From nothing to important actions: agents that act morally

Summary

You may start reading here, or jump to the “Comment” section or to the “Takeaways”. If none of these starting points seem interesting to you, the entire post probably won’t either. Posted also on the EA Forum. Seeing Let’s consider visual experiences. It seems uncontestable that some visual experiences look darker than others[1]. It is one way in which visual experiences look different from each other. Another difference is colour: some experiences look green more than they look purple. Let’s try to attack the above statement. How could it not be the case that some experiences look darker than others? If you somehow couldn’t perceive differences in scales of grey, then maybe you wouldn’t say that some visual experiences look darker than others. If your visual experiences were such that nothing looked black or grey, and every colour you saw looked equally bright, then stating that some experiences look darker than others wouldn’t make sense to you. Let’s introduce a hypothetical tool I’ll refer to as the consciousness device. The consciousness device allows a conscious being to temporarily experience what another conscious being experiences[2]. For example, if you linked the consciousness device to my brain, you would temporarily stop experiencing whatever you are experiencing right now, and you would instead have the experience of someone who is typing words on a keyboard while looking at a screen. After some time, you would be back to your normal life experience. Now, let’s reconsider the hypothetical situation in which your visual experience is such that everything looks equally bright, without blackness or greyness. If you link the consciousness device to someone who claims that some experiences do indeed look darker than others, then the statement that didn’t make sense before now starts to make perfect sense. And although the statement doesn’t match what you experience when you are back to your own experience, it matches what you remember of the experience you had while using the consciousness device. You don’t see a way to attack the statement that some experiences look darker than others anymore. Not only that: you also see that anyone who uses the consciousness device (by linking it to someone who can see scales of grey) will reach the same conclusion[3], no matter how unusual (or absent) their visual experiences are. Feeling Let’s consider valenced experiences. It seems uncontestable that some valenced experiences feel better than others[4]: it’s just how valence works! How could this not be the case? Maybe it’s possible that the experiences of some conscious beings never feel good nor bad: they are all equally neutral. But if these beings used the consciousness device, they would also reach the conclusion that some experiences feel better than others. Again, the statement seems very difficult to attack. Let’s move to more interesting stuff. (Re)Acting (to feelings) Weirdly enough, not only do some valenced experiences feel better than others: they also affect action in a way that non-valenced experiences don’t[5]. In short, some valenced experiences affect action more than others. For example, a conscious agent that feels very bad will do what they can to leave that experiential state and move to a state with better valence. The specific action will depend on the context and the kind of bad experience (fear, hunger, et cetera). How could it not be the case that some valenced experiences affect action more than others? First, from a perspective where there is no action, the statement doesn’t make much sense. Imagine a conscious being whose only experience is something like repeatedly seeing the sun rise and set, without any experience of control or action. For the statement to be meaningful, we need a conscious being that acts and has the impression of acting: let’s call such a being a conscious agent. Second, we can think again of a conscious agent for whom all experiences feel neutral, as we did before. But again, if this agent linked the consciousness device to an agent who does have experiences that feel better than others, they wouldn’t object to the statement anymore. Third, we can imagine a caricature of a Buddhist monk, someone who has so much self-control that he’s capable of not-even-flinching in whatever valenced state he finds himself in. Note that the consciousness device does not help here. If the monk’s valenced experiences are identical to others’ valenced experiences, and it is only the reaction to these experiences that changes, now we have an objection to the statement that some valenced experiences affect action more than others. But maybe the point is that we are talking about different experiences. Maybe the monk is able to not-even-flinch in situations that normal people consider extreme because, after many hours of meditation, now the monk’s experiences feel less bad, or maybe still ‘bad’ but in a different way. This idea agrees with the intuition that some valenced experien