6 ms·

"What better reward for a monkey, than a banana"? what about FREEDOM? I am not a vegan/whatever/animal activist, but maybe we should allow terminally-ill or de

"What better reward for a monkey, than a banana"? what about FREEDOM? I am not a vegan/whatever/animal activist, but maybe we should allow terminally-ill or death-row volunteers for this kind of experiment... With good money for the family, and I think some people would like to help mankind in the end. It is better than dying without accomplishing anything in life. So, you have at most one year with an inoperable tumor, and you will not travel because you want to be close to your family. Would you be a volunteer for this research, for 500 thousand dollars? (monkeys are cheaper, but you are the real deal)

NavinF 6y ago
Yeah I'd volunteer for implant testing if I had a 6 month life expectancy due to a terminal illness. I don't think it's a good idea to allow death-row inmates to do this though; They'd likely be pressured into volunteering as the only way to delay the execution.
- quilombodigital 6y ago
  I did not thought about this, but at the same time, "punishment" cannot coexist with "reparation"? Money would go to victims.
- logicchains 6y ago
  This sounds like the plot of a movie: death-row inmate forced to volunteer for implant testing, but he manages to connect to some kind of military robot and fights for his freedom.
  - castratikron 6y ago
    Death Rowbot (2022)
lwansbrough 6y ago
You said you’re not a vegan, so to be clear your okay with factory farms crushing pigs to death but minimally invasive surgery on monkeys so they can play pong is too far? I don’t care about your stance on animal consumption particularly, but don’t you find that a little hypocritical?
- 55555 6y ago
  They crush pigs to death? What? Nothing would surprise me at this point, but I couldnt find a citation for that at first glance.
  - DocTomoe 6y ago
    OP might be referring to pigs crushing each other to death because of overcrowding in badly-run farms and during transportation. Farmers don't throw pigs in trash compactors (and why would they? Non-compacted pigs is how they do earn their money.)
- antoinexp 6y ago
  Is your first statement not a kind of strawman argument? ( https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman ) I mean, I am not vegan too but it doesn't mean I am ok with pigs crushed to death anyway. I think I see the point that you want to make though: somehow it should feel as if this minimal surgery ought to be "logically" more morally acceptable than killing animals to eat them. But don't you think morality could be just the name of a preference function deeply encoded in each individual brain and which doesn't require to be "rationally tuned"? (So that it can lead to weird irrational situations as in, I am ok with eating meat but I feel uncomfortable at the idea of killing animals)
- quilombodigital 6y ago
  Yep, I agree this sounds hypocritical,but everybody has different "lines" to cross. I guess mine is how close they are to humans. (98%), and I also differentiate "food" from "experiment".
seesawtron 6y ago
Patients undergoing brain surgeries are routinely asked to volunteer for neuroscientific studies and they often do so. Terminally ill patients also donate their brain tissue for tons of studies more often than you would think. But the scope of experiments that one can do with them and the available multimodal data available from parallel studies in human cortex is extremely limited. On the other hand, non-human primates are readily available in a controlled environment, can be used to generate huge amounts of data specific to a diverse set of tasks and experiments that you just can not do on the human patients. The brain is a complex machine that is extremely hard to decipher just by studying a single species or one kind of experiments. The need for studies across species with a hundred different ways of collecting and analysing data is essential to first understand the mechnasims of the brain and only then (hopefully) be able to causally alter it for specific applications in medicine and so on.

NavinF 6y ago

Yeah I'd volunteer for implant testing if I had a 6 month life expectancy due to a terminal illness. I don't think it's a good idea to allow death-row inmates to do this though; They'd likely be pressured into volunteering as the only way to delay the execution.

quilombodigital 6y ago
I did not thought about this, but at the same time, "punishment" cannot coexist with "reparation"? Money would go to victims.
logicchains 6y ago
This sounds like the plot of a movie: death-row inmate forced to volunteer for implant testing, but he manages to connect to some kind of military robot and fights for his freedom.
- castratikron 6y ago
  Death Rowbot (2022)

lwansbrough 6y ago

You said you’re not a vegan, so to be clear your okay with factory farms crushing pigs to death but minimally invasive surgery on monkeys so they can play pong is too far? I don’t care about your stance on animal consumption particularly, but don’t you find that a little hypocritical?

55555 6y ago
They crush pigs to death? What? Nothing would surprise me at this point, but I couldnt find a citation for that at first glance.
- DocTomoe 6y ago
  OP might be referring to pigs crushing each other to death because of overcrowding in badly-run farms and during transportation. Farmers don't throw pigs in trash compactors (and why would they? Non-compacted pigs is how they do earn their money.)
antoinexp 6y ago
Is your first statement not a kind of strawman argument? ( https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman ) I mean, I am not vegan too but it doesn't mean I am ok with pigs crushed to death anyway. I think I see the point that you want to make though: somehow it should feel as if this minimal surgery ought to be "logically" more morally acceptable than killing animals to eat them. But don't you think morality could be just the name of a preference function deeply encoded in each individual brain and which doesn't require to be "rationally tuned"? (So that it can lead to weird irrational situations as in, I am ok with eating meat but I feel uncomfortable at the idea of killing animals)
quilombodigital 6y ago
Yep, I agree this sounds hypocritical,but everybody has different "lines" to cross. I guess mine is how close they are to humans. (98%), and I also differentiate "food" from "experiment".

seesawtron 6y ago

Patients undergoing brain surgeries are routinely asked to volunteer for neuroscientific studies and they often do so. Terminally ill patients also donate their brain tissue for tons of studies more often than you would think. But the scope of experiments that one can do with them and the available multimodal data available from parallel studies in human cortex is extremely limited. On the other hand, non-human primates are readily available in a controlled environment, can be used to generate huge amounts of data specific to a diverse set of tasks and experiments that you just can not do on the human patients. The brain is a complex machine that is extremely hard to decipher just by studying a single species or one kind of experiments. The need for studies across species with a hundred different ways of collecting and analysing data is essential to first understand the mechnasims of the brain and only then (hopefully) be able to causally alter it for specific applications in medicine and so on.