Hacker News Reader

Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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?

It's because this could be some sort of bizarre unending Harlan Ellisonesque torture.

Torturing animals is has been considered immoral for many, many, many years.

And yet is done everyday for food production.

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.

It’s not “sometimes,” it’s “mostly.”

> 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.

Is that the goal? Of the ad departments of meat companies maybe lol

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.

[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-top-10-misattribute...

> 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?

It seems that way now, but if the startup hits it big, I'll make millions!

Maybe, tell me more. I’m running out of interesting experiences.

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.

* thousands.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com