As to your point: this is one of the better arguments I’ve heard that welfare ranges might be similar between animals. Still I don’t think it squares well with the actual nature of the brain. Saying there’s a single suffering computation would make sense if the brain was like a CPU, where one core did the thinking, but actually all of the neurons in the brain are firing at once and doing computations in at the same time. So it makes much more sense to me to think that the more neurons are computing some sort of suffering, the greater the intensity of suffering.
One intuition against this is by drawing an analogy to LLMs: the residual stream represents many features. All neurons participate in the representation of a feature. But the difference between a larger and a smaller model is mostly that the larger model can represent more features, not that the larger model represents features with greater magnitude.
In humans it seems to be the case that consciousness is most strongly connected to processes in the brain stem, rather than the neo cortex. Here is a great talk about the topic—the main points are (writing from memory, might not be entirely accurate):
humans can lose consciousness or produce intense emotions (good and bad) through interventions on a very small area of the brain stem. When other much larger parts of the brain are damaged or missing, humans continue to behave in a way such that one would ascribe emotions to them from interactions, for example, they show affection.
dopamin, serotonin, and other chemicals that alter consciousness work in the brain stem
If we consider the question from an evolutionary angle, I’d also argue that emotions are more important when an organism has fewer alternatives (like a large brain that does fancy computations). Once better reasoning skills become available, it makes sense to reduce the impact that emotions have on behavior and instead trust the abstract reasoning. In my own experience, the intensity in which I feel emotions is strongly correlated to how action guiding it is, and I think as a child I felt emotions more intensly than now, which also fits the hypothesis that more ability to think abstract reduces intensity of emotions.
I have added a link to the report now.
As to your point: this is one of the better arguments I’ve heard that welfare ranges might be similar between animals. Still I don’t think it squares well with the actual nature of the brain. Saying there’s a single suffering computation would make sense if the brain was like a CPU, where one core did the thinking, but actually all of the neurons in the brain are firing at once and doing computations in at the same time. So it makes much more sense to me to think that the more neurons are computing some sort of suffering, the greater the intensity of suffering.
Can you elaborate how
leads to
?
One intuition against this is by drawing an analogy to LLMs: the residual stream represents many features. All neurons participate in the representation of a feature. But the difference between a larger and a smaller model is mostly that the larger model can represent more features, not that the larger model represents features with greater magnitude.
In humans it seems to be the case that consciousness is most strongly connected to processes in the brain stem, rather than the neo cortex. Here is a great talk about the topic—the main points are (writing from memory, might not be entirely accurate):
humans can lose consciousness or produce intense emotions (good and bad) through interventions on a very small area of the brain stem. When other much larger parts of the brain are damaged or missing, humans continue to behave in a way such that one would ascribe emotions to them from interactions, for example, they show affection.
dopamin, serotonin, and other chemicals that alter consciousness work in the brain stem
If we consider the question from an evolutionary angle, I’d also argue that emotions are more important when an organism has fewer alternatives (like a large brain that does fancy computations). Once better reasoning skills become available, it makes sense to reduce the impact that emotions have on behavior and instead trust the abstract reasoning. In my own experience, the intensity in which I feel emotions is strongly correlated to how action guiding it is, and I think as a child I felt emotions more intensly than now, which also fits the hypothesis that more ability to think abstract reduces intensity of emotions.