The Nonlinear Library EA - Why I'm skeptical about using subjective time experience to assign moral weights by Andreas Mogensen
Jan 22, 2024
11:19
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why I'm skeptical about using subjective time experience to assign moral weights, published by Andreas Mogensen on January 22, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This post provides a summary of my working paper "
Welfare and Felt Duration." The goal is to make the content of the paper more accessible and to add context and framing for an EA audience, including a more concrete summary of practical implications. It's also an invitation for you to ask questions about the paper and/or my summary of it, to which I'll try to reply as best I can below.
What's the paper about?
The paper is about how duration affects the goodness and badness of experiences that feel good or bad. For simplicity, I mostly focus on how duration affects the badness of pain.
In some obvious sense, pains that go on for longer are worse for you. But we can draw some kind of intuitive distinction between how long something really takes and how long it is felt as taking. Suppose you could choose between two pains: one feels longer but is objectively shorter, and the other feels shorter but is objectively longer. Now the choice isn't quite so obvious. Still, some people are quite confident that you ought to choose the second: the one that feels shorter.
They think it's how long a pain feels that's important, not how long it is. The goal of the paper is to argue that that confidence isn't warranted.
Why is this important?
This issue affects the moral weights assigned to non-human animals and digital minds.
The case for thinking that subjective time experience varies across the animal kingdom is summarized in
this excellent post by Jason Schukraft, which was a huge inspiration for this paper. One particular line of evidence comes from variation in the critical-flicker fusion frequency (CFF), the frequency at which a light source that's blinking on and off is perceived as continuously illuminated. Some birds and insects can detect flickering that you and I would completely miss unless we watched a slow motion recording. That might be taken to indicate that time passes more slowly from their subjective perspective, and so, if felt duration is what matters, that suggests we should give additional weight to the lifetime welfare of those animals.
here.
A number of people also argue that digital minds could experience time very differently from us, and here the differences could get really extreme. Because of the speed advantages of digital hardware over neural wetware, a digital mind could conceivably be run at speeds many orders of magnitude higher than the brain's own processing speed, which might again lead us to expect that time will be felt as passing much more slowly. As above, this may be taken to suggest that we should give those experiences significantly greater moral weight.
paper on digital minds.
What's the argument?
You can think of the argument of the paper as having three key parts.
Part 1: What is felt duration?
The first thing I want to do in the paper is emphasize that we don't really have a very strong idea of what we're talking about when we talk about the subjective experience of time. That should make us skeptical of our intuitions about the ethical importance of felt duration.
It seems clear that it doesn't matter in itself how much time you think has passed: e.g., if you think the pain went on for six minutes, but actually it lasted five. If subjective duration is going to matter, it can't be just a matter of your beliefs about time's passage. Something about the way the pain is experienced has got to be different. But what exactly? I expect you probably don't have an obvious answer to that question at your fingertips. I certainly don't. It's also worth noting that
some psychologists who study time perception claim that we can't distinguish empirically between judged and felt durati...
This post provides a summary of my working paper "
Welfare and Felt Duration." The goal is to make the content of the paper more accessible and to add context and framing for an EA audience, including a more concrete summary of practical implications. It's also an invitation for you to ask questions about the paper and/or my summary of it, to which I'll try to reply as best I can below.
What's the paper about?
The paper is about how duration affects the goodness and badness of experiences that feel good or bad. For simplicity, I mostly focus on how duration affects the badness of pain.
In some obvious sense, pains that go on for longer are worse for you. But we can draw some kind of intuitive distinction between how long something really takes and how long it is felt as taking. Suppose you could choose between two pains: one feels longer but is objectively shorter, and the other feels shorter but is objectively longer. Now the choice isn't quite so obvious. Still, some people are quite confident that you ought to choose the second: the one that feels shorter.
They think it's how long a pain feels that's important, not how long it is. The goal of the paper is to argue that that confidence isn't warranted.
Why is this important?
This issue affects the moral weights assigned to non-human animals and digital minds.
The case for thinking that subjective time experience varies across the animal kingdom is summarized in
this excellent post by Jason Schukraft, which was a huge inspiration for this paper. One particular line of evidence comes from variation in the critical-flicker fusion frequency (CFF), the frequency at which a light source that's blinking on and off is perceived as continuously illuminated. Some birds and insects can detect flickering that you and I would completely miss unless we watched a slow motion recording. That might be taken to indicate that time passes more slowly from their subjective perspective, and so, if felt duration is what matters, that suggests we should give additional weight to the lifetime welfare of those animals.
here.
A number of people also argue that digital minds could experience time very differently from us, and here the differences could get really extreme. Because of the speed advantages of digital hardware over neural wetware, a digital mind could conceivably be run at speeds many orders of magnitude higher than the brain's own processing speed, which might again lead us to expect that time will be felt as passing much more slowly. As above, this may be taken to suggest that we should give those experiences significantly greater moral weight.
paper on digital minds.
What's the argument?
You can think of the argument of the paper as having three key parts.
Part 1: What is felt duration?
The first thing I want to do in the paper is emphasize that we don't really have a very strong idea of what we're talking about when we talk about the subjective experience of time. That should make us skeptical of our intuitions about the ethical importance of felt duration.
It seems clear that it doesn't matter in itself how much time you think has passed: e.g., if you think the pain went on for six minutes, but actually it lasted five. If subjective duration is going to matter, it can't be just a matter of your beliefs about time's passage. Something about the way the pain is experienced has got to be different. But what exactly? I expect you probably don't have an obvious answer to that question at your fingertips. I certainly don't. It's also worth noting that
some psychologists who study time perception claim that we can't distinguish empirically between judged and felt durati...