Chicken Beheading Dilemma

Valenced conscious experience is what matters.

But who has it and how much? I believe factory-farmed chickens have it, Claude Opus 4.7 less so (although I can’t rule it out).

Truly believing this means both that I have rational arguments supporting it and that my actions reflect this. Moral intuitions and emotional responses influence these actions. Let’s investigate them.

Consider the chicken-beheading dilemma:

Which one would be harder to do? Which one would you feel more guilt about?

(I believe) this is the operationalization of valenced conscious experience that matters. To believe a being has valenced conscious experience is to have an aversion to (their) negative valence experience and an aversion to killing them (ending that experience).

“Okay but we’ve evolved to feel bad about living things dying, GPUs are so recent, all this says is that we have evolved perceptual biases; we shouldn’t draw conclusions about our moral beliefs based on these.” Fair. Dilemma #2:

Part of our aversion to beheading the chicken is related to evolved moral intuitions and guilt. These are involuntary and invoked by the appearance and behavior of the chicken. Here, we control for this. The only difference is that you know that one is a cell-based biological chicken, the other one is not made of cells and has Opus 4.7 controlling its behavior. Which one do you consider more likely to have valenced conscious experience that matters? Practically, if forced to, which one would you be more okay to behead?

What we truly believe is a function of the revealed preferences of our (hypothetical) actions, and the ethical reasoning that (hopefully) supports them. The two influence each other but they can (and do) often diverge. I see the project of consciousness-first ethics as steering our beliefs towards more coherence and a future of high, positive valence conscious experience.