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Ethical objections in this thread are a red herring. Our brains are not that different than other primates' brains. We do abhorrent things to other primates th
by chaos_emergent 2y ago
Ethical objections in this thread are a red herring.
Our brains are not that different than other primates' brains. We do abhorrent things to other primates that __demonstrably__ have similar experiential qualia as humans, mostly for the benefit of our species. But somehow objectioners are losing their marbles over a human cell cluster that has no more than a few thousand constituent cells.
The computational ability of human brains is an unintentional happenstance of billions of years of random-walk evolution; there's no reason to believe that we can't make systems that are even more efficient with intentional design. If these organoids get us there, I'm all for them.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThere isn’t enough time for a random walk evolution to result in the structure we see. It’s more complicated than that. It seems the universe in the form of humans was meant to contemplate itself.
- bell-cot 2y agoObviously, no human has any experience, nor any expertise, on whether there was enough time. So the argument pretty much turns into "my feelings" vs. Occam's Razor.
- User23 2y agoAmusingly, I suspect that supporters of both the teleological position and the non-teleological position think Occam supports them. For what it’s worth, the only empirical macroevolution we’ve done, from domestication, to Monte Carlo simulations, to genetic algorithms, to LLM training, is all goal directed.
- bell-cot 2y ago> Amusingly, I suspect... Yes...though I'd say that the teleological folks have emotional reasons to judge an ever-so-specific deity (who they already believe in) to be a conveniently minimal hypothesis. Which is a good example of a usually-necessary heuristic - pushing complexity, costs, unknowns, and other unhappy things far enough away (in real or metaphorical space/time) that you don't have to worry about them now. > FWIW, the only empirical... All the budget requests for sextillions of organisms, simulated for billions of years, were rejected. So, unfortunately, some large corners had to be cut...
- User23 2y agoOut of curiosity do you have any kind of argument or supporting evidence for your position or just straw men and snark?
- mensetmanusman 2y agoIf you dramatically redefine random to include choices between useful outcomes (ie. the non random boundary conditions to the decision tree), then Occam’s razor works well here.
- beepbooptheory 2y agoDid not expect an earnest argument for a cosmological teleology on HN today, thank you. I would just say its a whole lot of trouble to get humans to do something they aren't even doing!
- Bluestein 2y agoI would gladly hear more of your take on this.-
- mensetmanusman 2y agoWould require beer near Minneapolis! And a jar of organoid bioprocessors.
- dbingham 2y agoThe fact that we do more horrifying things to other species is not a justification. We shouldn't be doing those things. The fact our legal structures haven't banned them yet does not invalidate the ethical concerns about using human brain tissue in this manner. It's not just a cell cluster, it's a cluster of brain cells, the organ that is most likely linked to consciousness. We don't understand how that organ is linked to consciousness, so we don't know at what point and structure a cluster of neurons would develop it. Given that, this is an extremely dangerous path to start walking down.
- wruza 2y agoDangerous for what?
- rubslopes 2y agoHacking someone's brain to mine cryptocoins in the background may not ever be possible, but if it is, this is how it all starts.
- rogueparitybit 2y agoDangerous for the potential consequences we cant predict, and the violation of ethical considerations for a sentient organism. We dont fully understand consciousness or how it works, and by experimenting with these, we could inadvertently create something capable of suffering or even self awareness. Without a clear understanding of these processes and how they work, it's downright reckless and unethical to assume theres no risk. Dbingham rightly points out that we're treading into unknown and potentially unethical territory.
- wruza 2y agoWe couldn’t predict consequences of most things, from wheel to eletricity to internet. People predicted mailmen on flying bicycles delibering mail to cloud houses. Best predictions were rare and still shallow. Still worked more or less. I don’t get this part at all. I believe the most important part for ethics-concerned commenters here are ethics. But I have a hard time reasoning about it while living on a whole planet with (roughly) 90% of humans living under poverty line, 9.9% of humans living as modern-era slaves, and 100% of organisms that ever lived suffering in an incountable amount of ways. To me it’s more dangerous to leave this as is than experimenting on yet another 0.001% of biotissue. Even when I try hard to take an ethical position, it seems moot to me. I still can’t be sure that my spinal cord isn’t suffering all these tears without me knowing. I mean yes, less suffering would be great, not even by ethics, just from empathy. But neural tissue that has no mouth and probably must scream is too effing everywhere to single some cell collections out. Nature doesn’t care. Scream if you can, and if you can not, too bad. I just can’t find this balanced view that you guys have, it feels pretty self patting on the back to me.
- humansareok1 2y ago>Our brains are not that different than other primates' brains. We do abhorrent things to other primates that __demonstrably__ have similar experiential qualia as humans, mostly for the benefit of our species. But somehow objectioners are losing their marbles over a human cell cluster that has no more than a few thousand constituent cells. This is some kind of strawman. I'm confident that people who are against human cell cluster torture are also against primate torture. Or at least make the mental calculus required to justify it.