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.
So I'll talk for about two thirds of the talk about some theoretical considerations related to the grounds of moral status.
And I want to I'll be going over some things I said in a recent book, maybe tweaking some of them slightly.
But what I want to really do is work towards the last third of the talk where
I want to try to begin to build some bridges towards some practical things.
Thinking about it, implement a certain view about the grounds of moral status.
And hopefully when I get to that part, we'll see some.
Some things I want to say are congenial to what Ruth and Tom we're talking about,
so I was very excited by some of the things they said, and so we'll see how that goes.
Now I'm going to focus mostly on the value of consciousness when I deal with the theoretical considerations.
So when someone like Nabokov says of the marvel of consciousness,
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.
But it resonates with me, and it seems to me that consciousness is something can be something that's highly valuable.
And so in a book that came out last year called Consciousness and Moral Status,
I offer an account of what what I call non derivative value within a mental life.
And at the centre of the account is phenomenal consciousness. So I'm going to talk mostly about that for the next few minutes.
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.
But the basic idea here is non derivative value is at least one ground of moral status.
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.
I don't mean to give a full account of moral status with this link between non derivative values,
so I'm happy to allow room for non derivative value to be elsewhere in non mental parts of the world.
I'm not saying that's true. I'm just not saying it's not true. I have some friends that live in Colorado,
and they want to think about wilderness as having non derivative value in ecosystems as having moral status,
and I just don't want to argue against that.
I'm also happy to allow for other grounds for moral status, although I won't say anything in particular about them here.
It's just to say I'm not trying to be imperialistic with what I say about moral status here.
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.
It's to some degree in practical ethics. Although practical ethicists have have more to say.
That's not just depending upon the assumption, but the idea is at least with respect to some experiences,
especially violent experiences like pleasure and pain. These kinds of experiences bear value, and they ground some degree of moral status.
So if we were to find out that some type of entity, some animal experiences pain for the first time, we find this out.
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.
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.
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,
we're just focussing on the kind of most simplistic, hypnotic states.
We can look committed to a kind of crude hedonism. And I take it that most of us aren't crude hedonist.
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.
Or, as I call it, phenomenal value just for short. But actually, I'm not even a sophisticated hedonist, I don't think.
And so my aim in the book and part and part of this talk was at least to try to make
some of the options more transparent for how to think about the value of consciousness.
And here I'm doing something similar to what David was doing earlier,
just presenting a kind of picture because I don't have time to defend every single bit of it.
So when you think about trying to articulate the value of a non derivative value that consciousness might bear,
you run into the following kind of fact. And the fact is that our conscious mental lives are complex variegated.
So our conscious experience at any given time is rich with different sensory modalities.
Humans have a set of these. Some animals have very different ones from us.
These are often integrated in really interesting ways. So a lot of what we experience about the world is the result of multisensory integration.
Sometimes this multi-sensory integration gets combined with other things,
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.
There's all sorts of sorts of other things going on, too. So emotions are there.
There can be moods and background levels of arousal that influence the kind of experience you have at any one time.
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.
So I want to ask just a series of questions and then report some of the answers I've tried to defend.
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.
And I'm open to further discussion and disagreement about this.
But but in my view, it's not all aspects. It is only some.
So consider the following client. I apologise because it's a bit of a mouthful,
but the claim says it's necessary and sufficient for the presence of some non
derivative value in a conscious experience that the experience has evaluative,
phenomenal properties that essentially contain affective properties. Now I really apologise for that's terrible writing.
So what I was trying to. Do with that, evaluative properties that essentially contain affective properties is get affecte into the mix,
and what I'm really doing is I'm gesturing towards it,
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.
I mean, people have tried to do this.
So when I talk about affective properties, I really am just hoping you recognise the things that I'm gesturing towards.
So things like painful ness and pleasantness count, but other things count as well.
The kind of gut located unease you might feel during food poisoning, chess centred home first love or even second or third love.
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,
the gnawing of boredom, the bubbling frustration of reading bad philosophy or hearing an impossibly abstruse talk in philosophy.
All these things are kind of can be affective.
And what I'm saying with this affective evaluative claim is without this without this phenomenon logically recognisable valence affective valence,
a conscious experience would not be non derivative valuable.
With this, this element, this affect development, then the experience bears at least some value.
OK, so that's how I kind of want to answer the first claim. I'll just share a case with you.
That's not mine. Andrew Leigh recently published a paper on the intrinsic value of phenomenal consciousness in philosophical studies,
and he says, Well, look, consider two worlds that are empty, save for a single creature inhabiting each world.
And in the first world, you have a maximally simple, conscious experience that lacks any valence and experience of slight brightness, he says.
In the Second World, the creature is not conscious at all. And what Li says this is just Lee's intuition,
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.
So the experience of slight brightness on its own? Not intrinsically, he says.
Intrinsically, that's a non derivative, but not non derivative. Li valuable open to disagreement on that front, but that's the first thing.
Now I was just talking there about the value that's present within consciousness.
We now know, of course, that a lot of our mental life goes on in non-conscious regions of the mind.
And so a further question is, are non-conscious elements of mental life non derivatives be valuable?
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.
So I'll just note first that that I googled zombie sleeping beauty looking for a picture and their tongues.
So apparently it's a thing. I'm glad my kids have not found it because it seems rough.
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,
and she imagines Sleeping Beauty and sleeping beauties in a beautiful world. And Sleeping Beauty is herself beautiful.
But she's asleep, and the thought is, if she never wakes up,
then there's not really beauty present in her life, even though the beauty is kind of all around.
But she needs to kind of experientially engage with it and doesn't quite answer the question that I asked.
So we can imagine Zombie Sleeping Beauty so her world doesn't look great,
but we could imagine that it's beautiful or she likes it, at least, and she wakes up.
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
derivative value there in that world and not ends zombie sleeping beauty's life either,
because none of it's conscious and not aware that people will disagree.
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,
but that's what I kind of want to say, which gets me to this strong evaluative claim.
It's necessary and sufficient for the presence of some non derivative value in a subject's
mental life that the mental life contain these episodes that have the affective properties.
So, OK, the idea then, is consciousness in some sense can disclose items of value.
But really, the thing I'm pressing on here is that it creates items of value for the subject.
To my mind, phenomenal value. When you have non derivative value, that's there is non derivative of the valuable full stop.
OK. Now we can ask a further question, what bears the non derivative value, phenomenal properties or conscious experiences?
And this is a bit abstract. The reason that I bring it up here is I think it's actually important.
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.
Because if you think it's just the properties that bear non derivative value,
it becomes pretty easy to shave the valence properties away in any given experience.
That's the only thing that matters pleasure and pain, plus more sophisticated emotions. That's it.
These other aspects of our conscious mental life that aren't balanced don't really make a contribution.
But I want to ask, what if we said that conscious experiences bear some non derivative value?
Then we have to ask this question. That's kind of about mere ology in the philosophy of of what our conscious experiences.
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.
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.
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.
Right? And it seems like some of those things clustered together in the things that we might call experiences.
Others are that maybe don't fit within the particular experience I'm having right now.
And so we can debate how is it that the phenomenal properties that in some sense constitute our experiences get clustered together?
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,
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.
There seems to be many legitimate ways to build a legitimate experience, for example, having a single property alone.
So a subject instantiate a phenomenal property at a time that doesn't seem like too bad a way to have an experience.
But often we have these more complex experiences, and here I'm following people like [INAUDIBLE] and bang to say,
here's kind of the idea about what constitutes a conscious experience that's more complex than a single property.
If you have a set of properties that are unified in the right way by at least one legitimate unity relation,
and there are lots of candidates for these,
so 10 bands got a whole book where he emphasises and he thinks it's kind of primitive this relation of consciousness.
So right now, I'm having auditory experiences, visual experiences, proprioceptive experiences, cognitive experiences.
If you're going for that kind of thing, I'm shifting my attention all over the room.
These kinds of things, and they're all kind of just present at the same time, they're co conscious.
Christopher Hill thinks that we can probably explain consciousness away in the sense that it's not primitive,
but there might be multiple overlapping relations that cognitive science can help explain.
So perceptual integration that gives us experiences as a unified objects in time and space,
or temporal integration that gives us experiences of change or the kinds of integration in there's multiple different kinds,
really, because there's different kinds of memory, but the kinds of integration that memory might provide for.
And I want to say I don't have a full theory of the right set of unity relations,
but we're going to need something like that and this is going to come up again when I get to the practical bits.
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,
so I want to replace this question with another one.
That kind of sub question at least work towards something that can be useful for ethics.
And so this question is, do non-violence phenomenal properties contribute to the value and experience?
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.
And the question is,
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.
And I think the answer is is yes, and I try to go to some lengths in the book to illustrate this.
But it seems to me that it's really hard to understand the value that really some
of the richer experiences we have bear unless we include all sorts of things.
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,
not just about the kind of sensory affect that's associated with it, but it's about the object of grief,
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.
And you can think the same thing about pride and the achievements of a child or something like that.
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
build in certain kinds of cognitive elements so that you know what the anticipation is about.
So the kind of thing I'm gesturing towards here is available as a kind of interpretation of this quote from from William James.
I think there are other ways to interpret it, but he's getting it, something I think is interesting.
So he says wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it there,
the life becomes genuinely significant and by eagerness, here I'm reading kind of these affective properties.
But look, the affective properties get bound up in our mental life and all sorts of rich ways.
Sometimes the eagerness is more narrow, but the motor activity,
sometimes the perceptions and times of the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought.
But wherever it's found, there's the zest, the tingle,
the excitement of reality and there is importance and the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.
OK, so this is all still a little bit abstract,
but I think from here we can start to work towards something that gets us in the direction of thinking more
practically so we can start to work towards a way to think about a subject's capacity for phenomenal value.
So I have no theory about what makes any particular experience better than another.
And I'm not sure that we need any such thing if we want to really be practical ethicists about the value of consciousness.
But it does really help to have some sense of a subject's capacity for phenomenal value.
So here's where I introduce the following kind of notion it's a notion I call the subject's evaluative space.
This is a space of the kinds of evaluative experiences, affective experiences that are available to a subject.
So it's constituted by the psychological toolkit that allows you to construct the experiences that you wind up constructing.
It's going to include lots of capacities, probably most of them, not all of our psychological capacities.
So whatever's going on in the spinal cord that lets us walk without much effort,
most of the time might not contribute, but a lot of the other ones will contribute.
And here's how I try to think about. I guess adding some structure to this notion of an evaluative space.
So three dimensions in particular along which we might think about how to measure an evaluative space,
one is size, and that's just the number of properties a subject is capable of ing across different experiences.
So you can imagine a being with 15 sensory modalities or 38 sensory modalities, and there's debate about how many humans have.
There's the traditional five other people think now we got it.
We got to accommodate bodily senses in a different way and we've got to accommodate taste.
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.
So you know, there's debates about whether we really depend on echolocation in some ways,
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.
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.
There's a second dimension that I think of in terms of complexity,
and this is where these unity relations become important because this is something like the number of
properties and property types that a subject can bring together under a legitimate unity relation.
So it says something like how complicated a particular experience could become.
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,
although it's going to influence the character of particular experiences.
So it's something like a relation of sense making that holds between experiences.
I think I need to think of a little bit better ways to articulate this.
So I'm open to hearing from you about that. But look, the basic idea here is with the great Bob Ross.
If you put me in a room and said, you know, make a nice painting,
what I'm able to make is going to depend in part on the tools that are available to me.
What kinds of colours do I have? What kinds of brushes do I have? What kinds of tools do I have?
If I just have one colour, I can't do much. Not even Bob Ross could do much with just one colour.
Probably. Maybe a rabbit could do something cool with one colour. I doubt Bob Ross could.
So the point about psychological toolkits constructing evaluative spaces is the more tools you have, then the bigger the more complex.
Perhaps the more coherent your mental life is going to be.
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?
And what I want to say is increases in these things and size,
complexity and coherence are associated with higher potentials for value and dis value within a conscious mental life,
and we can call this just have a placeholder for it. Phenomenal richness.
Now there is other work to be done work that I hope to do. I haven't done, really.
Others could probably do it just as well or better in thinking about other ways to carve up the evaluative space.
So in my view, I think complexity is more important than size. I think coherence is probably more important than either.
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,
but you can imagine a massively parallel processing intelligence that is able to perform all sorts of tasks,
but there's no coherence to its mental life. It's just kind of one little thing after another.
And to the extent that everything is kind of parallel processing and there's no coherence to the mental life,
you lose the sense that this is really a subject and might just be a disjointed series of operations.
So I think coherence really is important when we think about the value of our conscious subject's mental
life and when it comes to complexity just to help maybe locate what I'm saying in some analogous space.
I agree with what Alan Goldman here says about the value of aesthetic experience,
not just kind of want to generalise it in some ways to all experience. So he talks about engaging with art,
and he talks about this simultaneous challenge and engagement of all our mental capacities in the most complex experiences of engaging with art.
So perceptual, cognitive, affective, imaginative, even volitional, he in appreciation of the relations amongst aspects, elements of artworks.
Such engagement creates a rich and intense mental experience imbued with meanings
from all these faculties operating in tandem and informing one another. And I'm thinking.
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,
team, when I think about some of the more valuable experiences, they seem to engage a lot of elements that go into my.
Evaluative space. OK, so that's a real quick tour through some theoretical considerations that have to do with the value of consciousness,
and now I want to talk a little bit about what kinds of implications there might be for moral status.
So the first thing to say is, I think there are some similarities between the view I'm articulating and a family
of views that these days often called sophisticated cognitive capacity views.
And some people in this room have argued for versions of these kinds of views.
So I agree with David when he says some beings might deserve consideration in proportion to their cognitive, emotional and social complexity.
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,
I suppose, the way I think about value and mental life.
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.
The phenomenal value view that I'm articulating really is different in some ways.
I mean, it's conceptually different because something could have sophisticated cognitive capacities without consciousness.
And I would think not much or any value there.
So if there's just access consciousness and saying, I don't really think access consciousness is necessarily a thing.
So I think there's ways that I could be friends with that view. But you might think just access consciousness.
No phenomenal consciousness. My view predicts not much value there. And some of the implications are different.
So sometimes when people talk about sophisticated cognitive capacities, there seems to be a quick slide from cognitive to intelligent.
And that's really not what I'm saying, because I'm not even sure exactly what intelligence is supposed to be.
I don't think it's smarts that matter so much as something more like having a rich, affective life.
That's more important for my view. So, OK, a few questions that have come up in the literature.
I just want to breeze through these. But this will help locate maybe the view a little bit.
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.
So it could be as an empirical matter. We look at the sophistication of the mental lives of humans,
and they compare very favourably to all other animals that could that could turn out to be right.
But the view itself doesn't say anything about that. It could be that we're on a plane with several other animal types.
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,
that's going to require some difficult work or other degrees of moral status on this kind of view.
I think almost certainly, it seems like phenomenal richness is degree, so moral status could be.
Is there such a thing as full moral status? I don't disagree that that can be a convenient fiction.
I think Sarah said earlier, but I think there's no particularly good reason to think so.
You can imagine the phenomenal richness growing almost indefinitely.
Now here's the thing I really want to talk about.
This is the way the last, you know, nine minutes or so the talk, how to determine the degrees and levels of moral status.
And I was extremely worried about talking about these things because it just seems so insanely speculative.
But I'm really glad to have heard Tom and Ruth, who sounded less speculative and presented their thing in the spirit of hope.
Well, I'll present mine in the same spirit.
What I want to say about how to go about this is it's possible to think about mapping a kind
of axial allergy of mental value or phenomenal value onto a psychological architecture.
Right? So we're going to be asking questions like what capacities are those that enhance the evaluative space?
That's if you accept my view. So some forms of memory might be really important.
You'd have to make the arguments, but that could be critical. Some kinds of cognitive control might be really important.
Some forms of metacognition might be really important. Now, I haven't done this work, so I'm just offering some suggestions.
But the point is a science of what you might call high richness structures is possible.
It's largely uncharted. It would be massively interdisciplinary. It would be difficult in lots of ways.
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,
with scientists trying to understand levels of consciousness in response to work on the difference being persistent vegetative state,
minimally conscious state emergency, minimally conscious state.
It turns out it's difficult empirically and conceptually to even think about the different
dimensions we might put a mind in when we talk about the levels of consciousness,
and that's just for human beings. But some of that work is being done. I mean, this is very recent stuff.
Other people have worked on levels of self-awareness, and humans are tracking it across development.
So what's the level of self-awareness that 18 months? Twenty four months at four years full adulthood?
And so those kinds of ways to think about taxonomy, the mind might offer some guidance.
But this is just to say that it's still going to take a lot of work to think about this,
and you're going to have to work closely with cognitive pathologists that work with animals.
And so it's going to be difficult. Another thing to point out is the aims of such a kind of.
Science, a science of what I'm calling high rates of structures might be primarily moral and only secondarily about kind of functional explanations,
so you really might need a lot of collaboration with ethicists and scientists.
There's no guarantee that coming up with some kind of metric for the richness of phenomenal value.
Or if you want to jettison my view and you're just thinking about a metric for levels of moral status, which fine,
there's no guarantee that any of that's going to map cleanly onto what scientists care about initially,
which is some kind of functional upshot, some kind of explanation of the nature of these mines.
So so it could turn out that it's actually really useful to think of things in this way.
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.
But I think we can envision some steps for making this practical.
And here is where I think it is important to kind of recruit.
So for a review like mine to recruit sophisticated cognitive capacity proponents here because we might have minor quibbles,
but look what we end up saying about levels of moral status across the animal kingdom and across the machine kingdom,
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.
Right? I mean, that's going to be tough, but that's the hope, right?
So in a recent issue of the journal Animal Sentinels, Jonathan Birch is a philosopher biologist.
London tries to talk about a precautionary principle for animal protection, legislation for research on animals, this kind of thing.
And here's what he settles on. He makes two claims, he says, for the purposes of formulating animal protection legislation.
Think about it like this there's sufficient evidence that animals of a particular order.
It's pretty broad. Our sentiment if they're statistically significant evidence obtained by experiments that meet normal scientific
standards of the presence of at least one credible indicator of sentence and at least one species of that order.
This is a very precautionary kind of measure, but he thinks it's warranted because he thinks sentences are very valuable, OK?
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.
Look at their order. Look at the science. Is there one credible indicator?
Then we should include within the scope of animal protection legislation, all animals for which the evidence of sentence is sufficient.
So you go by the orders and you get people into the club. Now this already kind of burgeoning is recognises this.
To some degree, this already starts to map out the need for some kind of collaboration because he says,
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?
You need to be publicly available when you need to kind of generally agree on them.
Now, I think that's an interesting proposal. I think it's plausible in some ways.
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.
That's important.
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.
So he says, we'll think about it like this. There's a chance that deca pods are sentient.
So this precautionary principle that birds offer says we'll avoid using them in research.
But perhaps just imagine deca part research could do something great for humans,
could help cure cancer or whatever, prevent untold harm to lots of other fascinating things.
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.
And this is true not just to think about the human vs. animal case.
So Peter Gottfried Smith in a recent article, is talking about the difference between the conscious lives of certain kinds of animals.
And he says, here's a thing that might be true in the animal kingdom. Maybe complex perception and evaluation are separable.
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,
and we're not tempted to distinguish them because they're both president us.
But then when you actually look at the animal kingdom and how people behave, sometimes they're found separately.
And he suggests that spiders might be an example of something that has very complex perception.
It's a great tracker of things in the environment, but scores low with respect to these kinds of motivational, perhaps affective feelings.
So this is maybe they're sophisticated trackers of the world, but their motivation, robotic and perhaps gastropods are the exact opposite.
So they don't seem to have very complex perception, but they seem to be more motivational, sophisticated now,
if that's right than you might have choices to make in the event that you really need
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.
I mean, I doubt it, but I wouldn't put it past hipsters, right?
So you got to make choices,
and then you really have to start to think about the structure of their mental lives in these matters of degree become very important.
So the suggestion is, if we're working towards this, you would be wanting to keep a revised and updated list,
not just of markers of sentiments, but something like levels of phenomenal richness.
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.
Is this, it seems to me, would be capacities that enable the construction of complex experiences,
these would be capacities that enable kind of integration between different elements of your mind.
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,
more sophisticated mental lives. And so then you would want to.
Do something like sort these entities in the broad classes. And here pragmatism would probably play a big role.
So I agree with everyone else who said, you don't you probably don't want forty six levels.
For practical purposes and you would want to err on the side of caution.
So here's just a really toy example just moderating virtuous language slightly.
So you might say, for the purposes of formulating animal protection legislation, there's sufficient evidence that animals of a particular group.
I'm not saying order because I'm not exactly sure how best to do it,
but a particular group bear phenomenal value to Level X. If statistically significant evidence is found obtained by experiments
that meet the normal standards of the presence of at least one credible indicator of whatever level we're talking about.
And then you could be if you want to be this cautious, you could do what Bush doesn't say.
Animal protection legislation has to be updated with guidance regarding what it means.
So implications of meeting level hacks and this is the thing that Tom Ruth
was talking about terms of spelling out the rights that might be associated, the obligations that might be associated with different levels.
OK. So I'm basically done, I'll just quickly review the main claims that I made,
I said it seems to me that phenomenal consciousness bears non derivative value.
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,
but also in virtue of these relations, of unity and binding and integration between multiple property types.
I suggested that I didn't really argue for it,
but I suggested a more sophisticated evaluative spaces are associated with higher potentials for value and this value and a mental life.
And so then in the practical bit, I said it's possible to map psychological architectures onto evaluative spaces.
That's going to be a lot of work getting these kinds of maps up and running. But you could do it.
It would then be possible to locate levels of phenomenal richness in the kind of space of conscious entities.
And then it would be possible to do things like formulate precautionary principles that could be sensitive to some degree,
to the proportionality of value. OK, thanks.