Btw, coming at it from a different angle: Jessicata raises the hypothesis (in her recent post) that people put so much weight on ‘consciousness’ as a determinant of moral weight because it is relatively illegible and they believe outside the realm of things that civilization currently has a scientific understanding of, so that they can talk about it more freely and without the incredibly high level of undercutting and scrutiny that comes to scientific hypotheses. Quote:
Consciousness is related to moral patiency (in that e.g. animal consciousness is regarded as an argument in favor of treating animals as moral patients), and is notoriously difficult to discuss. I hypothesize that a lot of what is going on here is that:
1. There are many beliefs/representations that are used in different contexts to make decisions or say things.
2. The scientific method has criteria for discarding beliefs/representations, e.g. in cases of unfalsifiability, falsification by evidence, or complexity that is too high.
3. A scientific worldview will, therefore, contain a subset of the set of all beliefs had by someone.
4. It is unclear how to find the rest of the beliefs in the scientific worldview, since many have been discarded.
5. There is, therefore, a desire to be able to refer to beliefs/representations that didn’t make it into the scientific worldview, but which are still used to make decisions or say things; “consciousness” is a way of referring to beliefs/representations in a way inclusive of non-scientific beliefs.
I don’t think that was my point exactly. Rather, my point is that not all representations used by minds to process information make it into the scientific worldview, so there is a leftover component that is still cared about. That doesn’t mean people will think consciousness is more important than scientific information, and indeed scientific theories are conscious to at least some people.
Separately, many people have a desire to increase the importance of illegible things to reduce constraint, which is your hypothesis; I think this is an important factor but it wasn’t what I was saying.
Btw, coming at it from a different angle: Jessicata raises the hypothesis (in her recent post) that people put so much weight on ‘consciousness’ as a determinant of moral weight because it is relatively illegible and they believe outside the realm of things that civilization currently has a scientific understanding of, so that they can talk about it more freely and without the incredibly high level of undercutting and scrutiny that comes to scientific hypotheses. Quote:
I don’t think that was my point exactly. Rather, my point is that not all representations used by minds to process information make it into the scientific worldview, so there is a leftover component that is still cared about. That doesn’t mean people will think consciousness is more important than scientific information, and indeed scientific theories are conscious to at least some people.
Separately, many people have a desire to increase the importance of illegible things to reduce constraint, which is your hypothesis; I think this is an important factor but it wasn’t what I was saying.