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Not the first time, unlike what the article says [1]. I don't know if there was any follow-up on the previous case, but a big ethical concern was that human DNA
by hn8788 6y ago
Not the first time, unlike what the article says [1]. I don't know if there was any follow-up on the previous case, but a big ethical concern was that human DNA was used to increase their brain capacity, and if they had been allowed to be born, then they would have been as intelligent as humans. So it raises the question of what counts as a human, and did the scientists effectively create "humans" in a lab, then terminate them once the experiment was over.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/12/18306867/china-genetics-monkey-brain-intelligence https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/12/18306867/china-...
- nerpderp82 6y agoAnything with human levels of cognition and/or awareness should be considered a person.
- GloriousKoji 6y agoWhat counts as human levels of cognition/awareness? There are many birds that would rank higher thank human toddlers on the cognitive and awareness scale.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoNote the “should”.
- sakex 6y agoEven AI?
- nerpderp82 6y agoEven AI.
- Nasrudith 6y agoThe really awkward thing is that human level isn't a discrete level but a wide range based upon the set of all humanity. Not just our assumptions of such. If a new outlier was somehow born with the intelligence of a mealworm or what was previously believed to be a level only reachable by a superintelligence those vast anomalies would still have human level intelligence. We don't actually apply the set based standards properly but instead based upon imaginary ideas of human level. If we did consistently operate on set logic and the directive people reduced to brainstem autonomous functions only would eithervmake eating plants unethical or we would be arbitrarily excluding humans from the set for reasons other than absolute ethical. To go more fantastic it would be consistent with ethics to declare obligate murderous vampires who must eat humans non-human because their existence literally depends unconditionally on taking human lives and it falls into paradox of tolerance. Instead our standard for the irreversible brain stem only is to eventually withdraw life support or harvest their organs as they are effectively judged dead.
- Thorentis 6y agoHumans are created in the lab and then destroyed when no longer needed all the time during IVF procedures, but nobody seems to care.
- christophilus 6y agoSome of us do care. There’s a reason the Catholic church is opposed to IVF.
- zokier 6y agoHow much brain capacity those terminated embryos have though??
- Thorentis 6y agoYou're right, anything below a certain brain capacity should just be killed off. Maybe we could even put such people into camps and then slowly kill them without people finding out. I doubt anybody would care or start a world war because of it.
- scrollaway 6y agoStraight to godwin. You know an easy way to tell awful comments? How about this: a sarcastic reply to someone who didn't even make a particular point, with "You're right, [here's what I wish your comment was so I could make fun of it]"
- rsyring 6y agoHow much brain capacity does a human adult have after a catastrophic brain injury or significant dementia? Are you sure you really want this to be the basis on which we decide the morality of terminating life?
- scrollaway 6y agoThere's a solid difference between a laissez-faire "whatever let's just kill it" attitude you might have with a mosquito, and the morality of, for example, assisted suicide in the cases you just described. I get what you're getting at but I don't think your example serves to make your point. Keeping people alive against their wishes can be really fucking barbaric, especially in cases of irreparably debilitating brain injuries.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- elil17 6y agoWhat these researchers are doing is very different than that Vox article. They aren’t giving a monkey a human brain, they are just adding some human cells into a monkey so the monkey will carry them around. By my understanding the Chimera is a host for human tissue that can be used for disease research, sort of like a more effective version of growing human tissue in Petri dishes (e.g. HeLa).