“The Acuity Problem: Maybe we can’t infer how intensely a being can feel from the number of different intensity levels it can go through” by Jim Buhler

Summary A lot of scientific evidence has been gestured at to show how wide an organism's welfare range (i.e., the absolute intensity at the end of the affective spectrum) might be. But most (if not all) of this evidence is in fact evidence of evaluative acuity (i.e., how many differentiable gradients of pain and pleasure the spectrum contains). (§2) In theory, a cognitively simple organism could feel either nothing or something extreme, and nothing in between. And a complex one could dissociate between trillions of different pain levels between nothing and a pinprick, and never feel anything worse. Acuity and range can be independent. (§1) In practice, there may be evolutionary reasons to expect some dependence, but this does not tell us how strong it would be or what the dependence relationship looks like. This is in tension with what many arguments for prioritizing some species over others have implicitly assumed so far—I’m talking about both arguments for prioritizing less numerous cognitively complex beings over many simpler ones, and arguments for the exact opposite. Call this the acuity problem. (§3) The consequence is that the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the moral weights we should assign to different species is even [...] ---Outline:(00:15) Summary(02:06) 1. Acuity vs Range(04:00) 2. Purported evidence for cross-species varying degrees of sentience is evidence for varying acuity(07:19) 3. How dependent are acuity and range?(10:52) 4. The resulting deep uncertainty and its implications(14:19) Acknowledgements The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 10th, 2026 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mjGQWSpQgdndPnC5b/the-acuity-problem-maybe-we-can-t-infer-how-intensely-a --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.