I currently think consciousness research is less important/tractable/neglected than AI safety, AI governance, and a few other things. The main reason is that it totally seems to me to be something we can "punt to the future" or "defer to more capable successors" to a large extent. However, I might be wrong about this. I haven't talked to QRI at length sufficient to truly evaluate their arguments. (See this exchange, which is about all I've got.)

I am a 3rd year PhD student in consciousness neuroscience. After studying 3 years in this field I tend to think that better understanding consciousness looks less important than standard EA causes areas. 

Understanding consciousness is probably not very neglected. Indeed, although the field of consciousness science is relatively young and probably still small relatively to other academic fields, it is a growing academic field with established lab teams such as the Sackler center for consciousness science, the tlab, Stan Dehaene lab, Giulio Tononi and more. Consciousness is a fascinating problem that attract many intellectuals. There is an annual conference on the science of consciousness organised every year that probably gather hundreds of academics https://assc24.forms-wizard.co.il/ (unsure about the number of participants)

Although I appreciate the enthusiasm of QRI and the original ideas they discuss, I am  personally concerned by the potential general lack of scientific rigor that might be induced by the structure of QRI, but I would need to engage more with QRI content. Consciousness (noted C) is a difficult problem that quite likely requires collaboration between a good amount of academics with solid norms of scientific rigor (i.e. doing better than the current replication crisis).

In terms of importance of the cause, it is plausible that there is a lot of variation in architecture and phenomenology of conscious processing and so it is unclear how easily results in current, mostly human-centric, consciousness science would transfer to other species or AIs. On the other hand this suggests that understanding consciousness in specific species might be more neglected (but maybe having reliable behavioral markers of C might already go a long way to understand moral patienthood). In any case I have a difficult time making the case for why understanding consciousness is a particularly important problem relative to other standard EA causes.

Some potential interest to further specify that could potentially make the case for studying consciousness more:

• C might be necessary for general intelligence then better understanding C might help us to better understand general AI and suggest interesting new directions for AI safety.
• Building conscious AI (in the form of brain emulations or other architectures) could possibly help us create a large amount of valuable artificial beings. Wildely speculative indulgence: being able to simulate humans and their descendents could be a great way to make the human species more robust to most existing existential risks (if it is easy to create artificial humans that can live in simulations then humanity could becomes much more resilient)

Overall I am quite skeptical that on the margin consciousness science is the best field for an undergrad in informatics  compare to AI safety or other priority cause areas.

On a longtermist POV, if you think humanity will soon be in a position to create or spread consciousness on a huge scale and has a decent chance of making a hard to reverse decision (e.g. sending out autonomous self-replicating conscious entities, either animal or artificial), knowing more soon about consciousness might be very important.

In the shorter term, knowing more will help animal advocates prioritize between species.

Besides QRI, check out Rethink Priorities and ASENT.

The "meta-problem of consciousness" is "What is the exact chain of events in the brain that leads people to self-report that they're conscious?". The idea is (1) This is not a philosophy question, it's a mundane neuroscience / CogSci question, yet (2) Answering this question would certainly be a big step towards understanding consciousness itself, and moreover (3) This kind of algorithm-level analysis seems to me to be essential for drawing conclusions about the consciousness of different algorithms, like those of animal brains and AIs.

(For example, a complete accounting of the chain of events that leads me to self-report "I am wearing a wristwatch" involves, among other things, a description of the fact that I am in fact wearing a wristwatch, and of what a wristwatch is. By the same token, a complete accounting of the chain of events that leads me to self-report "I am conscious" ought to involve the fact that I am conscious, and what consciousness is, if indeed consciousness is anything at all. Unless you believe in p-zombies I guess, and likewise believe that your own personal experience of being conscious has no causal connection whatsoever to the words that you say when you talk about your conscious experience, which seems rather ludicrous to me, although to be fair there are reasonable people who believe that.)

My impression is that the meta-problem of consciousness is rather neglected in neuroscience / CogSci, although I think Graziano is heading in the right direction. For example, Dehaene has a whole book about consciousness, and nowhere in that book will you see a sentence that ends "...and then the brain emits motor commands to speak the words 'I just don't get it, why does being human feel like anything at all?'." or anything remotely like that. I don't see anything like that from QRI either, although someone can correct me if I missed it. (Graziano does have sentences like that.)

Ditto with the "meta-problem of suffering", incidentally. (Is that even a term? You know what I mean.) It's not obvious, but when I wrote this post I was mainly trying to work towards a theory of the meta-problem of suffering, as a path to understand what suffering is and how to tell whether future AIs will be suffering. I think that particular post was wrong in some details, but hopefully you can see the kind of thing I'm talking about. Conveniently, there's a lot of overlap between solving the meta-problem of suffering and understanding brain motivational systems more generally, which I think may be directly relevant and important for AI Alignment.

It seems to me that consciousness research could be categorized as "fundamental" research and while it may have a less obvious or near-term altruistic impact, without a full understanding, we may miss something essential in how we work or how we operate. For example, studying consciousness, what it is, how it works, and who/what "has it" to what degree could have strong implications on animal rights discussions. More broadly, I tend to think fundamental research is pretty significantly underfunded and underrepresented, perhaps because the direct application seems fuzzier, but I think it is still very important for formalizing and hardening our understanding of how the world works, which serves to improve our decision making. Cognitive science in general is promising to me too, since it can help us figure out why we feel and act like we do, which can really improve our ability to overcome our potentially negative impulses, support our positive impulses, and be more rational and clear-thinking.

I'd say the same thing about astrophysics or quantum mechanics; they seem to be less directly relevant and don't have an 80,000 hours profile, but people definitely still need to do it, since they are essential to our understanding of the universe and have direct applications in improving the world or avoiding existential risks. Not necessarily saying they need to be on 80,000 hours' "most pressing" list, but I certainly wouldn't want to discourage people from working in these areas if the have the skills and interest. We could let "more capable successors" deal with these issues, but I am of the opinion that we can't let work on fundamental research go to zero, or even close to it, while we wait for the successors to arrive.

Research into the human brain and mind does not seem neglected. I am skeptical of our ability to make much progress into the question of consciousness and in particular I don't think we will ever be able to be confident which animals and AI are conscious. But to whatever extent we can make progress on these questions it seems it will come from research areas that are not neglected. Of course, if you are passionate about the area you might think that going into it and donating part of your salary is the best decision overall.