Cattle have a bit less than 1/3rd the brain mass of humans, chickens about 1/40th, and fish are down more than an order of magnitude (moreso by cortex). If you weight expected value by neurons, which is made plausible by thinking about things like split-brain patients and local computations in nervous systems, that will drastically change the picture.
My quick back-of-the envelope (which didn’t take into account the small average size of the mostly feed fish involved, and thus reduced neural tissue) is that making this adjustment would cut the cost-effectiveness metric by a factor of at least 400 times, and plausibly 1000+ times. This reflects the fact that fish make up most of the life-days in the calculation, and also have comparatively tiny and simple nervous systems. Personally, I would pay more to ensure a painless death for a cow than for a small feed fish with orders of magnitude less neural capacity.
An additional point:
Cattle have a bit less than 1/3rd the brain mass of humans, chickens about 1/40th, and fish are down more than an order of magnitude (moreso by cortex). If you weight expected value by neurons, which is made plausible by thinking about things like split-brain patients and local computations in nervous systems, that will drastically change the picture.
My quick back-of-the envelope (which didn’t take into account the small average size of the mostly feed fish involved, and thus reduced neural tissue) is that making this adjustment would cut the cost-effectiveness metric by a factor of at least 400 times, and plausibly 1000+ times. This reflects the fact that fish make up most of the life-days in the calculation, and also have comparatively tiny and simple nervous systems. Personally, I would pay more to ensure a painless death for a cow than for a small feed fish with orders of magnitude less neural capacity.
Ah, but now I can turn myself into a utility monster by artificially enlarging my brain! Game over.
We’re trying to work out how to make progress on moral questions today, not trying to lay down a rule for all eternity that future agents can’t game.
It was a joke.
Oops, sorry!
Or by having kids. Or copying your uploaded self. Or re-engineering your nervous system in other ways...