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?
Sometimes it happens as a side-effect of cost-cutting, but it's not desired. The goal is to have animals wander around a barn/field for months to years and then get instantly killed before being cut up.
> pigs are placed in a crate made of iron bars that is the exact length and width of their bodies, so they can do nothing for their entire lives but stand on a concrete floor, never turn around, never see any outdoors, never even see their tails, never move more than an inch.
Of everyone in the meat company all of the way to the consumer. Nobody wants the animals to suffer (outside the portion of psychopaths present in all industries).
How so? If that were true, we'd see factory farms lobbying for stronger laws against animal cruelty, to prevent competitors that do not care about animals from forcing everyone into the current state of things.
Truth is, a lot of people - inside and outside - just don't care. Ceteris paribus, they'd prefer animals to have happy lives, but that preference is outweighed by needs of convenience, profit, human healthcare, and food security.
Psychopaths are rare. But, with apologies to Burke/Mill[0], the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is to separate good men from it by enough layers of abstraction.
--
[0] - Apparently [1], the Burke never said that, and the original sounds closer to "Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing", which is incidentally even closer to my paraphrase.
> How so? If that were true, we'd see factory farms lobbying for stronger laws against animal cruelty
Right. And instead they throw their weight behind ag-gag laws, which criminalize whistleblowing on factory farms.
I think that way more people outside than inside do care, it’s just that you have to go seeking this information yourself to find out much, and it’s highly disturbing stuff. So without loud voices pushing people to confront the issue,it’s easy to remain willfully ignorant.
Hey, can I keep your mind alive and disconnect it from your body, and just, you know, try stuff out, while you endure some kind of surreal waking nightmare, forever looking out from a terrarium with lidless eyes?
If you happened to be a death row inmate in China, you might had better chances running into such experiences. Your remaining organs, while your brain was in a jar, would be donated to a rich cause.
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.
>If the meat I buy is from someone who mutilated the cow and optimized for maximum pain in the death of the cow then I would not buy that meat.
What if more pain directly correlated with better-tasting meat (or some other tangible advantage, like health benefits or medicinal properties)? I think you'd find many, many people who'd be okay with cows inflicted maximum pain for maximum yum meat, let alone meat that made them healthier than the alternative.
If there's a spectrum here, an instance of that spectrum exists for each individual too. Is it rational to believe we could ever agree on a single universal line on that spectrum for everyone?
What if the "mutilated" cow would save your life or just fix a small health issue(i.e backpain)? Would you still accept the procedure? We test on animals so that we don't have to test on us(first). I find using animals for science experiments(even if they are painful) more ethical than killing them for their good taste. If you replace the animals with humans (eating vs experiments) there is no question which one is more wrong.
What if the mutilated cow (in the slaughterhouse) could save my life? Cows that are ill treated before they dead actually produce worse meat. So I think it's provable that tortured cow meat is bad for me.
Now I know you weren't referring to that.
As far as animal experimentation goes, it's pretty much illegal to do torturous experimentation on animals.
Getting IRB approval is difficult for anything besides normal life for an animal. Yes you can inject drugs into it etc., but pain to the animal plays a very large role in if you'll be allowed to do it.
* My wife is a cancer biologist who maintains and works with mouse models.
> If you replace the animals with humans (eating vs experiments) there is no question which one is more wrong.
Consent is the only issue here. What you're talking about isn't really ethics, more disgust.
Where do you personally draw the line? I'm not trying to be adversarial, just trying to understand how cogent your argument is.
I think the race argument is a bit reductio ad adsurdum. Why is that any different than if you decide to only eat plants? That draws the line at the kingdom classification which is just another human convention. Drawing the line between species seems to have some logic to it at least, given there is a stronger biological definition rather than a contrived race argument. (e.g., we can strictly define a species, in part, by their ability to produce viable offspring)
I do not draw a line in kingdom either, that would be every bit as absurd and arbitrary as drawing a line on species or race. In practice, I end up eating only members of plant kingdom, but that is just a fortuitous artifact, not the result of drawing a line at 'kingdom'.
I seek to avoid causing suffering (I'm an utilitarian, but you don't necessarily have to be utilitarian to try to prevent suffering). Q: What entities can suffer? A: Sentient beings, by definition of sentience.
In particular, animals that we usually kill, do suffer (but not necessarily every individual belonging to that kingdom does). Carrots do not (but if in the future we discovered an individual of another kingdom that suffered as much as a pig on a slaughterhouse, I wouldn't eat him either, being there so many other options).
Thanks for the clarification on your stance and for sharing the link. Although I know a lot of people think Dawkins worships on the alter of rationality, I think some of his stances on this issue need to be taken with a grain of salt because he openly admits that he occasionally makes emotional arguments when it comes to (non-human) animal rights.
I think the assumptions that need to be called out in Singer's argument (and possibly yours, given the little bit in your post above) are 1) we know how to define sentience and 2) we understand the link between sentience and suffering. These points may be a departure from Singer in part because he's making a philosophical argument and not necessarily a scientific one. The science part being relevant to this thread because I think part of the discussion is how strict definitions are necessary to avoid the moral relativism aspect of the conversation.
There doesn't appear to be any scientific consensus on how to define consciousness or sentience. Some, like Sam Harris, define it simply in terms of information processing. In that case, what suffers can get murky fast. Are mollusks more conscious than, say, a venus fly trap? I don't know, but as a layman, I haven't come across a good definition to parse that question effectively.
Even if we have an understanding of sentience, there doesn't seem to be a definition on how this translates to suffering. You seem to imply it is a given that sentience leads directly to the ability to suffer, but I haven't found a good consensus on this either. Some people like Gerald Edelman take the stance that suffering is dependent on complexity of the nervous system, so there's nothing morally wrong with killing lobsters and less complex animals. There's others like Vilayanur Ramachandran who go further and don't think more complex animals like cows suffer because they don't introspectively experience pain the way humans do.
The above is a just a long-winded way of saying that I think we need strict scientific definitions to make some sense of the topic or we'll just be endlessly entangled in relativistic arguments. I'm not convinced we have made sense enough of the problem to define it this thoroughly.
Our lives and laws are necessarily filled with quasi-arbitrary lines and conventions. What is the age of consent for marriage? What threshold of blood-alcohol is too much to drive a motor vehicle? When is someone considered dead?
Comparing the acknowledgement of such lines with racism is ridiculous.
Ok, so let's propose another quasi-arbitrary line and convention: black people can be enslaved, white people cannot. So, this rule would be just as arbitrary and valid as any other. Or is there a ethical justification against it?
Someone (or a group of person) fought and convinced other that its in their best interests to make a particular law. For example a law against murder, some people think that its in their best interest to punish people for murder, some other don't.
Regardless what the "true" morality is regarding murder, the one who fight and and can either successfully force or convince other to follow, get to decide what the law is.
I'm not but I am pretty sure there is someone who is Ok with that. Besides in my previous response I'm just specifically concerned with human vs non human. I'm not saying anything regarding human X vs human Y.
I understand that, I'm pointing out that your drawing a line separating human vs non human is just as arbitrary as drawing a line separating white vs non white
Sure there is, but in your view we couldn't say that those people are evil, because in the end it's just preference of where to draw the line, correct?
Nazis chose to draw a line excluding jews, and that was their preference
Evil or not is relative. You can say nazis is evil but to the nazis they might not think its evil. To me evil or not is irrelevant. If you dont like Nazi action, then you have to force them to stop regardless.
Ok, so by that same rationale we could say:
"Evil or not is irrelevant, but if you don't like animal-exploiters action, you have to force them to stop regardless"
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'.
I totally get the '0.1%' thought here, the idea being that the majority of this scientific progress will only benefit those how can afford it.
Personally, I'd be hoping for more universal advancement. I hope society gets to the point where scientific advancements benefit all people, not just the minority that can afford such advancements.
As with most advancements, it's doubtful we'll ever get to a time period where we'll discover/invent/create/do something new and suddenly it's available to everyone. All things get cheaper with time, and scale eventually propagates once-expensive things out to more of the populace. In most cases the higher origin cost funds manufacturing advancements or research to bring down other costs, which make the argument that targeting the 0.1% is actually necessary for a wider distribution later.
Rather than thinking in terms of "all these crazy improvements will only be for the 0.1%", it's important to think of them on a per-advancement basis. Each one will be expensive at first, and then get cheaper; and as we start seeing cheaper things available, we will also continue to see more advancements that are inevitably targeted at the 0.1% that will also eventually fall in price, and the cycle should continue indefinitely. I don't think we'll ever hit a period where there are no more advancements to be made, which means there will always be previous iterations that are available for cheaper than the cutting edge of anything.
> 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.
If theory of mind is the issue, some pigs display some attributes that could be interpeted as theory of mind.
In any case, your argument fell apart because there is no metric you can pick to justify what we do to animals other than: it is wrong but it is the least of evils right now (from a legal standpoint), which is different to "humans are more important than pigs".
Your argument is a slippery slope that leads to very dark places: can the rich experiment on the poor?, can we experiment on the disabled or mentally ill?... if being "important" justifies abuse, we would live in a world of abuse.
That is important because when simulations can solve the problem, we could outlaw experimentation in-vivo.
>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.”
But if something goes wrong (which sounds very likely at some point in such an imprecise operation)? That'll be a helluva existential crisis situation.
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.
This is too much. Uncrossable lines must be drawn immediately. Humanity cannot afford to "wing it" when it comes to ethics and morality at this scale. There needs to be clear lines where crossing means the highest criminal consequence to the researcher. And people funding it. And it needs to be a global effort.
Why is this an uncrossable line, though? Clearly this research is meant to be a first/early step towards preserving brains in the event of traumatic bodily injury. Is that not a worthwhile goal? Is it outweighed by some possible nefarious abuse of this technique?
There are obviously major issues to work out still, but I don't see how else this research can advance but with animal experiments.
I would be seriously disappointed if some of these people don’t have research projects running for this. You can get away with some crazy stuff once you leave US soil.
I don’t see major issues either. If they can make this work it reasons maintaining the eyes may be possible, and perhaps some auditory nerve capability too.
I’d probably take the chance if faced with early death otherwise.
Because animal torture is considered unethical. If you don't agree that's fine. Let us at least agree the line is needed. We shouldn't be discussing this retroactively.
Please don't represent your debate opponents here as supporting "animal torture" -- that's horrible.
In this article there was no brain function at all.
As research progresses, it may be possible to establish brain activity without any pain sensation. One can debate whether being suddenly blind, deaf, and paralyzed rises to the level of animal abuse. And then, whether this is nonetheless worth the research benefits.
That's exactly my point,is there a law that defines what constitutes enough brain functionality to classify this as torture.
This isn't about you or anyone else supporting animal torture,don't imply my saying things I did not. This is about clearly defining what constitutes animal torture and unethical practices are and implementing most severe of consequences for those who cross it.
The debate is need for a clearly defined line and consequences,not where it should be drawn.
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.