240 And what I'm saying with this affective evaluative claim is without this without this phenomenon logically recognisable valence affective valence, 72 00:06:42,240 --> 00:06:46,110 a conscious experience would not be non derivative valuable. 73 00:06:46,110 --> 00:06:52,440 With this, this element, this affect development, then the experience bears at least some value. 74 00:06:52,440 --> 00:06:56,700 OK, so that's how I kind of want to answer the first claim. I'll just share a case with you. 75 00:06:56,700 --> 00:07:02,670 That's not mine. Andrew Leigh recently published a paper on the intrinsic value of phenomenal consciousness in philosophical studies, 76 00:07:02,670 --> 00:07:09,660 and he says, Well, look, consider two worlds that are empty, save for a single creature inhabiting each world. 77 00:07:09,660 --> 00:07:15,900 And in the first world, you have a maximally simple, conscious experience that lacks any valence and experience of slight brightness, he says. 78 00:07:15,900 --> 00:07:21,510 In the Second World, the creature is not conscious at all. And what Li says this is just Lee's intuition, 79 00:07:21,510 --> 00:07:29,490 and it's consistent with my affective evaluative is and neither world is there any value in virtue of what's going on with those two creatures. 80 00:07:29,490 --> 00:07:34,260 So the experience of slight brightness on its own? Not intrinsically, he says. 81 00:07:34,260 --> 00:07:41,850 Intrinsically, that's a non derivative, but not non derivative. Li valuable open to disagreement on that front, but that's the first thing. 82 00:07:41,850 --> 00:07:45,840 Now I was just talking there about the value that's present within consciousness. 83 00:07:45,840 --> 00:07:53,010 We now know, of course, that a lot of our mental life goes on in non-conscious regions of the mind. 84 00:07:53,010 --> 00:07:58,980 And so a further question is, are non-conscious elements of mental life non derivatives be valuable? 85 00:07:58,980 --> 00:08:08,340 And here again, I answer no without a ton of confidence, but that is what I've tried to say, and it's for four reasons to deal with cases like these. 86 00:08:08,340 --> 00:08:15,390 So I'll just note first that that I googled zombie sleeping beauty looking for a picture and their tongues. 87 00:08:15,390 --> 00:08:20,130 So apparently it's a thing. I'm glad my kids have not found it because it seems rough. 88 00:08:20,130 --> 00:08:26,580 But anyway, tiny resort. He's got a case where she's asking whether there's this kind of beauty and good present in someone's life, 89 00:08:26,580 --> 00:08:31,470 and she imagines Sleeping Beauty and sleeping beauties in a beautiful world. And Sleeping Beauty is herself beautiful. 90 00:08:31,470 --> 00:08:35,370 But she's asleep, and the thought is, if she never wakes up, 91 00:08:35,370 --> 00:08:39,240 then there's not really beauty present in her life, even though the beauty is kind of all around. 92 00:08:39,240 --> 00:08:45,840 But she needs to kind of experientially engage with it and doesn't quite answer the question that I asked. 93 00:08:45,840 --> 00:08:49,170 So we can imagine Zombie Sleeping Beauty so her world doesn't look great, 94 00:08:49,170 --> 00:08:53,400 but we could imagine that it's beautiful or she likes it, at least, and she wakes up. 95 00:08:53,400 --> 00:09:01,980 But she's a philosophical zombie. She's not conscious. And so the intuition that I'm here kind of siding with is the thought that there's not non 96 00:09:01,980 --> 00:09:06,720 derivative value there in that world and not ends zombie sleeping beauty's life either, 97 00:09:06,720 --> 00:09:10,420 because none of it's conscious and not aware that people will disagree. 98 00:09:10,420 --> 00:09:17,550 My experience is that not many will disagree, but there's always a few. And Walter, I think Neil Levy has disagreed with me about this anyway, 99 00:09:17,550 --> 00:09:21,270 but that's what I kind of want to say, which gets me to this strong evaluative claim. 100 00:09:21,270 --> 00:09:25,500 It's necessary and sufficient for the presence of some non derivative value in a subject's 101 00:09:25,500 --> 00:09:30,450 mental life that the mental life contain these episodes that have the affective properties. 102 00:09:30,450 --> 00:09:39,000 So, OK, the idea then, is consciousness in some sense can disclose items of value. 103 00:09:39,000 --> 00:09:43,050 But really, the thing I'm pressing on here is that it creates items of value for the subject. 104 00:09:43,050 --> 00:09:50,310 To my mind, phenomenal value. When you have non derivative value, that's there is non derivative of the valuable full stop. 105 00:09:50,310 --> 00:10:00,240 OK. Now we can ask a further question, what bears the non derivative value, phenomenal properties or conscious experiences? 106 00:10:00,240 --> 00:10:05,790 And this is a bit abstract. The reason that I bring it up here is I think it's actually important. 107 00:10:05,790 --> 00:10:11,160 Or at least it helped me to see a way that I might not have to be a hedonist and just focus on the valence. 108 00:10:11,160 --> 00:10:15,240 Because if you think it's just the properties that bear non derivative value, 109 00:10:15,240 --> 00:10:19,170 it becomes pretty easy to shave the valence properties away in any given experience. 110 00:10:19,170 --> 00:10:23,250 That's the only thing that matters pleasure and pain, plus more sophisticated emotions. That's it. 111 00:10:23,250 --> 00:10:29,130 These other aspects of our conscious mental life that aren't balanced don't really make a contribution. 112 00:10:29,130 --> 00:10:36,630 But I want to ask, what if we said that conscious experiences bear some non derivative value? 113 00:10:36,630 --> 00:10:42,960 Then we have to ask this question. That's kind of about mere ology in the philosophy of of what our conscious experiences. 114 00:10:42,960 --> 00:10:47,580 And that's kind of a tough one. So there's this literature on this that I won't dive into here in this talk. 115 00:10:47,580 --> 00:10:52,950 But the basic idea is there's a lot going on in our minds. There's a lot going on in my mind right now. 116 00:10:52,950 --> 00:11:00,360 I'm kind of seeing your faces. I'm hearing my own voice and feeling my body move, and there's been stuff going on for me all day long. 117 00:11:00,360 --> 00:11:06,090 Right? And it seems like some of those things clustered together in the things that we might call experiences. 118 00:11:06,090 --> 00:11:09,870 Others are that maybe don't fit within the particular experience I'm having right now. 119 00:11:09,870 --> 00:11:17,950 And so we can debate how is it that the phenomenal properties that in some sense constitute our experiences get clustered together? 120 00:11:17,950 --> 00:11:24,510 OK, now here I'm just reporting what I think is the most plausible view, and it's one that there's still some debate over the details, 121 00:11:24,510 --> 00:11:30,750 but people like Tim Bain and Christopher Hill and others have settled on this thought that we probably should be pluralist about this kind of thing. 122 00:11:30,750 --> 00:11:36,690 There seems to be many legitimate ways to build a legitimate experience, for example, having a single property alone. 123 00:11:36,690 --> 00:11:42,270 So a subject instantiate a phenomenal property at a time that doesn't seem like too bad a way to have an experience. 124 00:11:42,270 --> 00:11:49,380 But often we have these more complex experiences, and here I'm following people like [INAUDIBLE] and bang to say, 125 00:11:49,380 --> 00:11:55,110 here's kind of the idea about what constitutes a conscious experience that's more complex than a single property. 126 00:11:55,110 --> 00:12:01,650 If you have a set of properties that are unified in the right way by at least one legitimate unity relation, 127 00:12:01,650 --> 00:12:03,630 and there are lots of candidates for these, 128 00:12:03,630 --> 00:12:09,390 so 10 bands got a whole book where he emphasises and he thinks it's kind of primitive this relation of consciousness. 129 00:12:09,390 --> 00:12:15,300 So right now, I'm having auditory experiences, visual experiences, proprioceptive experiences, cognitive experiences. 130 00:12:15,300 --> 00:12:18,750 If you're going for that kind of thing, I'm shifting my attention all over the room. 131 00:12:18,750 --> 00:12:24,240 These kinds of things, and they're all kind of just present at the same time, they're co conscious. 132 00:12:24,240 --> 00:12:29,070 Christopher Hill thinks that we can probably explain consciousness away in the sense that it's not primitive, 133 00:12:29,070 --> 00:12:33,660 but there might be multiple overlapping relations that cognitive science can help explain. 134 00:12:33,660 --> 00:12:38,670 So perceptual integration that gives us experiences as a unified objects in time and space, 135 00:12:38,670 --> 00:12:44,490 or temporal integration that gives us experiences of change or the kinds of integration in there's multiple different kinds, 136 00:12:44,490 --> 00:12:49,110 really, because there's different kinds of memory, but the kinds of integration that memory might provide for. 137 00:12:49,110 --> 00:12:53,580 And I want to say I don't have a full theory of the right set of unity relations, 138 00:12:53,580 --> 00:12:59,160 but we're going to need something like that and this is going to come up again when I get to the practical bits. 139 00:12:59,160 --> 00:13:09,330 So fourth question. How do we determine how much value and experience bears now this is a tough one and I have no good answer for it, 140 00:13:09,330 --> 00:13:12,450 so I want to replace this question with another one. 141 00:13:12,450 --> 00:13:17,340 That kind of sub question at least work towards something that can be useful for ethics. 142 00:13:17,340 --> 00:13:22,590 And so this question is, do non-violence phenomenal properties contribute to the value and experience? 143 00:13:22,590 --> 00:13:31,080 So so at any given time, you might be having an experience that has some valence associated with all sorts of other things going on as well. 144 00:13:31,080 --> 00:13:32,700 And the question is, 145 00:13:32,700 --> 00:13:40,440 is it just the valence things that are important for the value or some experience is very valuable in part in virtue of non-violence aspects. 146 00:13:40,440 --> 00:13:45,840 And I think the answer is is yes, and I try to go to some lengths in the book to illustrate this. 147 00:13:45,840 --> 00:13:50,730 But it seems to me that it's really hard to understand the value that really some 148 00:13:50,730 --> 00:13:55,620 of the richer experiences we have bear unless we include all sorts of things. 149 00:13:55,620 --> 00:14:03,480 That's not just the valence. So grief, it seems to me, can be a really intense and either very valuable or less valuable experience in some part, 150 00:14:03,480 --> 00:14:07,920 not just about the kind of sensory affect that's associated with it, but it's about the object of grief, 151 00:14:07,920 --> 00:14:14,550 what it's about the place in one's life that attachments to memory and knowledge and these sorts of things about whatever it is that one's lost. 152 00:14:14,550 --> 00:14:20,160 And you can think the same thing about pride and the achievements of a child or something like that. 153 00:14:20,160 --> 00:14:27,690 You could think the same thing about love. It seems hard to me to understand the intense value of certain types of anticipation unless we 154 00:14:27,690 --> 00:14:33,390 build in certain kinds of cognitive elements so that you know what the anticipation is about. 155 00:14:33,390 --> 00:14:42,290 So the kind of thing I'm gesturing towards here is available as a kind of interpretation of this quote from from William James. 156 00:14:42,290 --> 00:14:47,730 I think there are other ways to interpret it, but he's getting it, something I think is interesting. 157 00:14:47,730 --> 00:14:53,850 So he says wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it there, 158 00:14:53,850 --> 00:14:58,770 the life becomes genuinely significant and by eagerness, here I'm reading kind of these affective properties. 159 00:14:58,770 --> 00:15:02,880 But look, the affective properties get bound up in our mental life and all sorts of rich ways. 160 00:15:02,880 --> 00:15:05,380 Sometimes the eagerness is more narrow, but the motor activity, 161 00:15:05,380 --> 00:15:09,180 sometimes the perceptions and times of the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. 162 00:15:09,180 --> 00:15:12,300 But wherever it's found, there's the zest, the tingle, 163 00:15:12,300 --> 00:15:20,220 the excitement of reality and there is importance and the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be. 164 00:15:20,220 --> 00:15:25,020 OK, so this is all still a little bit abstract, 165 00:15:25,020 --> 00:15:29,580 but I think from here we can start to work towards something that gets us in the direction of thinking more 166 00:15:29,580 --> 00:15:35,160 practically so we can start to work towards a way to think about a subject's capacity for phenomenal value. 167 00:15:35,160 --> 00:15:39,840 So I have no theory about what makes any particular experience better than another. 168 00:15:39,840 --> 00:15:44,820 And I'm not sure that we need any such thing if we want to really be practical ethicists about the value of consciousness. 169 00:15:44,820 --> 00:15:51,690 But it does really help to have some sense of a subject's capacity for phenomenal value. 170 00:15:51,690 --> 00:15:58,440 So here's where I introduce the following kind of notion it's a notion I call the subject's evaluative space. 171 00:15:58,440 --> 00:16:06,600 This is a space of the kinds of evaluative experiences, affective experiences that are available to a subject. 172 00:16:06,600 --> 00:16:14,010 So it's constituted by the psychological toolkit that allows you to construct the experiences that you wind up constructing. 173 00:16:14,010 --> 00:16:18,900 It's going to include lots of capacities, probably most of them, not all of our psychological capacities. 174 00:16:18,900 --> 00:16:21,990 So whatever's going on in the spinal cord that lets us walk without much effort, 175 00:16:21,990 --> 00:16:26,730 most of the time might not contribute, but a lot of the other ones will contribute. 176 00:16:26,730 --> 00:16:35,370 And here's how I try to think about. I guess adding some structure to this notion of an evaluative space. 177 00:16:35,370 --> 00:16:40,980 So three dimensions in particular along which we might think about how to measure an evaluative space, 178 00:16:40,980 --> 00:16:47,700 one is size, and that's just the number of properties a subject is capable of ing across different experiences. 179 00:16:47,700 --> 00:16:53,940 So you can imagine a being with 15 sensory modalities or 38 sensory modalities, and there's debate about how many humans have. 180 00:16:53,940 --> 00:16:56,850 There's the traditional five other people think now we got it. 181 00:16:56,850 --> 00:17:00,900 We got to accommodate bodily senses in a different way and we've got to accommodate taste. 182 00:17:00,900 --> 00:17:08,280 And so maybe it's more like seven or eight. The size of an evaluative space would grow if you were able to tack on lots of sensory modalities. 183 00:17:08,280 --> 00:17:12,450 So you know, there's debates about whether we really depend on echolocation in some ways, 184 00:17:12,450 --> 00:17:18,900 like slightly different from bats, but some people seem to be able to do it. I would sign up for mental modification that gave me echolocation. 185 00:17:18,900 --> 00:17:24,630 I think that would be cool. I also think it would grow my value to space and might add to the value in my mental life. 186 00:17:24,630 --> 00:17:28,020 There's a second dimension that I think of in terms of complexity, 187 00:17:28,020 --> 00:17:32,580 and this is where these unity relations become important because this is something like the number of 188 00:17:32,580 --> 00:17:39,990 properties and property types that a subject can bring together under a legitimate unity relation. 189 00:17:39,990 --> 00:17:47,550 So it says something like how complicated a particular experience could become. 190 00:17:47,550 --> 00:17:54,510 And then there's a third dimension that I think of in terms of coherence, and I think of coherence here as a kind of relation between experiences, 191 00:17:54,510 --> 00:17:59,280 although it's going to influence the character of particular experiences. 192 00:17:59,280 --> 00:18:03,300 So it's something like a relation of sense making that holds between experiences. 193 00:18:03,300 --> 00:18:08,250 I think I need to think of a little bit better ways to articulate this. 194 00:18:08,250 --> 00:18:15,960 So I'm open to hearing from you about that. But look, the basic idea here is with the great Bob Ross. 195 00:18:15,960 --> 00:18:20,900 If you put me in a room and said, you know, make a nice painting, 196 00:18:20,900 --> 00:18:25,830 what I'm able to make is going to depend in part on the tools that are available to me. 197 00:18:25,830 --> 00:18:29,730 What kinds of colours do I have? What kinds of brushes do I have? What kinds of tools do I have? 198 00:18:29,730 --> 00:18:33,900 If I just have one colour, I can't do much. Not even Bob Ross could do much with just one colour. 199 00:18:33,900 --> 00:18:38,430 Probably. Maybe a rabbit could do something cool with one colour. I doubt Bob Ross could. 200 00:18:38,430 --> 00:18:45,000 So the point about psychological toolkits constructing evaluative spaces is the more tools you have, then the bigger the more complex. 201 00:18:45,000 --> 00:18:49,360 Perhaps the more coherent your mental life is going to be. 202 00:18:49,360 --> 00:18:59,580 So then we can ask what's the relationship between a subject's evaluative space and the non derivative value that's present in her mental life? 203 00:18:59,580 --> 00:19:04,140 And what I want to say is increases in these things and size, 204 00:19:04,140 --> 00:19:10,440 complexity and coherence are associated with higher potentials for value and dis value within a conscious mental life, 205 00:19:10,440 --> 00:19:14,850 and we can call this just have a placeholder for it. Phenomenal richness. 206 00:19:14,850 --> 00:19:19,230 Now there is other work to be done work that I hope to do. I haven't done, really. 207 00:19:19,230 --> 00:19:25,680 Others could probably do it just as well or better in thinking about other ways to carve up the evaluative space. 208 00:19:25,680 --> 00:19:31,770 So in my view, I think complexity is more important than size. I think coherence is probably more important than either. 209 00:19:31,770 --> 00:19:38,190 So you can imagine. So, Walter, great minds built slides are like you can imagine someone like like how on and have how is quite this way, 210 00:19:38,190 --> 00:19:44,700 but you can imagine a massively parallel processing intelligence that is able to perform all sorts of tasks, 211 00:19:44,700 --> 00:19:49,650 but there's no coherence to its mental life. It's just kind of one little thing after another. 212 00:19:49,650 --> 00:19:53,790 And to the extent that everything is kind of parallel processing and there's no coherence to the mental life, 213 00:19:53,790 --> 00:19:58,890 you lose the sense that this is really a subject and might just be a disjointed series of operations. 214 00:19:58,890 --> 00:20:04,890 So I think coherence really is important when we think about the value of our conscious subject's mental 215 00:20:04,890 --> 00:20:13,450 life and when it comes to complexity just to help maybe locate what I'm saying in some analogous space. 216 00:20:13,450 --> 00:20:16,630 I agree with what Alan Goldman here says about the value of aesthetic experience, 217 00:20:16,630 --> 00:20:21,370 not just kind of want to generalise it in some ways to all experience. So he talks about engaging with art, 218 00:20:21,370 --> 00:20:29,110 and he talks about this simultaneous challenge and engagement of all our mental capacities in the most complex experiences of engaging with art. 219 00:20:29,110 --> 00:20:36,760 So perceptual, cognitive, affective, imaginative, even volitional, he in appreciation of the relations amongst aspects, elements of artworks. 220 00:20:36,760 --> 00:20:40,660 Such engagement creates a rich and intense mental experience imbued with meanings 221 00:20:40,660 --> 00:20:45,650 from all these faculties operating in tandem and informing one another. And I'm thinking. 222 00:20:45,650 --> 00:20:52,200 Something like that sounds right to me in terms of my own experience of engaging with good art and then something about that seems right, 223 00:20:52,200 --> 00:20:59,960 team, when I think about some of the more valuable experiences, they seem to engage a lot of elements that go into my. 224 00:20:59,960 --> 00:21:09,230 Evaluative space. OK, so that's a real quick tour through some theoretical considerations that have to do with the value of consciousness, 225 00:21:09,230 --> 00:21:16,220 and now I want to talk a little bit about what kinds of implications there might be for moral status. 226 00:21:16,220 --> 00:21:22,850 So the first thing to say is, I think there are some similarities between the view I'm articulating and a family 227 00:21:22,850 --> 00:21:27,110 of views that these days often called sophisticated cognitive capacity views. 228 00:21:27,110 --> 00:21:30,470 And some people in this room have argued for versions of these kinds of views. 229 00:21:30,470 --> 00:21:38,910 So I agree with David when he says some beings might deserve consideration in proportion to their cognitive, emotional and social complexity. 230 00:21:38,910 --> 00:21:47,090 And you might think that one thing I'm doing is just trying to emphasise the consciousness aspect of this thing in a way that tracks more with, 231 00:21:47,090 --> 00:21:49,730 I suppose, the way I think about value and mental life. 232 00:21:49,730 --> 00:21:55,790 But one thing to point out, although I want to come back to the sophisticated cognitive capacity thing and say that we can be friends. 233 00:21:55,790 --> 00:21:59,120 The phenomenal value view that I'm articulating really is different in some ways. 234 00:21:59,120 --> 00:22:05,300 I mean, it's conceptually different because something could have sophisticated cognitive capacities without consciousness. 235 00:22:05,300 --> 00:22:08,900 And I would think not much or any value there. 236 00:22:08,900 --> 00:22:13,860 So if there's just access consciousness and saying, I don't really think access consciousness is necessarily a thing. 237 00:22:13,860 --> 00:22:20,060 So I think there's ways that I could be friends with that view. But you might think just access consciousness. 238 00:22:20,060 --> 00:22:25,210 No phenomenal consciousness. My view predicts not much value there. And some of the implications are different. 239 00:22:25,210 --> 00:22:32,300 So sometimes when people talk about sophisticated cognitive capacities, there seems to be a quick slide from cognitive to intelligent. 240 00:22:32,300 --> 00:22:38,360 And that's really not what I'm saying, because I'm not even sure exactly what intelligence is supposed to be. 241 00:22:38,360 --> 00:22:43,910 I don't think it's smarts that matter so much as something more like having a rich, affective life. 242 00:22:43,910 --> 00:22:50,150 That's more important for my view. So, OK, a few questions that have come up in the literature. 243 00:22:50,150 --> 00:22:53,810 I just want to breeze through these. But this will help locate maybe the view a little bit. 244 00:22:53,810 --> 00:23:01,880 So on this kind of view, are humans special? Well, the View doesn't give us any special reason to think so, but it certainly doesn't rule it out. 245 00:23:01,880 --> 00:23:07,550 So it could be as an empirical matter. We look at the sophistication of the mental lives of humans, 246 00:23:07,550 --> 00:23:12,740 and they compare very favourably to all other animals that could that could turn out to be right. 247 00:23:12,740 --> 00:23:17,180 But the view itself doesn't say anything about that. It could be that we're on a plane with several other animal types. 248 00:23:17,180 --> 00:23:22,820 It could be that we're on a plane. There's a lot of room for enhancement. Before you move significantly out of the plane that we're in, 249 00:23:22,820 --> 00:23:30,060 that's going to require some difficult work or other degrees of moral status on this kind of view. 250 00:23:30,060 --> 00:23:36,170 I think almost certainly, it seems like phenomenal richness is degree, so moral status could be. 251 00:23:36,170 --> 00:23:40,910 Is there such a thing as full moral status? I don't disagree that that can be a convenient fiction. 252 00:23:40,910 --> 00:23:45,170 I think Sarah said earlier, but I think there's no particularly good reason to think so. 253 00:23:45,170 --> 00:23:50,570 You can imagine the phenomenal richness growing almost indefinitely. 254 00:23:50,570 --> 00:23:52,040 Now here's the thing I really want to talk about. 255 00:23:52,040 --> 00:23:59,120 This is the way the last, you know, nine minutes or so the talk, how to determine the degrees and levels of moral status. 256 00:23:59,120 --> 00:24:05,840 And I was extremely worried about talking about these things because it just seems so insanely speculative. 257 00:24:05,840 --> 00:24:11,210 But I'm really glad to have heard Tom and Ruth, who sounded less speculative and presented their thing in the spirit of hope. 258 00:24:11,210 --> 00:24:15,440 Well, I'll present mine in the same spirit. 259 00:24:15,440 --> 00:24:21,740 What I want to say about how to go about this is it's possible to think about mapping a kind 260 00:24:21,740 --> 00:24:26,490 of axial allergy of mental value or phenomenal value onto a psychological architecture. 261 00:24:26,490 --> 00:24:32,180 Right? So we're going to be asking questions like what capacities are those that enhance the evaluative space? 262 00:24:32,180 --> 00:24:36,710 That's if you accept my view. So some forms of memory might be really important. 263 00:24:36,710 --> 00:24:42,650 You'd have to make the arguments, but that could be critical. Some kinds of cognitive control might be really important. 264 00:24:42,650 --> 00:24:49,550 Some forms of metacognition might be really important. Now, I haven't done this work, so I'm just offering some suggestions. 265 00:24:49,550 --> 00:24:54,590 But the point is a science of what you might call high richness structures is possible. 266 00:24:54,590 --> 00:24:59,580 It's largely uncharted. It would be massively interdisciplinary. It would be difficult in lots of ways. 267 00:24:59,580 --> 00:25:07,550 So. So there are some places we could try to draw from. So this is just a slide that comes from some papers Tim Baynes worked on with other people, 268 00:25:07,550 --> 00:25:14,120 with scientists trying to understand levels of consciousness in response to work on the difference being persistent vegetative state, 269 00:25:14,120 --> 00:25:16,850 minimally conscious state emergency, minimally conscious state. 270 00:25:16,850 --> 00:25:20,870 It turns out it's difficult empirically and conceptually to even think about the different 271 00:25:20,870 --> 00:25:25,850 dimensions we might put a mind in when we talk about the levels of consciousness, 272 00:25:25,850 --> 00:25:30,710 and that's just for human beings. But some of that work is being done. I mean, this is very recent stuff. 273 00:25:30,710 --> 00:25:35,420 Other people have worked on levels of self-awareness, and humans are tracking it across development. 274 00:25:35,420 --> 00:25:41,450 So what's the level of self-awareness that 18 months? Twenty four months at four years full adulthood? 275 00:25:41,450 --> 00:25:46,580 And so those kinds of ways to think about taxonomy, the mind might offer some guidance. 276 00:25:46,580 --> 00:25:50,310 But this is just to say that it's still going to take a lot of work to think about this, 277 00:25:50,310 --> 00:25:54,140 and you're going to have to work closely with cognitive pathologists that work with animals. 278 00:25:54,140 --> 00:25:59,330 And so it's going to be difficult. Another thing to point out is the aims of such a kind of. 279 00:25:59,330 --> 00:26:07,670 Science, a science of what I'm calling high rates of structures might be primarily moral and only secondarily about kind of functional explanations, 280 00:26:07,670 --> 00:26:11,630 so you really might need a lot of collaboration with ethicists and scientists. 281 00:26:11,630 --> 00:26:17,330 There's no guarantee that coming up with some kind of metric for the richness of phenomenal value. 282 00:26:17,330 --> 00:26:23,240 Or if you want to jettison my view and you're just thinking about a metric for levels of moral status, which fine, 283 00:26:23,240 --> 00:26:26,930 there's no guarantee that any of that's going to map cleanly onto what scientists care about initially, 284 00:26:26,930 --> 00:26:31,880 which is some kind of functional upshot, some kind of explanation of the nature of these mines. 285 00:26:31,880 --> 00:26:35,240 So so it could turn out that it's actually really useful to think of things in this way. 286 00:26:35,240 --> 00:26:44,600 Scientifically, not morally, but that's not guaranteed. So some moral motivation, it seems to me, is just kind of explicit in this kind of project. 287 00:26:44,600 --> 00:26:49,610 But I think we can envision some steps for making this practical. 288 00:26:49,610 --> 00:26:52,550 And here is where I think it is important to kind of recruit. 289 00:26:52,550 --> 00:26:59,060 So for a review like mine to recruit sophisticated cognitive capacity proponents here because we might have minor quibbles, 290 00:26:59,060 --> 00:27:04,670 but look what we end up saying about levels of moral status across the animal kingdom and across the machine kingdom, 291 00:27:04,670 --> 00:27:11,300 if it comes to that might end up being similar enough to build some kind of consensus and actually have a view that people can can work with. 292 00:27:11,300 --> 00:27:15,290 Right? I mean, that's going to be tough, but that's the hope, right? 293 00:27:15,290 --> 00:27:21,210 So in a recent issue of the journal Animal Sentinels, Jonathan Birch is a philosopher biologist. 294 00:27:21,210 --> 00:27:29,420 London tries to talk about a precautionary principle for animal protection, legislation for research on animals, this kind of thing. 295 00:27:29,420 --> 00:27:35,600 And here's what he settles on. He makes two claims, he says, for the purposes of formulating animal protection legislation. 296 00:27:35,600 --> 00:27:40,620 Think about it like this there's sufficient evidence that animals of a particular order. 297 00:27:40,620 --> 00:27:47,630 It's pretty broad. Our sentiment if they're statistically significant evidence obtained by experiments that meet normal scientific 298 00:27:47,630 --> 00:27:53,060 standards of the presence of at least one credible indicator of sentence and at least one species of that order. 299 00:27:53,060 --> 00:27:58,490 This is a very precautionary kind of measure, but he thinks it's warranted because he thinks sentences are very valuable, OK? 300 00:27:58,490 --> 00:28:06,710 He goes on to say, Well, look include then. So that's kind of going to kind of be our guidance for determining whether some animal is sentient. 301 00:28:06,710 --> 00:28:11,180 Look at their order. Look at the science. Is there one credible indicator? 302 00:28:11,180 --> 00:28:16,580 Then we should include within the scope of animal protection legislation, all animals for which the evidence of sentence is sufficient. 303 00:28:16,580 --> 00:28:23,780 So you go by the orders and you get people into the club. Now this already kind of burgeoning is recognises this. 304 00:28:23,780 --> 00:28:28,730 To some degree, this already starts to map out the need for some kind of collaboration because he says, 305 00:28:28,730 --> 00:28:34,920 you're going to need to keep an updated list of the best indicators of sentence if this is what you want to do, right? 306 00:28:34,920 --> 00:28:39,440 You need to be publicly available when you need to kind of generally agree on them. 307 00:28:39,440 --> 00:28:43,160 Now, I think that's an interesting proposal. I think it's plausible in some ways. 308 00:28:43,160 --> 00:28:50,150 But one thing to note about it is, in many cases, it's not going to be sentience alone, it's going to be these matters of degree. 309 00:28:50,150 --> 00:28:51,380 That's important. 310 00:28:51,380 --> 00:28:57,950 And this is something that's been live in some of the other discussions that Colin Klein, in a response to Birch, points the same thing out. 311 00:28:57,950 --> 00:29:01,850 So he says, we'll think about it like this. There's a chance that deca pods are sentient. 312 00:29:01,850 --> 00:29:06,020 So this precautionary principle that birds offer says we'll avoid using them in research. 313 00:29:06,020 --> 00:29:10,040 But perhaps just imagine deca part research could do something great for humans, 314 00:29:10,040 --> 00:29:15,260 could help cure cancer or whatever, prevent untold harm to lots of other fascinating things. 315 00:29:15,260 --> 00:29:23,420 It's hard to know what to do in that case. So he says the precautionary principle has to be reformulated in terms of proportionality. 316 00:29:23,420 --> 00:29:26,750 And this is true not just to think about the human vs. animal case. 317 00:29:26,750 --> 00:29:34,400 So Peter Gottfried Smith in a recent article, is talking about the difference between the conscious lives of certain kinds of animals. 318 00:29:34,400 --> 00:29:42,650 And he says, here's a thing that might be true in the animal kingdom. Maybe complex perception and evaluation are separable. 319 00:29:42,650 --> 00:29:49,490 He says that so then we have this possibility that there are two kinds of phenomena that we kind of vaguely grouped together as subjective experience, 320 00:29:49,490 --> 00:29:52,460 and we're not tempted to distinguish them because they're both president us. 321 00:29:52,460 --> 00:29:57,590 But then when you actually look at the animal kingdom and how people behave, sometimes they're found separately. 322 00:29:57,590 --> 00:30:02,630 And he suggests that spiders might be an example of something that has very complex perception. 323 00:30:02,630 --> 00:30:09,050 It's a great tracker of things in the environment, but scores low with respect to these kinds of motivational, perhaps affective feelings. 324 00:30:09,050 --> 00:30:15,500 So this is maybe they're sophisticated trackers of the world, but their motivation, robotic and perhaps gastropods are the exact opposite. 325 00:30:15,500 --> 00:30:21,230 So they don't seem to have very complex perception, but they seem to be more motivational, sophisticated now, 326 00:30:21,230 --> 00:30:25,160 if that's right than you might have choices to make in the event that you really need 327 00:30:25,160 --> 00:30:30,660 to use one of these animals in certain forms of research or something like that. Or maybe you like to eat both of these things. 328 00:30:30,660 --> 00:30:35,720 I mean, I doubt it, but I wouldn't put it past hipsters, right? 329 00:30:35,720 --> 00:30:36,720 So you got to make choices, 330 00:30:36,720 --> 00:30:42,740 and then you really have to start to think about the structure of their mental lives in these matters of degree become very important. 331 00:30:42,740 --> 00:30:47,690 So the suggestion is, if we're working towards this, you would be wanting to keep a revised and updated list, 332 00:30:47,690 --> 00:30:51,950 not just of markers of sentiments, but something like levels of phenomenal richness. 333 00:30:51,950 --> 00:30:59,240 That's if you believe the theory that I've offered. So these would be, in my case, this is where the unity relation stuff becomes important to. 334 00:30:59,240 --> 00:31:03,830 Is this, it seems to me, would be capacities that enable the construction of complex experiences, 335 00:31:03,830 --> 00:31:09,050 these would be capacities that enable kind of integration between different elements of your mind. 336 00:31:09,050 --> 00:31:17,360 So you can think about finding the operationalise of a unity relations and thinking about what kinds of capacities give species those to build richer, 337 00:31:17,360 --> 00:31:22,350 more sophisticated mental lives. And so then you would want to. 338 00:31:22,350 --> 00:31:28,790 Do something like sort these entities in the broad classes. And here pragmatism would probably play a big role. 339 00:31:28,790 --> 00:31:33,360 So I agree with everyone else who said, you don't you probably don't want forty six levels. 340 00:31:33,360 --> 00:31:36,990 For practical purposes and you would want to err on the side of caution. 341 00:31:36,990 --> 00:31:41,890 So here's just a really toy example just moderating virtuous language slightly. 342 00:31:41,890 --> 00:31:48,600 So you might say, for the purposes of formulating animal protection legislation, there's sufficient evidence that animals of a particular group. 343 00:31:48,600 --> 00:31:52,560 I'm not saying order because I'm not exactly sure how best to do it, 344 00:31:52,560 --> 00:31:59,400 but a particular group bear phenomenal value to Level X. If statistically significant evidence is found obtained by experiments 345 00:31:59,400 --> 00:32:04,710 that meet the normal standards of the presence of at least one credible indicator of whatever level we're talking about. 346 00:32:04,710 --> 00:32:07,980 And then you could be if you want to be this cautious, you could do what Bush doesn't say. 347 00:32:07,980 --> 00:32:12,300 Animal protection legislation has to be updated with guidance regarding what it means. 348 00:32:12,300 --> 00:32:15,420 So implications of meeting level hacks and this is the thing that Tom Ruth 349 00:32:15,420 --> 00:32:22,600 was talking about terms of spelling out the rights that might be associated, the obligations that might be associated with different levels. 350 00:32:22,600 --> 00:32:27,940 OK. So I'm basically done, I'll just quickly review the main claims that I made, 351 00:32:27,940 --> 00:32:31,720 I said it seems to me that phenomenal consciousness bears non derivative value. 352 00:32:31,720 --> 00:32:38,800 And I offered a kind of picture of how that happens is that experience is bear value and they do so in virtue of affective properties, 353 00:32:38,800 --> 00:32:45,010 but also in virtue of these relations, of unity and binding and integration between multiple property types. 354 00:32:45,010 --> 00:32:47,800 I suggested that I didn't really argue for it, 355 00:32:47,800 --> 00:32:54,850 but I suggested a more sophisticated evaluative spaces are associated with higher potentials for value and this value and a mental life. 356 00:32:54,850 --> 00:33:01,600 And so then in the practical bit, I said it's possible to map psychological architectures onto evaluative spaces. 357 00:33:01,600 --> 00:33:05,920 That's going to be a lot of work getting these kinds of maps up and running. But you could do it. 358 00:33:05,920 --> 00:33:11,800 It would then be possible to locate levels of phenomenal richness in the kind of space of conscious entities. 359 00:33:11,800 --> 00:33:16,660 And then it would be possible to do things like formulate precautionary principles that could be sensitive to some degree, 360 00:33:16,660 --> 00:33:28,640 to the proportionality of value. OK, thanks.