Evidence receipt / preference
Published · transcript-backedTyler Cowen: preference
7 Jun 2023 Conversations with Tyler Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas
“There’s something about sentience that is essential for a being to count, but we actually know very little about consciousness.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Tyler Cowen
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 7 Jun 2023
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…I would agree with that. So they don’t count. I agree with that, too. There’s something about sentience that is essential for a being to count, but we actually know very little about consciousness. You can read philosophy of mind. You can look at neuroscience. It seems to me one of the most mysterious and baffling areas in all of human knowledge. We have introspection; I’m not sure how much to trust introspection. Does it worry you to be erecting a moral theory based on sentience, some notion of utility happiness, when all of our scientific inroads toward that concept seem to be, at least for the moment, very, very badly flawed? They’re incomplete, certainly. Are they flawed in the sense that would lead us astray in terms of making those decisions based on sentience? I’m not convinced of that.…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.