On theories of sentience: a talk with Magnus Vinding

Magnus Vinding is a philosopher focused on reducing suffering. In his works, he has covered topics such as effective altruism, anti-speciesism, suffering-focused ethics (about which he was writing a book at the time of this interview), and issues of personal identity and ontology, such as open individualism and physicalism. He has a degree in mathematics and is the author of the books: Why We Should Go Vegan, Why “Happy Meat” Is Always Wrong, Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It, Reflections on Intelligence, You Are Them, and Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others?

[Puedes leer esta entrevista en español aquí]

Manu Herrán: Let’s start with the very beginning. I’ll use the word sentience for experiences of suffering and enjoyment, and consciousness for subjective experiences in general. Not only pain and pleasure but, for instance, to perceive. Does it match your terminology?

Magnus Vinding: Yes.

Manu Herrán: Some researchers consider that in general non human animals have a lack of consciousness. Does it implies that they deserve less (or even none) moral consideration?

Magnus Vinding: “Consciousness” is sometimes understood as “self-knowledge”, which one may seek to operationalize and measure in various ways, yet one obvious way is to ask whether an individual is able to pass the mirror test. Many non-human animals are evidently conscious in this sense. But beyond that, it’s certainly possible for, let’s say, an invertebrate or a developing human child to feel pain without a very clear idea of what’s happening, without having any self-model. But that doesn’t diminish the moral relevance of the suffering itself, if it exists. Sentience, I submit, is ultimately what matters, or at any rate what matters most.

Manu Herrán: Sentience is the only thing that matters?

Magnus Vinding: Philosophers disagree about this. Though it seems most do agree that, to the extent anything matters, sentience is at least among what matters.

Manu Herrán: Other people consider beauty, complexity or life. Or knowledge.

Magnus Vinding: One can argue that knowledge, especially if construed broadly such that it includes epistemic values, has a special status. If we zoom out a bit, we may think in terms of epistemic values on the one hand (e.g. consistency, parsimony, “seeming reasonable/plausible”, etc.) and moral values on the other (e.g. reducing suffering, living kindly, never lying, etc.).

The relationship between these two classes of values is interesting, I think. For example, we must depend on certain epistemic values to reach any set of moral values, yet we may then in turn decide, based on our moral values, to change certain epistemic values we initially held, such as if we think excess curiosity and exploration might cause more suffering in the future. And this might have a cost of closing off certain knowledge that might actually change our moral values further. The question of how to best balance such values against each other is a deep one; after all, which values should one rest on here? This is deep philosophy.

In relation to the notion that beauty, complexity or life are good (or bad for that matter), my own view is that they only have instrumental value. That is, they are good or bad to the extent there is someone whose experience is impacted positively of negatively by them.

The same can be said about knowledge, if we disregard the more fundamental issue mentioned above: on my view of ethics, knowledge is good to the extent it can help us avoid extreme suffering (which is not to say we should necessarily think about knowledge in such instrumental terms; that may not be useful in most cases).

Manu Herrán: You are in contact with the main researchers and organizations that aim to reduce suffering. Would you say that you share a common understanding of sentience, what it is, and where it comes from?

Magnus Vinding: In some aspects yes, but not in others. It would take a very long time to explain it all properly, but the main distinction is that between realists and non-realists about consciousness.

Non-realists, or eliminativists, hold that consciousness does not really exist. This view has been defended by Brian Tomasik, and it seems to have inspired many people concerned about reducing suffering (Brian has in turn been inspired by Daniel Dennett and Eliezer Yudkowsky).

Eliminativism is also the view Sentience Institute tentatively subscribes to, though I say tentatively because Sentience Institute does not seem to actually hold that consciousness does not exist — e.g. Jacy Reese writes: “I am fully on board with, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ and the notion that you can have 100% confidence in your own first-person experience.” The sense in which Jacy denies the existence of consciousness is thus, as far as I can tell, more in the sense that consciousness is not a crisp category, just as, say, “music” is not a crisp, well-demarcated category. Yet this, I would argue, is not to deny the existence of consciousness in any substantive sense; after all, most realists would agree with the claim that consciousness — in the sense of a complex composite mind — is not a clearly delineated category.

I have tried, elsewhere, to draw an analogy to sound and music: just because “music” is a fuzzy category, and we may not be able to give a clear answer to whether a collection of sounds counts as music or not, this does not mean there are no truths about the nature of this collection of sounds (their volume, pitch, character, etc.). The same, I would argue, can be applied to consciousness: just because we may not be able to agree on what counts as a composite mind (which is often what the term “consciousness” connotes) does not mean there are no truths about the phenomenal state of a given mind-brain (in terms of intensity, its content, its character, etc.).

In contrast to the non-realists, you have explicit realists about consciousness. One of these is David Pearce, who views “consciousness” and “the physical” as one and the same phenomenon under different descriptions (I have tried to give a simple explanation of his view here). Pearce has put forth a daring hypothesis about consciousness in concrete physical terms which one can find here.

Other realists include Mike Johnson and Andrés Gómez Emilsson who have co-founded the Qualia Research Institute in order to explore the physical signatures of consciousness from a somewhat more agnostic position than Pearce’s (in terms of what the physical signatures might ultimately be).

Beyond that, there is a distinction to be drawn between functionalist and non-functionalist (or one may perhaps call them “concretist”) accounts of consciousness. Brian Tomasik is a functionalist, whereas someone like Mike Johnson is not — he used to be, yet he changed his mind and has written the following, in my mind, rather strong critique of functionalism. Pearce sometimes calls himself a “micro-functionalist”, meaning that if a mind-brain is reproduced down to the level of the finest “micro-physical” detail, in a concrete rather than an abstract sense, then it will have the same phenomenal properties as the original. But not otherwise, and hence he is not a functionalist in the traditional sense.

These views, in turn, have very different implications for what suffering is in particular and what we can do about it. For instance, David Pearce views suffering as a concrete phenomenon we will likely come to understand in great detail and ultimately phase out, whereas Brian Tomasik does not see suffering as something that can be crisply understood or phased out; on his view, suffering is, at least in one sense, more inherent to reality.

Manu Herrán: This is a very important difference, with very significant implications in the allocation of resources in a possible project to reduce suffering. Isn’t it? I’m thinking, for example, on the project of The Hedonistic Imperative.

Magnus Vinding: Yes, though exploring the full extent of the differences is beyond the scope of this conversation. It is also worth pointing out, however, that there are significant points of convergence, including that the boundaries we draw in relation to which beings can suffer are quite fuzzy from our current vantage point. Though from a realist perspective, they are fuzzy due to our ignorance, whereas they are fuzzy more or less by definition on the non-realist view. Thus, realism arguably implies more research on this question than does non-realism (which is not to say that one will necessarily ever find certain answers given realism).

Beyond that, it is worth noting that, regardless of their views of consciousness, people in Effective Altruism who try to reduce suffering pretty much all agree that we should seek to explore future risks with an open mind; that we should seek to engage with other people in friendly, cooperative ways; that we should expand the moral circle; that we should promote compassion and wise consequentialist thinking, etc.

Manu Herrán: How can Brian reconcile eliminativism and functionalism? I mean, if I understand correctly, Brian believes in eliminativism and functionalism at the same time.

Magnus Vinding: You would have to ask him, I guess. But I suspect he would say eliminativism is true objectively whereas (his) functionalism is the way he chooses, subjectively, to define consciousness and sentience.

Manu Herrán: Do you think that Brian and David have each just a single strong belief about their own (different) understandings on sentience, or do they honestly recognize that other theories may be true as well?

Magnus Vinding: I know David struggles to understand Brian’s view, i.e. to understand what it even means. Brian, to my knowledge, mostly retains some uncertainty for Aumann reasons. But speaking more generally, I think both of them tend to acknowledge that we may well all be very wrong about the nature of reality, and that our human concepts may ultimately do a poor job of capturing what is really going on.

Manu Herrán: Which is your preferred view or views on consciousness? I mean, in the sense of “more probable hypothesis”.

Magnus Vinding: My view is physicalist and not functionalist in the macro sense, but only in the micro/”concretist” sense. In general, I think David Pearce is right that, as Mike Johnson sums up David’s view: “consciousness is ‘ontologically unitary’, and so only a physical property that implies ontological unity (such as quantum coherence) could physically instantiate consciousness.” (Principia Qualia, p. 73).

That is, I lean toward the view that my present conscious mind is an actual, unitary physical “thing”. After all, if experience is not physically unitary in this way, if it can emerge from something physically disconnected by a small distance, then why should it not be able to emerge from something separated by a large distance? Why should the physical state that mediates one particular aspect of my experience — say, sights — not be situated in another country, or indeed on another planet, from the physical states that mediate other aspects, such as sounds and emotions? (I draw a similar analogy to computers made of billard balls here). There must, I think, be some connection and integration in physical terms, and I suspect most people’s intuitions would agree.

And the relevant question is then in which systems such connection/integration obtains. Could it, for instance, ever obtain in systems such as present-day computers? I doubt it, and I think too many in our circles treat a positive answer to this question as a foregone conclusion, and consider doubts about it tantamount to supernaturalism and anthropocentrism. I just think this is wrong. Computers have not been designed to bring together a lot of sensory-information from their environments to act on for their survival, moment-to-moment. Biological brains have. This is a pretty significant difference. And saying that two highly abstract models of two different physical systems are in some sense isomorphic (say, some abstract model of a PC and of a brain respectively) in no way implies that every relevant property these physical systems have will be shared.

Manu Herrán: Is your physicalist view the same as David Pearce’s?

Magnus Vinding: In some ways. Yet as far as I can tell, I am much more agnostic about the nature of consciousness in physical terms. But at the level of the basics, I follow Pearce, and have indeed been greatly inspired by him. That is, like Pearce, I hold a monist view according to which there is just one world conforming to different descriptions.

This view may seem counter-intuitive, yet I think the analogy I drew above in relation to sound in general and music in particular can actually help dissolve some of our confusion and render it more intuitive. The problem is that we have this one word, consciousness, which covers far too much. Some vocabular refinement is called for (see the previous link for elaboration).

Another point of confusion is that we conflate epistemology and ontology — in a sense, we confuse our physical models of reality for reality itself, and we fail to realize when we speak about epistemological reduction versus ontological reduction, something I say more about in a recent post called Physics Is Also Qualia.

Manu Herrán: All the different theories sound complex, but your explanations are clarifying them a lot. Can we summarize that Brian, David and you have different views about sentience?

Magnus Vinding: Yes, that is quite safe to say. Although the difference between David and myself is not so large; we are close to each other relative to Brian (although, in some ways, Brian is also close, such as when he describes his view as a panpsychist view). The main difference between David’s view and my own is, as mentioned, that I am more agnostic concerning the physical “details”. Also, unlike David, I don’t think I have really said anything original; the things I have written about consciousness mostly clarify and defend aspects of David’s view.

Manu Herrán: Do you think we will be able to defeat suffering?

Magnus Vinding: I will give a functional answer that is useful for moral agents: I think moral agents aiming to reduce suffering should always spend a large fraction of their resources exploring how they can best reduce suffering in expectation, and this would be true even if suffering had been abolished.

Also, whether suffering can be abolished ultimately depends on one’s view of the nature of time and the universe at large, so it is not easy to give a straightforward answer.

Beyond that, I would also say that focusing on defeating suffering as one’s goal may actually be harmful. It is better, I think, to focus on reducing the most suffering in expectation (within the bounds of reasonable side-constraints), which in the best case will entail the “defeat of suffering” anyway.

Manu Herrán: Thanks Magnus. It has been a pleasure to have this talk.

Magnus Vinding: I can say the same thing. Good luck with your projects.