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If you can recreate (part of) a human brain through stem cells or any other way , then why would this not be a human? People with half a brain (after an accide

If you can recreate (part of) a human brain through stem cells or any other way , then why would this not be a human? People with half a brain (after an accident, say) are still people. Cloned people (twins) are still people. Babies born from artificial insemination are still people. It's not up to these researcher to determine what is allowed to do with human brain tissue. Very troubling and unethical

golergka 7y ago
Aborted fetuses have 1/1000th of a human brain, but we (as in, the mainstream political opinion on HN) don't consider them human. And being in OP would have much less than that.
- andai 7y ago
  I wonder if that logic goes the other way. If we succeed in creating a being with intelligence equivalent to 100 humans, would experimenting on it be 100x as unethical as experimenting on humans?
  - snakeboy 7y ago
    As far as I am aware, intelligence is not the variable we care about with respect to ethical experimentation. Rather, consciousness. All humans are assumed equally conscious, while clearly not equally intelligent. Similarly, we understand (at least mammalian) brain structure well enough to identify animals like cows to probably have relatively minimal conscious lived experience, even if they have ample processing power, i.e. "intelligence". So at least in examples from nature, there is no reason to believe that intelligence and conscious lived experience need be correlated meaningfully. So in your example, we would need some way to quantify the degree to which it's conscious, rather than intelligent.
    - h0l0cube 7y ago
      > Similarly, we understand (at least mammalian) brain structure well enough to identify animals like cows to probably have relatively minimal conscious lived experience, even if they have ample processing power, i.e. "intelligence". Do you have any sources to back that up? As far as I'm aware, the 'hard problem of consciousness' is still 'hard'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

golergka 7y ago

Aborted fetuses have 1/1000th of a human brain, but we (as in, the mainstream political opinion on HN) don't consider them human. And being in OP would have much less than that.

andai 7y ago
I wonder if that logic goes the other way. If we succeed in creating a being with intelligence equivalent to 100 humans, would experimenting on it be 100x as unethical as experimenting on humans?
- snakeboy 7y ago
  As far as I am aware, intelligence is not the variable we care about with respect to ethical experimentation. Rather, consciousness. All humans are assumed equally conscious, while clearly not equally intelligent. Similarly, we understand (at least mammalian) brain structure well enough to identify animals like cows to probably have relatively minimal conscious lived experience, even if they have ample processing power, i.e. "intelligence". So at least in examples from nature, there is no reason to believe that intelligence and conscious lived experience need be correlated meaningfully. So in your example, we would need some way to quantify the degree to which it's conscious, rather than intelligent.
  - h0l0cube 7y ago
    > Similarly, we understand (at least mammalian) brain structure well enough to identify animals like cows to probably have relatively minimal conscious lived experience, even if they have ample processing power, i.e. "intelligence". Do you have any sources to back that up? As far as I'm aware, the 'hard problem of consciousness' is still 'hard'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness