How to resist the Fading Qualia Argument
Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 5-2024
The Fading Qualia Argument is perhaps the strongest argument supporting the view that in order for a system to be conscious, it does not need to be made of anything in particular, so long as its internal parts have the right causal relations to each other and to the system’s inputs and outputs. I show how the argument can be resisted given two key assumptions: that consciousness is associated with vagueness at its boundaries and that conscious neural activity has a particular kind of holistic structure. I take this to show that what is arguably our strongest argument supporting the view that consciousness is substrate independent has important weaknesses, as a result of which we should decrease our confidence that consciousness can be realized in systems whose physical composition is very different from our own.
Other working papers
Altruism in governance: Insights from randomized training – Sultan Mehmood, (New Economic School), Shaheen Naseer (Lahore School of Economics) and Daniel L. Chen (Toulouse School of Economics)
Randomizing different schools of thought in training altruism finds that training junior deputy ministers in the utility of empathy renders at least a 0.4 standard deviation increase in altruism. Treated ministers increased their perspective-taking: blood donations doubled, but only when blood banks requested their exact blood type. Perspective-taking in strategic dilemmas improved. Field measures such as orphanage visits and volunteering in impoverished schools also increased, as did their test scores in teamwork assessments…
A Fission Problem for Person-Affecting Views – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
On person-affecting views in population ethics, the moral import of a person’s welfare depends on that person’s temporal or modal status. These views typically imply that – all else equal – we’re never required to create extra people, or to act in ways that increase the probability of extra people coming into existence. In this paper, I use Parfit-style fission cases to construct a dilemma for person-affecting views: either they forfeit their seeming-advantages and face fission analogues…
Crying wolf: Warning about societal risks can be reputationally risky – Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) et al.
Society relies on expert warnings about large-scale risks like pandemics and natural disasters. Across ten studies (N = 5,342), we demonstrate people’s reluctance to warn about unlikely but large-scale risks because they are concerned about being blamed for being wrong. In particular, warners anticipate that if the risk doesn’t occur, they will be perceived as overly alarmist and responsible for wasting societal resources. This phenomenon appears in the context of natural, technological, and financial risks…