“Experience size” by trammell

This post is a bit rougher than I would otherwise have posted, but I figured it was worth getting it out this week while more people are thinking about the “$100m to on animal welfare vs. global health” question. Feedback of all kinds very welcome. IntroductionLet's call an experience the bundle of qualia felt by one subject at once. That is, in the typical human case, an experience is a bundle that includes a field of vision, a field of feelings of pressure on the body, an internal monologue, and so on, all lasting for one moment.[1] Let's say a hedonic theory of welfare maintains something like the following:i) that each experience comes with some (positive, negative, or zero) hedonic intensity,[2] capturing how intensely good or bad it feels; ii) that each experience comes with some amount (positive, negative, or zero) of welfare; and iii) [...] ---Outline:(00:19) Introduction(03:29) Defining experience size(03:33) Analogy to the visual field(06:05) Analogy to the field of bodily sensations(07:05) Split brain cases(07:57) Welfare as an aggregate within an experience(08:02) The welfare of the whole experience depends on the parts(10:39) Put aside whether the whole depends only on the parts(13:13) Adding and removing parts(14:16) Ethical implications(14:20) Immediate ethical implications(16:48) How these implications are revisionary(21:41) Mill's “higher pleasures”?(22:51) Intuitions for superlinearity vs. sublinearity(27:25) (Even more speculative) epistemic implications(28:55) Related existing ideasThe original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 7th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wcn6uoSYZfn83vQA8/experience-size --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.