6 ms·

Challenges of producing cultivated meat at scale

60 points by paraschopra 5y ago

rdlecler1 5y ago
This is a good outline of the major challenges for cultivated meat and one reason why we’ve had difficulty finding investable opportunities in this space. I do expect plant-hybrid will be necessary and can significantly bring down the cost. Customers are concerned with taste, texture, cost, convenience, and health. Some plant-based alternatives are already challenging taste and cost (we’re an investor in Black Sheep, and I think it tastes better than the animal analog) and cell based hybrids may be able to make additional improvements. On the need for hormones, we invested in Japanese company, integriculture, because it solves this problem by coculturing organ cells (like liver and pancreas) that product these hormones natively. As far as go to market, I expect there will be better opportunities with cosmetics where you could sell something for $1,600/lbs while volumes are still low.
- girvo 5y ago
  > we’re an investor in Black Sheep, and I think it tastes better than the animal analog I'm the same, in that I honestly prefer the taste of The Meet Co's products when making the various recipes than actual beef or chicken.
darawk 5y ago
One thing I don't quite understand about this is why these cultivated meat companies don't start at the high end. Sure, it's true that commodity beef might be $4/lb, but a high end Wagyu steak is an order of magnitude or more higher than that. I would think that producing high end meats using cultivation shouldn't be much more expensive (if at all) than producing low end meats, given the primary difference is the marbling, which is a fairly arbitrary parameter biologically. There must be some good reason why this is hard, but i'd just like to understand why that is.
- User23 5y ago
  I imagine making A5 graded meat in a bioreactor is beyond the state of the art. It might also have trouble in the marketplace. And from what I know those cattle live pretty nice lives until they’re slaughtered. Which, if done properly, is painless because the brain is instantaneously destroyed. Edit: I find factory farming gross and I’m omnivorous. I’m opposed to unnecessary suffering, but I don’t think that’s really a problem for high grade meat.
  - darawk 5y ago
    > I imagine making A5 graded meat in a bioreactor is beyond the state of the art. It might also have trouble in the marketplace. And from what I know those cattle live pretty nice lives until they’re slaughtered. Which, if done properly, is painless because the brain is instantaneously destroyed. I agree that it doesn't achieve the moral/social/climatological objective immediately, but as a business strategy to get to that objective later it seems like a better approach.
  - donw 5y ago
- ska 5y ago
  I think you are vastly underestimating the size of the technical jump you are suggesting.
  - darawk 5y ago
    I understand it's a technical jump, but it seems like a more tractable one than substantially reducing the cost of scale production.
    - ska 5y ago
      I suspect you have those two significantly inverted, but that's just a SWAG.
- PeterisP 5y ago
aaroninsf 5y ago
Context: I became vegetarian for "ethical, and resource consumption" reasons 25 years ago. So family remains so. We are vegan-leaning but definitely not strict. I am not "nauseated" by meat per se; I grew up on it. Au contraire, I have patiently waited out the availability of higher-quality meat proxies. Beyond and Impossible were a significant step in some narrow niches toward satisfying my ongoing interest in, say, a good grilled burger. I try each new pretender to fake-bacon and am duly disappointed. "Vat beef" has been a running joke in my family and circles; it has always seemed like scalable fusion or FSD in being "just a few years away." Perusing this, I find myself asking the same squicky philosophical question I return to... what is the best "line" to target between conventional animal (with its baleful gaze and obvious capacity for suffering), and scifi vat-beef (cultured cells growing in a fortified gel or something)? I say squicky because I wonder if the sweet spot so to speak is closer to brainless animal, than fermentation tank. A lot of the optimization and engineering has been solved to spec for us, why not just breed headless animal horrors with digestive systems and other details tweaked to not belch methane, to accept Huel as input, and maybe ditch the keratin and the like as unnecessary in a controlled environment? It's pretty easy to imagine something that looks like a Human Centipede/Expanse nightmare of a banana or grape cluster comprised of budded legless meat-beanbags which have conventional vascular systems and kinda-sorta digestive tracks, and maybe lungs/maybe outboard oxygenation, optimized for producing electrode-stimulated meat meat meat. The optics are a branding problem, yes, but when it's this or insect-protein, I dunno. The decision may take longer. Just a thought.
- messe 5y ago
  > scalable fusion or FSD in being "just a few years away." Even though I've seen it plenty of times before, it took me way to long to remember the acronym because I'm exhausted. For anybody else in my position: FSD stands for Full Self Driving.
- bobsmooth 5y ago
  The bit of the article where it lists the challenges of vat-beef and how evolution solved these problems millions of years ago, it really makes you think that a topdown approach as you describe would be easier than trying to engineer the necessities for life piecemeal.
collaborative 5y ago
If plant "meat" can be as tasty as McPlants I am in no need of ever eating meat again. Just wish I could buy McPlant steaks and burgers at the supermarket -they are so yummy! So in essence I think that plant meat will replace meat, no need to "cultivate" it
- barbazoo 5y ago
  Even though I don't know McPlant it looks like other veggie patties and I fully agree. They fully replaced meat patties for me. Do they taste like meat, no, but who cares, burgers and hot dogs are mostly about condiments and toppings anyway. Do people really care? The flavor profile of many veggie patties is so much more complex than any meat patty I've ever had, without any of the ethical or environmental problems that comes with meat. That's why I wonder why were even bothering with lab grown meat instead of going the plant based route.
  - collaborative 5y ago
    Indeed. The richness of flavor of McPlants just blows my mind
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    I don't put condiments or toppings on my hotdogs and hamburgers.
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      I highly recommend it.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > burgers and hot dogs are mostly about condiments and toppings anyway For hot dogs, yes. The meat is pretty gross, you want a lot of condiments. Burgers, though, if you need condiments then you need to take a step back and reconsider how you're cooking the beef. That is far and away the dominant flavor for any good hamburger.
trhway 5y ago
not only for humans - startup by a Stanford microbiologist for cultivated mouse meat for cats and dogs https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/15/meet-the-company-making-mouse-meat-cat-treats-without-harming-animals.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/15/meet-the-company-making-mous...
cheese_goddess 5y ago
Just one little problem the article didn't quite touch on: growth factor comes from dead baby cows: > The culture media is an essential component of in vitro cultivation. It is responsible for providing the macromolecules, nutrients and growth factors necessary for cell proliferation. Sourcing growth factors is one of the most challenging tasks of cellular agriculture. Traditionally, it involves the use of fetal bovine serum (FBS) which is a blood product extracted from fetal cows. Besides the argument that its production is unethical, it is also vitiates the independence of the use of animals. [...] > The current alternative is to generate each growth factor individually using recombinant protein production. In this process, the genes coding for the specific factor are integrated into bacteria which are then fermented. However, due to the added complexity of this process, it is particularly expensive.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat#Growth_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat#Growth_factors So unless a viable alternative is found the ethical (and probably environmental also) issues are pretty much the same as eating normal meat.
- donw 5y ago
  > So unless a viable alternative is found the ethical (and probably environmental also) issues are pretty much the same as eating normal meat. Like pretty much everything else pushed by the environmentalist community, it's more about signaling how much you care. Results don't mean shit. If you want to see true environmentalism, the homesteading community does a great job. Massive focus on sustainability, reuse, local cradle-to-grave manufacturing, zero pollution, all the rest. They do the work. Contrast that to the "biofuels are evil" crowd, which has zero problem with intensive lithium strip-mining... as long as it happens somewhere else. Doesn't matter that their Teslas are effectively coal-fired, because they have fought nuclear power for decades. Lifestyles that are wholly unsustainable without de facto slave labor. And let's not even get started with the "recycling" that was, in reality, just shipping trash to foreign landfills. The credibility level of the environmental movement is well into negative numbers from where I sit.
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    Both lithium and FBS replacements are actively in development. Perhaps it would be better to wait on even starting the cultured meat stuff till after the tech is available though. I suspect the environmentalist community aren't the ones that actually want it. I'm perfectly happy with plant based. I would probably eat the cultured stuff but I'd never go out of my way to buy it. It's a compromise to appeal to the general public who seem abhor the thought of vegan food, probably because of the combined efforts of vegans(The worst PR people ever!) and the manosphere/fitness community/traditional living/edgy darwin obsessed atheists who probably never read a darwin book spouting about how it's unnatural to not eat meat.
blurker 5y ago
I thought this was a pretty good summary, but one thing stuck out to me as not quite right: > To be price competitive, cultivated meat needs to match the cost of animal derived meat. I don't think that's strictly true. Plenty of people are willing to pay more for products that are more ethical. Also, meat prices are likely to increase as we grapple with climate change and other issues related to subsidized, unsustainable sources of meat that we currently use. That being said, if we are still mostly around $10,000/lb, we are a long way off and the overall conclusion doesn't change much. Seems like there are some big things to figure out before it's going to be a thing in the markets.
robbrown451 5y ago
I'm all for cultivated meat, but I don't agree with the reasoning being that animals used for food experience pain and suffering. And I most certainly don't agree with this assumption: "Factory farms are not what animals evolved for, so the unnatural conditions in which they're raised very likely induces suffering and pain in the raised livestock." What makes you think that "natural" means free of suffering? Nature is spectacularly cruel. Many domestic animals (think well-loved family pets such as cats and dogs) live lives incredibly free of the suffering of their non-domestic ancestors. It is certainly possible to raise animals for food where they have an easy life, and feel no pain at the end. I can't speak to whether it is economical (obviously, ensuring this would be expensive), but still. It is NOT impossible, or really all that difficult. If you want to make the argument that killing animals with brains is bad, fine. I can go with that, and would prefer meat that doesn't involving killing. But basing it on false assumptions about how much pain the animal must experience is just going to make me say "let's just make laws that say animals must be treated very well and have a perfectly painless and stress free death." Because I'm just not convinced, at all, that a well treated animal automatically suffers more than one in the wild.
- zzkwa 5y ago
  The issue with factory farming is that the industry has become extremely reliant on it, and the practice by nature demands the minimum legal effort to protect the well being and safety of animals. Farms often don't even meet that standard. Upwards of 90% of pigs and chickens are raised in factory farms in the US. There is simply too much demand in the country for meat to be raised in local, humane farms at this point. The current scale of livestock farming is dependent of factory farms, so the consumption of meat on a national level hinges on the abuse of animals. If you doubt that the animals raised in these conditions suffer, you can pretty easily find the details online and in documentaries. Industrial meat production is one of the most disgusting parts of our society.
- luplex 5y ago
  I think it's pretty clear that conditions in many of today's farms really do cause unnecessary suffering for the animals. If we treat animals better, we can't produce as much meat. So, in order to get the general public on board with better animal welfare standards, we need to provide alternatives to meat, at scale. In democracies, we (a few concerned people) can't just make laws. We can only implement solutions that can be supported across society.
tengbretson 5y ago
If you are interested in ensuring your meat comes from animals that don't suffer, about 50 square feet of a backyard, or even just a spare bedroom in an apartment is all it would take to raise enough rabbits to supply you with a majority of your meat.
tpoacher 5y ago
> Plants and single cells likely aren't conscious or experience pain the same way we or other animals do. To make a philosophical point: Huge assumption right there. At best we can say that if they are conscious and experience pain, they do so in a paradigm that is fundamentally different to that of animals, one which we as humans are unable to relate, and therefore we care less, prefer not to think about it, and treat them as unconscious agents. We relate to the perceived experience of animals a lot more because superficially they seem to react similarly to relevant scenarios that we interpret and relate to as reflecting consciousness and personality, and their anatomies that generate such consciousness is similar to ours, so we know which parts should be removed in the process of cultivating meat. We know no such thing about plants. In fact, we know jack shit about plant consciousness, and the more we learn the more we realise that plants have their own form of consciousness too (fungal neural networks, eusocial norms and social hierarchies, pain-like/defensive responses, collective intelligence, etc). We prefer to think of plants as a glorified bundle of chemical reactions packaged as a quasi-neural network. But then, you could reduce animals to the same; humans too. The only reason we consider humans to be more than the sum of their chemical parts is because we are able to communicate our suprising subjective experience clearly. The reason we consider it likely that animals share a similar experience, is because we identify some of their behaviours as relatable, and perhaps even as a form of communication for that experience. With plants, we simply don't relate, but this in no way means their behaviour isn't underlied by conscious experience. You have no idea when a plant recoils from your touch or releases chemicals, whether this is "just a chemical response" or if its experiencing a stressful experience in its own manner of consciousness. I have caught myself wondering, imagine if you had to justify garbage collection in your code in terms of ethics. Like, you wake up one day and find out that every single variable you've ever instantiated in code, had a conscious experience. What would you do? Would you leave programs running? Would you let memory leaks happen to avoid 'killing' variables off? Would you only delete some variables but not others?
xyzzy21 5y ago
The biggest challenges: * takes FAR more energy and material inputs that normal meat * tastes like ass

60 points by paraschopra 5y ago

This is a good outline of the major challenges for cultivated meat and one reason why we’ve had difficulty finding investable opportunities in this space. I do expect plant-hybrid will be necessary and can significantly bring down the cost. Customers are concerned with taste, texture, cost, convenience, and health. Some plant-based alternatives are already challenging taste and cost (we’re an investor in Black Sheep, and I think it tastes better than the animal analog) and cell based hybrids may be able to make additional improvements. On the need for hormones, we invested in Japanese company, integriculture, because it solves this problem by coculturing organ cells (like liver and pancreas) that product these hormones natively. As far as go to market, I expect there will be better opportunities with cosmetics where you could sell something for $1,600/lbs while volumes are still low.

girvo 5y ago
> we’re an investor in Black Sheep, and I think it tastes better than the animal analog I'm the same, in that I honestly prefer the taste of The Meet Co's products when making the various recipes than actual beef or chicken.

darawk 5y ago

One thing I don't quite understand about this is why these cultivated meat companies don't start at the high end. Sure, it's true that commodity beef might be $4/lb, but a high end Wagyu steak is an order of magnitude or more higher than that. I would think that producing high end meats using cultivation shouldn't be much more expensive (if at all) than producing low end meats, given the primary difference is the marbling, which is a fairly arbitrary parameter biologically. There must be some good reason why this is hard, but i'd just like to understand why that is.

User23 5y ago
I imagine making A5 graded meat in a bioreactor is beyond the state of the art. It might also have trouble in the marketplace. And from what I know those cattle live pretty nice lives until they’re slaughtered. Which, if done properly, is painless because the brain is instantaneously destroyed. Edit: I find factory farming gross and I’m omnivorous. I’m opposed to unnecessary suffering, but I don’t think that’s really a problem for high grade meat.
- darawk 5y ago
  > I imagine making A5 graded meat in a bioreactor is beyond the state of the art. It might also have trouble in the marketplace. And from what I know those cattle live pretty nice lives until they’re slaughtered. Which, if done properly, is painless because the brain is instantaneously destroyed. I agree that it doesn't achieve the moral/social/climatological objective immediately, but as a business strategy to get to that objective later it seems like a better approach.
- donw 5y ago
ska 5y ago
I think you are vastly underestimating the size of the technical jump you are suggesting.
- darawk 5y ago
  I understand it's a technical jump, but it seems like a more tractable one than substantially reducing the cost of scale production.
  - ska 5y ago
    I suspect you have those two significantly inverted, but that's just a SWAG.
PeterisP 5y ago

aaroninsf 5y ago

Context: I became vegetarian for "ethical, and resource consumption" reasons 25 years ago. So family remains so. We are vegan-leaning but definitely not strict. I am not "nauseated" by meat per se; I grew up on it. Au contraire, I have patiently waited out the availability of higher-quality meat proxies. Beyond and Impossible were a significant step in some narrow niches toward satisfying my ongoing interest in, say, a good grilled burger. I try each new pretender to fake-bacon and am duly disappointed. "Vat beef" has been a running joke in my family and circles; it has always seemed like scalable fusion or FSD in being "just a few years away." Perusing this, I find myself asking the same squicky philosophical question I return to... what is the best "line" to target between conventional animal (with its baleful gaze and obvious capacity for suffering), and scifi vat-beef (cultured cells growing in a fortified gel or something)? I say squicky because I wonder if the sweet spot so to speak is closer to brainless animal, than fermentation tank. A lot of the optimization and engineering has been solved to spec for us, why not just breed headless animal horrors with digestive systems and other details tweaked to not belch methane, to accept Huel as input, and maybe ditch the keratin and the like as unnecessary in a controlled environment? It's pretty easy to imagine something that looks like a Human Centipede/Expanse nightmare of a banana or grape cluster comprised of budded legless meat-beanbags which have conventional vascular systems and kinda-sorta digestive tracks, and maybe lungs/maybe outboard oxygenation, optimized for producing electrode-stimulated meat meat meat. The optics are a branding problem, yes, but when it's this or insect-protein, I dunno. The decision may take longer. Just a thought.

messe 5y ago
> scalable fusion or FSD in being "just a few years away." Even though I've seen it plenty of times before, it took me way to long to remember the acronym because I'm exhausted. For anybody else in my position: FSD stands for Full Self Driving.
bobsmooth 5y ago
The bit of the article where it lists the challenges of vat-beef and how evolution solved these problems millions of years ago, it really makes you think that a topdown approach as you describe would be easier than trying to engineer the necessities for life piecemeal.

collaborative 5y ago

If plant "meat" can be as tasty as McPlants I am in no need of ever eating meat again. Just wish I could buy McPlant steaks and burgers at the supermarket -they are so yummy! So in essence I think that plant meat will replace meat, no need to "cultivate" it

barbazoo 5y ago
Even though I don't know McPlant it looks like other veggie patties and I fully agree. They fully replaced meat patties for me. Do they taste like meat, no, but who cares, burgers and hot dogs are mostly about condiments and toppings anyway. Do people really care? The flavor profile of many veggie patties is so much more complex than any meat patty I've ever had, without any of the ethical or environmental problems that comes with meat. That's why I wonder why were even bothering with lab grown meat instead of going the plant based route.
- collaborative 5y ago
  Indeed. The richness of flavor of McPlants just blows my mind
- charcircuit 5y ago
  I don't put condiments or toppings on my hotdogs and hamburgers.
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    I highly recommend it.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > burgers and hot dogs are mostly about condiments and toppings anyway For hot dogs, yes. The meat is pretty gross, you want a lot of condiments. Burgers, though, if you need condiments then you need to take a step back and reconsider how you're cooking the beef. That is far and away the dominant flavor for any good hamburger.

trhway 5y ago

not only for humans - startup by a Stanford microbiologist for cultivated mouse meat for cats and dogs https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/15/meet-the-company-making-mouse-meat-cat-treats-without-harming-animals.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/15/meet-the-company-making-mous...

cheese_goddess 5y ago

Just one little problem the article didn't quite touch on: growth factor comes from dead baby cows: > The culture media is an essential component of in vitro cultivation. It is responsible for providing the macromolecules, nutrients and growth factors necessary for cell proliferation. Sourcing growth factors is one of the most challenging tasks of cellular agriculture. Traditionally, it involves the use of fetal bovine serum (FBS) which is a blood product extracted from fetal cows. Besides the argument that its production is unethical, it is also vitiates the independence of the use of animals. [...] > The current alternative is to generate each growth factor individually using recombinant protein production. In this process, the genes coding for the specific factor are integrated into bacteria which are then fermented. However, due to the added complexity of this process, it is particularly expensive.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat#Growth_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat#Growth_factors So unless a viable alternative is found the ethical (and probably environmental also) issues are pretty much the same as eating normal meat.

donw 5y ago
> So unless a viable alternative is found the ethical (and probably environmental also) issues are pretty much the same as eating normal meat. Like pretty much everything else pushed by the environmentalist community, it's more about signaling how much you care. Results don't mean shit. If you want to see true environmentalism, the homesteading community does a great job. Massive focus on sustainability, reuse, local cradle-to-grave manufacturing, zero pollution, all the rest. They do the work. Contrast that to the "biofuels are evil" crowd, which has zero problem with intensive lithium strip-mining... as long as it happens somewhere else. Doesn't matter that their Teslas are effectively coal-fired, because they have fought nuclear power for decades. Lifestyles that are wholly unsustainable without de facto slave labor. And let's not even get started with the "recycling" that was, in reality, just shipping trash to foreign landfills. The credibility level of the environmental movement is well into negative numbers from where I sit.
- eternityforest 5y ago
  Both lithium and FBS replacements are actively in development. Perhaps it would be better to wait on even starting the cultured meat stuff till after the tech is available though. I suspect the environmentalist community aren't the ones that actually want it. I'm perfectly happy with plant based. I would probably eat the cultured stuff but I'd never go out of my way to buy it. It's a compromise to appeal to the general public who seem abhor the thought of vegan food, probably because of the combined efforts of vegans(The worst PR people ever!) and the manosphere/fitness community/traditional living/edgy darwin obsessed atheists who probably never read a darwin book spouting about how it's unnatural to not eat meat.

blurker 5y ago

I thought this was a pretty good summary, but one thing stuck out to me as not quite right: > To be price competitive, cultivated meat needs to match the cost of animal derived meat. I don't think that's strictly true. Plenty of people are willing to pay more for products that are more ethical. Also, meat prices are likely to increase as we grapple with climate change and other issues related to subsidized, unsustainable sources of meat that we currently use. That being said, if we are still mostly around $10,000/lb, we are a long way off and the overall conclusion doesn't change much. Seems like there are some big things to figure out before it's going to be a thing in the markets.

robbrown451 5y ago

I'm all for cultivated meat, but I don't agree with the reasoning being that animals used for food experience pain and suffering. And I most certainly don't agree with this assumption: "Factory farms are not what animals evolved for, so the unnatural conditions in which they're raised very likely induces suffering and pain in the raised livestock." What makes you think that "natural" means free of suffering? Nature is spectacularly cruel. Many domestic animals (think well-loved family pets such as cats and dogs) live lives incredibly free of the suffering of their non-domestic ancestors. It is certainly possible to raise animals for food where they have an easy life, and feel no pain at the end. I can't speak to whether it is economical (obviously, ensuring this would be expensive), but still. It is NOT impossible, or really all that difficult. If you want to make the argument that killing animals with brains is bad, fine. I can go with that, and would prefer meat that doesn't involving killing. But basing it on false assumptions about how much pain the animal must experience is just going to make me say "let's just make laws that say animals must be treated very well and have a perfectly painless and stress free death." Because I'm just not convinced, at all, that a well treated animal automatically suffers more than one in the wild.

zzkwa 5y ago
The issue with factory farming is that the industry has become extremely reliant on it, and the practice by nature demands the minimum legal effort to protect the well being and safety of animals. Farms often don't even meet that standard. Upwards of 90% of pigs and chickens are raised in factory farms in the US. There is simply too much demand in the country for meat to be raised in local, humane farms at this point. The current scale of livestock farming is dependent of factory farms, so the consumption of meat on a national level hinges on the abuse of animals. If you doubt that the animals raised in these conditions suffer, you can pretty easily find the details online and in documentaries. Industrial meat production is one of the most disgusting parts of our society.
luplex 5y ago
I think it's pretty clear that conditions in many of today's farms really do cause unnecessary suffering for the animals. If we treat animals better, we can't produce as much meat. So, in order to get the general public on board with better animal welfare standards, we need to provide alternatives to meat, at scale. In democracies, we (a few concerned people) can't just make laws. We can only implement solutions that can be supported across society.

tengbretson 5y ago

If you are interested in ensuring your meat comes from animals that don't suffer, about 50 square feet of a backyard, or even just a spare bedroom in an apartment is all it would take to raise enough rabbits to supply you with a majority of your meat.

tpoacher 5y ago

> Plants and single cells likely aren't conscious or experience pain the same way we or other animals do. To make a philosophical point: Huge assumption right there. At best we can say that if they are conscious and experience pain, they do so in a paradigm that is fundamentally different to that of animals, one which we as humans are unable to relate, and therefore we care less, prefer not to think about it, and treat them as unconscious agents. We relate to the perceived experience of animals a lot more because superficially they seem to react similarly to relevant scenarios that we interpret and relate to as reflecting consciousness and personality, and their anatomies that generate such consciousness is similar to ours, so we know which parts should be removed in the process of cultivating meat. We know no such thing about plants. In fact, we know jack shit about plant consciousness, and the more we learn the more we realise that plants have their own form of consciousness too (fungal neural networks, eusocial norms and social hierarchies, pain-like/defensive responses, collective intelligence, etc). We prefer to think of plants as a glorified bundle of chemical reactions packaged as a quasi-neural network. But then, you could reduce animals to the same; humans too. The only reason we consider humans to be more than the sum of their chemical parts is because we are able to communicate our suprising subjective experience clearly. The reason we consider it likely that animals share a similar experience, is because we identify some of their behaviours as relatable, and perhaps even as a form of communication for that experience. With plants, we simply don't relate, but this in no way means their behaviour isn't underlied by conscious experience. You have no idea when a plant recoils from your touch or releases chemicals, whether this is "just a chemical response" or if its experiencing a stressful experience in its own manner of consciousness. I have caught myself wondering, imagine if you had to justify garbage collection in your code in terms of ethics. Like, you wake up one day and find out that every single variable you've ever instantiated in code, had a conscious experience. What would you do? Would you leave programs running? Would you let memory leaks happen to avoid 'killing' variables off? Would you only delete some variables but not others?

xyzzy21 5y ago

The biggest challenges: * takes FAR more energy and material inputs that normal meat * tastes like ass