Experiments like these were done even decades back. Every time, there is some temporary indignation/outrage from some limited quarters and then the news dies down while such experiments continue behind closed doors. Only the much derided "animals rights" group keep up sustained focus but they're effectively isolated and ignored.
Perhaps society will do well to keep in mind that what we do to animals we will eventually do to each other too, when the circumstances and motives align just right. Such things have happened in the past and will happen again, unless we can find ways and means to elevate our collective ethics, checks and balances as a global species. Yet daily we shrink from confronting the really tough questions.
The article mentions that the pig brains are comatose, and that the scientists involved say that future experiments should seek to maintain a comatose state.
> Sestan acknowledged that surgeons at Yale had already asked him if the brain-preserving technology could have medical uses. Disembodied human brains, he said, could become guinea pigs for testing exotic cancer cures and speculative Alzheimer’s treatments too dangerous to try on the living.
> The setup, jokingly dubbed the “brain in a bucket,” would quickly raise serious ethical and legal questions if it were tried on a human.
I'm surprised this got the go-ahead, even for pigs. The process involved decapitating a pig. After the success of preserving healthy cells in a decapitated pig brain for 36 hours, the researcher quipped:
> I think a lot of people are going to start going to slaughterhouses to get heads and figure it out.
This has always dumbfounded me about animal experimentation - it's perfectly OK to decapitate a pig to make bacon but it's somehow horribly inhuman to do so to potentially save millions of lives?
You got it, stared straight at the cognitive dissonance produced by the incoherent values of our culture. Time to move forwards to showing compassion coherently.
Spoiler warning: I didn’t read the article (can’t access now due to vpn not working)
So from reading others comments and such: yeah, I understand the idea that the pigs could be comatose and not experiencing anything. From the science behind brains as we know it, that seems to be the case.
Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with this because, in the end, it will benefit humans. And we are more important than pigs.
Personally, I’d be all for human experiments as long as it was done correctly. This is why we do everything on animals first before human trials are even approved.
Give me, or my family enough money, and I’d be happen to be a brain in a bucket for a fixed period of time. Who knows what could happen. Maybe I’d be dead, maybe I’ll be in a waking dream, or maybe nothing at all. We don’t know.
Pig experiments may give us some insight to it. I hope so. Consciousness is one of those elusive things that we haven’t been able to pin down.
Who knows, we might even be able to Altered Carbon ourselves in the future, all thanks to pigs.
Well, we eat the pigs so doing some science experiments on them should be acceptable considering we have so many food alternatives and still eat pigs. I believe people who eat dogs don't see an issue with dog experiments.
It's very personal, but for me "it could reasonnably be useful for humans" (ie it's not cruelty for fun) and "they are not humans" makes it okay to do this to pigs. So yeah, dogs/dolphin/elephants/monkeys would be okay too.
But I do appreciate that other people might have different sensibility or empathy with animals
>>Give me, or my family enough money, and I’d be happen to be a brain in a bucket for a fixed period of time. Who knows what could happen. Maybe I’d be dead, maybe I’ll be in a waking dream, or maybe nothing at all. We don’t know.
That's an interesting perspective. Someone, extremely aware of what he's doing, taking one for the team--while being rewarded. Maybe the family will enjoy the $$ but at least you leave a legacy. Obviously it has to be a major experiment, the final one after all animal testing is exhausted. People sacrifice themselves to save others all the time, soldier jumping on top of grenade, people running into burning houses to save others, going to Mars etc etc
Just keep on piling ever more of the spoils of 'progress' on the 0,1%, while keeping the rest in a dog eat dog 'job hunt' struggle for survival, and you will have no shortage of 'volunteers'.
> in the end, it will benefit humans. And we are more important than pigs.
Let's agree with you for a moment and understand what it really means:
- Let's say you are N times more intelligent than an average pig.
- Now let's say another species appears, where the average individual is N times more intelligent than you.
According to your argument, you would voluntarily subject yourself to experimentation, including getting your brain removed.
Of course you would not do that. So your argument is really about justifying the abuse of other species of mammals that cannot defend themselves.
Variations of that same argument were used to enslave, abuse and kill millions of people. It is sad your comment is the most upvoted. Our society sucks.
This argument is valid forwards, but not universally backwards. Otherwise you could repeat it with pigs and ants, and then with ants and bacteria.
There is a spectrum of life, on one end you have self-propagating chemical reactions, on the other you have beings with moral significance. Whether or not experiments on animals are morally justified depend on where those animals lie on this spectrum, and the form and goal of the experiment.
I'm not trying to say here where pigs lie on the spectrum, just that this discussion needs to happen on a much deeper level of details than "humans are more important than pigs" vs. "but aliens could say the same thing about us" for it to be useful.
(Personally, as long as the brains remain comatose all the way through, I don't feel there's a problem here. If they were active... that would be animal cruelty to me. But that's just my individual moral intuition.)
Obviously, this is very sticky moral ground, and I don't claim to absolutely have the answers....
But I think there is merit to the idea of personage. Types of dolphins have been declared non-human persons, as have some primates, by several governments. There is some significant evidence that elephants may also belong in this grouping.
I think that at some point, an individuals awareness and potential for moral autonomy becomes significant enough that it deserves recognition as such by others with similar capabilities.
I don't pretend to know exactly how to judge this, but I think it is possible as we gain knowledge about the nature of intelligence to make judgements on this criteria.
I think that all animals (and plants) should be treated humanely within the practical possibility of doing so (I subscribe to the "if you can't fix it, try not to break it" philosophy) but I think it is farsical to attempt to equivilize the moral significance of dogs and pigs with that of humans and primates.
Others have already touched upon a few other points in your argument, but quite frankly, intelligence is not a good metric.
And neither is a creature's ability to measure morality.
Do we know how a pig measures morals? Do we know how to measure a pig's awareness? To an extent, we can measure a pig's intelligence, but is it simply 'doing what is repeated over and over' or is there actual understanding of the why behind an action?
Quite frankly, we don't know. We're not even close to understanding how to measure such things.
Because, right now, humans only really understand humans and how the human brain works. We can measure morality, intelligence, and awareness in humans, to a point. And yet...Shit, the brain is one of the least understood parts in humans still.
And we have very, very limited understanding of how animals "see" awareness, consciousness, intelligence, and moral ambiguity.
That isn't even why we need to do more brain research on animals.
Humans need to survive. That's our base-code. Survive. And quite frankly, humanity is on the verge of our own mass-extinction. Maybe brain research wont save us in the end, but it might help us find ways to continue living as a species when the Earth is a ball of dust.
And even then, the potential to understand ourselves, and animals, even more has amazing possibilities. Yes, five hundred years from now, we might look back and think, 'Damn, they did that to an animal?!'
But we would also understand why we had to do it, just like how we understand why people a hundred years ago experimented on animals and humans to develop our scientific knowledge to where it is today.
>where the average individual is N times more intelligent than you.
Nobody said anything about intelligence ratios except for you. Of course that’s a stupid metric. How many times more intelligent are you than a mushroom? Why is that an acceptable amount and not this pig ratio.
>Of course you would not do that.
Don’t call people liars without evidence to turn them into straw men that are easier to tear down.
>Variations of that same argument were used to enslave, abuse and kill millions of people. It is sad your comment is the most upvoted. Our society sucks.
It’s not op’s argument. It’s yours. Nobody said anything about intelligence ratios except for you. You then disregarded the part where op said he/she would volunteer because it didn’t fit your narrative.
The terrifying implications of this tech makes me shudder.
Science fiction has beaten me to considering the potential for abuse. I'm picturing Hyperion meets Brainship with some Altered Carbon thrown in. It hurts my brain even to contemplate.
They just wire up your pain receptors, ears and mouth. Mute your mouth, and ears and set pain to 10. Wait an hour and then ask you if you're willing to talk yet. Repeat until your break.
My mind went straight to Cold Lazarus, the sequel to Karaoke, by Dennis Potter. Reality Or Nothing! Poor fucking pig. I hope it stayed comatose and didn't dream. You can still feel pain from injuries in your dreams sometimes.
people have too much assumptions on what experience is, how that arises in the brain / mind and what those things are to say if these animals are suffering or not. i'd prefer if there was a more clear understanding of consciousness, experience and how that relates to our brains, hearts and other bodily functions before playing with it like this. that being said, like many posted, it's better to govern such experiments properly than to drive them underground as clearly there's many people with different opinions on this and basically before there's a thorough understanding on things it's not possible to say who's right or wrong. i'd just wish people did less work based on assumptions in science and medicine, because that always tends to lead to messy situations. from a personal perspective i think this kind of research is disgusting regarding the lack of information on this topic, but that's my personal opinion and i respect other's for having a different opinion even though that grosses me out. have fun in hell :-) guess we gotta fill that place too :D ( joking! for those atheists jumping on hate train)
I seems people can stomach anything when you’re not experimenting on humans...
A brain still a brain. If you don’t believe in a soul it seems logical to operate with the idea that as long as the brain has electrical waves propagating through it, it’s experiencing consciousness.
waves resembling normal consciousness specifically
I think the brain was likely totally comatose, from the article:
“””
Sestan now says the organs produce a flat brain wave equivalent to a comatose state, although the tissue itself “looks surprisingly great” and, once it’s dissected, the cells produce normal-seeming patterns.
The lack of wider electrical activity could be irreversible if it is due to damage and cell death. The pigs’ brains were attached to the BrainEx device roughly four hours after the animals were decapitated.
However, it could also be due to chemicals the Yale team added to the blood replacement to prevent swelling, which also severely dampen the activity of neurons. “You have to understand that we have so many channel blockers in our solution,” Sestan told the NIH. “This is probably the explanation why we don’t get [any] signal.”
I don't get something. When modelled in software instead, I don't see why a simulating function couldn't use pseudorandom functions and inputs only (nothing truly random, no source of input), and, therefore, be deterministic. I don't see how it makes its results worse. But if it's deterministic, I'm having a hard time seeing how actually running it can have a moral side effect, or how that effect is worse depending on how many times you run it. Especially since there are further levels of silent optimizations (such as by the compiler, or in the CPU) based on the abstraction that the result is all we really care about. Would the calculation involved have a moral side effect at one level of abstraction, but not another? What if you cache intermediate results? Final results?
It is really hard to give pure deterministic calculation itself a moral component, yet it seems a simulation could in the end be just that.
Readit News
Perhaps society will do well to keep in mind that what we do to animals we will eventually do to each other too, when the circumstances and motives align just right. Such things have happened in the past and will happen again, unless we can find ways and means to elevate our collective ethics, checks and balances as a global species. Yet daily we shrink from confronting the really tough questions.
Is it a bad thing in this case? A technique like this could help to extend life in some cases.
I don't think the parent is likening this to a "mistake," but rather a moral and ethical transgression. There's a big difference between the two.
"The EEG brain activity is a flat line, but a lot of other things keep on ticking"
> The setup, jokingly dubbed the “brain in a bucket,” would quickly raise serious ethical and legal questions if it were tried on a human.
I'm surprised this got the go-ahead, even for pigs. The process involved decapitating a pig. After the success of preserving healthy cells in a decapitated pig brain for 36 hours, the researcher quipped:
> I think a lot of people are going to start going to slaughterhouses to get heads and figure it out.
Torturing animals is has been considered immoral for many, many, many years.
So from reading others comments and such: yeah, I understand the idea that the pigs could be comatose and not experiencing anything. From the science behind brains as we know it, that seems to be the case.
Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with this because, in the end, it will benefit humans. And we are more important than pigs.
Personally, I’d be all for human experiments as long as it was done correctly. This is why we do everything on animals first before human trials are even approved.
Give me, or my family enough money, and I’d be happen to be a brain in a bucket for a fixed period of time. Who knows what could happen. Maybe I’d be dead, maybe I’ll be in a waking dream, or maybe nothing at all. We don’t know.
Pig experiments may give us some insight to it. I hope so. Consciousness is one of those elusive things that we haven’t been able to pin down.
Who knows, we might even be able to Altered Carbon ourselves in the future, all thanks to pigs.
Could we also do this to dogs?
Dolphins? Elephants? Monkeys?
We need a better framework for this issue than "where do you draw the line" Vegan Billboard[0].
--
[0] - https://imgur.com/gallery/h9tbwcH
Is it forbidden to reverse-engineer to get there faster?
But I do appreciate that other people might have different sensibility or empathy with animals
That's an interesting perspective. Someone, extremely aware of what he's doing, taking one for the team--while being rewarded. Maybe the family will enjoy the $$ but at least you leave a legacy. Obviously it has to be a major experiment, the final one after all animal testing is exhausted. People sacrifice themselves to save others all the time, soldier jumping on top of grenade, people running into burning houses to save others, going to Mars etc etc
Let's agree with you for a moment and understand what it really means:
- Let's say you are N times more intelligent than an average pig.
- Now let's say another species appears, where the average individual is N times more intelligent than you.
According to your argument, you would voluntarily subject yourself to experimentation, including getting your brain removed.
Of course you would not do that. So your argument is really about justifying the abuse of other species of mammals that cannot defend themselves.
Variations of that same argument were used to enslave, abuse and kill millions of people. It is sad your comment is the most upvoted. Our society sucks.
There is a spectrum of life, on one end you have self-propagating chemical reactions, on the other you have beings with moral significance. Whether or not experiments on animals are morally justified depend on where those animals lie on this spectrum, and the form and goal of the experiment.
I'm not trying to say here where pigs lie on the spectrum, just that this discussion needs to happen on a much deeper level of details than "humans are more important than pigs" vs. "but aliens could say the same thing about us" for it to be useful.
(Personally, as long as the brains remain comatose all the way through, I don't feel there's a problem here. If they were active... that would be animal cruelty to me. But that's just my individual moral intuition.)
But I think there is merit to the idea of personage. Types of dolphins have been declared non-human persons, as have some primates, by several governments. There is some significant evidence that elephants may also belong in this grouping.
I think that at some point, an individuals awareness and potential for moral autonomy becomes significant enough that it deserves recognition as such by others with similar capabilities.
I don't pretend to know exactly how to judge this, but I think it is possible as we gain knowledge about the nature of intelligence to make judgements on this criteria.
I think that all animals (and plants) should be treated humanely within the practical possibility of doing so (I subscribe to the "if you can't fix it, try not to break it" philosophy) but I think it is farsical to attempt to equivilize the moral significance of dogs and pigs with that of humans and primates.
And neither is a creature's ability to measure morality.
Do we know how a pig measures morals? Do we know how to measure a pig's awareness? To an extent, we can measure a pig's intelligence, but is it simply 'doing what is repeated over and over' or is there actual understanding of the why behind an action?
Quite frankly, we don't know. We're not even close to understanding how to measure such things.
Because, right now, humans only really understand humans and how the human brain works. We can measure morality, intelligence, and awareness in humans, to a point. And yet...Shit, the brain is one of the least understood parts in humans still.
And we have very, very limited understanding of how animals "see" awareness, consciousness, intelligence, and moral ambiguity.
That isn't even why we need to do more brain research on animals.
Humans need to survive. That's our base-code. Survive. And quite frankly, humanity is on the verge of our own mass-extinction. Maybe brain research wont save us in the end, but it might help us find ways to continue living as a species when the Earth is a ball of dust.
And even then, the potential to understand ourselves, and animals, even more has amazing possibilities. Yes, five hundred years from now, we might look back and think, 'Damn, they did that to an animal?!'
But we would also understand why we had to do it, just like how we understand why people a hundred years ago experimented on animals and humans to develop our scientific knowledge to where it is today.
Nobody said anything about intelligence ratios except for you. Of course that’s a stupid metric. How many times more intelligent are you than a mushroom? Why is that an acceptable amount and not this pig ratio.
>Of course you would not do that.
Don’t call people liars without evidence to turn them into straw men that are easier to tear down.
>Variations of that same argument were used to enslave, abuse and kill millions of people. It is sad your comment is the most upvoted. Our society sucks.
It’s not op’s argument. It’s yours. Nobody said anything about intelligence ratios except for you. You then disregarded the part where op said he/she would volunteer because it didn’t fit your narrative.
It does mean exactly that, person or pig. This is the true stuff of nightmares.
Science fiction has beaten me to considering the potential for abuse. I'm picturing Hyperion meets Brainship with some Altered Carbon thrown in. It hurts my brain even to contemplate.
I seems people can stomach anything when you’re not experimenting on humans...
A brain still a brain. If you don’t believe in a soul it seems logical to operate with the idea that as long as the brain has electrical waves propagating through it, it’s experiencing consciousness.
waves resembling normal consciousness specifically“””
Sestan now says the organs produce a flat brain wave equivalent to a comatose state, although the tissue itself “looks surprisingly great” and, once it’s dissected, the cells produce normal-seeming patterns.
The lack of wider electrical activity could be irreversible if it is due to damage and cell death. The pigs’ brains were attached to the BrainEx device roughly four hours after the animals were decapitated.
However, it could also be due to chemicals the Yale team added to the blood replacement to prevent swelling, which also severely dampen the activity of neurons. “You have to understand that we have so many channel blockers in our solution,” Sestan told the NIH. “This is probably the explanation why we don’t get [any] signal.”
“””
But yes this would be scary if that wasn’t true.
It is really hard to give pure deterministic calculation itself a moral component, yet it seems a simulation could in the end be just that.
Any solution to this problem?