Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
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.
> In the U.S., according to its National Pork Producers Council, 80 million of its 95 million pigs slaughtered each year are reared in industrial settings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_animal_farming#Con...
> 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.
Much more disturbing text and images can be found at the source: https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
And that’s only for pigs. Conditions are no better for chickens or cows at factory farms.
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.
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[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.
[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-top-10-misattribute...
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.
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].
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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.
So there is a spectrum here. Just because we kill animals for food does not mean that it's ethical along the rest of the spectrum of harm.
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?
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.
Is it forbidden to reverse-engineer to get there faster?
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 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).
Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer had a chat explaining well this issue: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GYYNY2oKVWU
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.
Comparing the acknowledgement of such lines with racism is ridiculous.
Edit: meant to say laissez-faire but I prefer fairy
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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?
My favorite quote: “This is probably not unique to pigs.”
Everything needs a balance.
There are obviously major issues to work out still, but I don't see how else this research can advance but with animal experiments.
disclaimer: I am not Peter Thiel
Maybe it's immortality for all of us, ability for a dying person to hop into a young, healthy, good looking clone body.
I’d probably take the chance if faced with early death otherwise.
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.
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.
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Best to find ways to govern ethical practices, instead of driving the research underground.
You can though. You can do whatever you want! Although you can't unknow something, you can choose not to do it