5 ms·

We do some fairly awful things to animals already, why would we suddenly get nervous about brain cells in a petri dish? Just because their DNA is human?

MPSimmons 6y ago
> To achieve this goal, Muotri says, he and others might need to deliberately create consciousness That is a very big yikes. The ethical implications of this are awful.
yboris 6y ago
I can't tell which side you're arguing for: more awful things to be done to sentient creatures, or pointing out that we should stop doing awful things to sentient creatures.
- tokai 6y ago
  It might seem weird here in 2020, but you can chime in on something without arguing for any position.
- Nbox9 6y ago
  Have you ever worked with lab mice? It leaves you with this exact juxtaposition of seeing the fantastic progress being made with mouse models and seeing the very real suffering on such a large scale. The fact that many experiments are okay on non-human animals but not humans is speciesist. Still, it’s the line we are all most comfortable with. I’d rather not have people be experimented on. I’d rather continue to have the advances in science built on the lives of untold number of lab animals. However, the line is arbitrary.
  - yboris 6y ago
    Thank you for sharing! Peter Singer, one of the most famous philosophers (and perhaps "the grandfather" of animal rights / animal welfare movement) argues that perhaps, unless we were willing to perform an experiment on humans, we ought not perform the experiment on animals. There are so many experiments which treat animals in awful ways for virtually no progress towards the goal of improving human lives. We were far worse in the past (see Draize test) and have gotten better at not performing really horrible experiments on animals. But it's precisely because animal lives are seen as less important that we are willing to perform experiments with almost no benefit for humanity. At the moment, the largest tragedy is meat consumption - we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures.
    - R0b0t1 6y ago
      Not doing these tests would hold back progress even more. Do you have good examples of pointless experiments? Not bearing out "useful" results is hard to evaluate because rejecting a hypothesis can be important as well. To me, it seems science is moving away from appropriate testing due to funding issues, etc. I don't think making it worse by making illegal certain tests would make it any better.
    - yboris 6y ago
      Re: R0b0t1 Peter Singer documents in his book Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement how (the taxpayer funded) American Museum of Natural History was mutilating cat faces to see if it affected their sexual behavior. It is very hard to make an argument how experiments like these would be a noticeably beneficial to anything other than the tautological "we now know more". From 1976: https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=hensart https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewconte...
    - Nbox9 6y ago
      > At the moment, the largest tragedy is meat consumption I fully agree, but when discussing the terrible ways we treat animals I often find that people are less willing to listen and think about the suffering of animals when it’s something they themselves are taking active part in. My goal when writing about animal suffering is to help people acknowledge animal suffering is a bad thing, and to think about under which circumstances we create animal suffering. If they start thinking that way it can eventually lead to changes in diet.
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      > We were far worse in the past To be fair, we were far worse to humans, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments > we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures. Just like there were orders of magnitude more harm done in just the normal workings of US imperialism on Guatemala than from those horrific experiments. We only notice the interesting suffering, while the mundane day-to-day operations of institutionalized suffering are brushed off as a necessary evil. It's the boring cruelty that lays the groundwork for the creative cruelty.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  Neither. I don't have a good answer for that problem. But I think it is safe to say that animals have a much stronger argument for sentience than brain organoids.
bazooka_penguin 6y ago
I've had a similar thought about the pursuit of AGI. If researchers are trying to create an AI sufficiently advanced enough it could pass as conscious isnt that just a roundabout way of creating slaves? But playing around with cloning to create organic computers is out of the question.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  The ethics are certainly complicated, but you could conceivably build an AI that doesn't possess pain/distress or desire for freedom in a way you could not by cloning a human.
  - tokai 6y ago
    If its amoral to create an intelligence that can feel pain, where does that leave having children?
    - rtkwe 6y ago
      They're not created for the explicit purpose of experimentation though. You don't plan on inflicting pain on kids when you have them normally.
      - alextheparrot 6y ago
        To argue the other perspective that it is amoral, the parents know their child will experience pain and that not creating that child will avoid that pain. It isn’t about intent, as the parent disregarding this because they want a child could just be selfishness - not considering others before themselves. Moreover, by still creating what you know will be injured and feel pain, are the parents not inherently violent? Does the fact that the parents don’t, with intent and personally, inflict the pain allow them to abdicate that they are the root cause of the pain even being possible in the first place.
        rtkwe 6y ago
rtkwe 6y ago
Society at large draws all sorts of lines between what's ok to do to animals and people, doesn't seem weird to question this especially as they potentially get closer to being a human equivalent brain. The question gets worse as we get more complete brains grown and then to the potential for uploads.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
If humans are electrical brain signals in a bio computer, everything done is entirely arbitrary. This historically the reason why many people fear atheism. Because if you allow for arbitrary definitions of which electrical signals are worth keeping, you might be willing to commit ‘atrocities’ as were witnessed in the 19th and 20th century.

MPSimmons 6y ago

> To achieve this goal, Muotri says, he and others might need to deliberately create consciousness That is a very big yikes. The ethical implications of this are awful.

yboris 6y ago

I can't tell which side you're arguing for: more awful things to be done to sentient creatures, or pointing out that we should stop doing awful things to sentient creatures.

tokai 6y ago
It might seem weird here in 2020, but you can chime in on something without arguing for any position.
Nbox9 6y ago
Have you ever worked with lab mice? It leaves you with this exact juxtaposition of seeing the fantastic progress being made with mouse models and seeing the very real suffering on such a large scale. The fact that many experiments are okay on non-human animals but not humans is speciesist. Still, it’s the line we are all most comfortable with. I’d rather not have people be experimented on. I’d rather continue to have the advances in science built on the lives of untold number of lab animals. However, the line is arbitrary.
- yboris 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing! Peter Singer, one of the most famous philosophers (and perhaps "the grandfather" of animal rights / animal welfare movement) argues that perhaps, unless we were willing to perform an experiment on humans, we ought not perform the experiment on animals. There are so many experiments which treat animals in awful ways for virtually no progress towards the goal of improving human lives. We were far worse in the past (see Draize test) and have gotten better at not performing really horrible experiments on animals. But it's precisely because animal lives are seen as less important that we are willing to perform experiments with almost no benefit for humanity. At the moment, the largest tragedy is meat consumption - we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures.
  - R0b0t1 6y ago
    Not doing these tests would hold back progress even more. Do you have good examples of pointless experiments? Not bearing out "useful" results is hard to evaluate because rejecting a hypothesis can be important as well. To me, it seems science is moving away from appropriate testing due to funding issues, etc. I don't think making it worse by making illegal certain tests would make it any better.
  - yboris 6y ago
    Re: R0b0t1 Peter Singer documents in his book Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement how (the taxpayer funded) American Museum of Natural History was mutilating cat faces to see if it affected their sexual behavior. It is very hard to make an argument how experiments like these would be a noticeably beneficial to anything other than the tautological "we now know more". From 1976: https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=hensart https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewconte...
  - Nbox9 6y ago
    > At the moment, the largest tragedy is meat consumption I fully agree, but when discussing the terrible ways we treat animals I often find that people are less willing to listen and think about the suffering of animals when it’s something they themselves are taking active part in. My goal when writing about animal suffering is to help people acknowledge animal suffering is a bad thing, and to think about under which circumstances we create animal suffering. If they start thinking that way it can eventually lead to changes in diet.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    > We were far worse in the past To be fair, we were far worse to humans, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments > we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures. Just like there were orders of magnitude more harm done in just the normal workings of US imperialism on Guatemala than from those horrific experiments. We only notice the interesting suffering, while the mundane day-to-day operations of institutionalized suffering are brushed off as a necessary evil. It's the boring cruelty that lays the groundwork for the creative cruelty.
rootusrootus 6y ago
Neither. I don't have a good answer for that problem. But I think it is safe to say that animals have a much stronger argument for sentience than brain organoids.

bazooka_penguin 6y ago

I've had a similar thought about the pursuit of AGI. If researchers are trying to create an AI sufficiently advanced enough it could pass as conscious isnt that just a roundabout way of creating slaves? But playing around with cloning to create organic computers is out of the question.

ceejayoz 6y ago
The ethics are certainly complicated, but you could conceivably build an AI that doesn't possess pain/distress or desire for freedom in a way you could not by cloning a human.
- tokai 6y ago
  If its amoral to create an intelligence that can feel pain, where does that leave having children?
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    They're not created for the explicit purpose of experimentation though. You don't plan on inflicting pain on kids when you have them normally.
    - alextheparrot 6y ago
      To argue the other perspective that it is amoral, the parents know their child will experience pain and that not creating that child will avoid that pain. It isn’t about intent, as the parent disregarding this because they want a child could just be selfishness - not considering others before themselves. Moreover, by still creating what you know will be injured and feel pain, are the parents not inherently violent? Does the fact that the parents don’t, with intent and personally, inflict the pain allow them to abdicate that they are the root cause of the pain even being possible in the first place.
      - rtkwe 6y ago

rtkwe 6y ago

Society at large draws all sorts of lines between what's ok to do to animals and people, doesn't seem weird to question this especially as they potentially get closer to being a human equivalent brain. The question gets worse as we get more complete brains grown and then to the potential for uploads.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

If humans are electrical brain signals in a bio computer, everything done is entirely arbitrary. This historically the reason why many people fear atheism. Because if you allow for arbitrary definitions of which electrical signals are worth keeping, you might be willing to commit ‘atrocities’ as were witnessed in the 19th and 20th century.