In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?
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Programs and algorithms can only encode models (which are themselves imperfect) of what we already know. There's countless things we know that we don't know, and yet more that we don't know that we don't know.
As bad as animal (and human) studies and trials can be, the beauty of them is we don't really have to know how or why things work, we can just do the thing and if the results are good, we have a new treatment. Lots of super common drugs, even paracetamol, are like this.
Of course, knowing and accurately modelling the action is great, but it's not necessary.
Not understanding your underlying conceptual model (be it biology here, or maybe healthcare, or natural resource exploration) will lead a lot of poor assumptions, limiting the impact of all the hard work.
That is when performing a test on a mouse we are not measuring what a particular mouse would do, but what the mice do on average. So as long as model behaves like a mouse it can be useful, even though it would not behave like any particular mouse.
Also it's important to remember that the question is not about all or nothing, when we get a model most likely instead of 100 experiments on real mice we will be doing millions on virtual mice, and then 10 on real mice to verify the results.
If you didn't have at least a broad idea of why something might work, you would most likely never have "done the thing". You need to narrow the search space. Simulations can help here.
The Game Of Life seems to contradict this claim. Also worth considering, computational physics and weather/climate simulations.
Scientists of all sorts already do learn new insights by creating simulated models of systems. The simulated systems will continue to get more accurate.
If anything, you may see something like the Jevons paradox, where when you increase the efficiency of something (in this case, animals used in medical research), usage actually goes up.
As someone in a bioinfomatics Ph.D., yes, there is statistics in genomic, but if you don't understand the underlying biology, you're going to be chasing wild statstical gooses. And even then, we sorta all treat our discoveries as temporary, needing wet lab work to help validate our claims. There's just something you cannot simulate.
You can use quantum computers to simulate quantum mechanical systems, such as ones studied in chemistry. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1147/JRD.2018.2888987
Indeed, simulating quantum systems was the reason quantum computers were proposed by Feynman in the first place!
Thank you for that. I think it might help explain why no matter how large my hard drives get I seem to have no problems filling them as the sizes and number of files seemed to increase to keep me constantly upgrading.
As for the lab mice, if we ever do reach the point where models are enough to replace the need for live animals it does open the door for even the most casual experimentation that might be considered too cruel and inhumane to be performed on living creatures. I'm not sure what kind of useful results could come from that kind of research, but at least then it could be explored without moral considerations or causing trauma to the researchers who would otherwise have to become torturers.
Instead, the way I'm reading it, they are recommending to use computer models whenever possible, and only resort to live animal testing when the limits of the modelling are reached.
[1]: I own 4 (once 5) pet rats. They are only a small colony and, while I love them, I don't keep them at lab standards (for example, I don't a vet sleeping on the couch 24/7 in case of emergencies), yet, in a bad month, I could end up with spending 1000+$ for their health. Now, imagine that for the health standard of lab rats/mice and the numbers required for research.
Maybe so are you.
Dualism holds that living entities are special, and can never be replicated artificially. So your question can actually be turned into dualism vs monism (which is not a question with a settled answer).
If somebody links "free will" to "determinism", they're very confused about what free will is.
There are a lot of philosophers doing genuinely useful work, but so much of the field is pre-occupied with trivial (and non-trivial) variations of the "if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?" koan.
1. Non-determinism is equivalent to determinism plus extra, random input.
2. The addition of random noise does not bestow free will upon something that didn't have it without the random noise.
3. 1 and 2 imply no non-determinstic systems can possess free will if deterministic systems cannot possess free will.
4. 3 implies free will is independent of determinism.
Pain is the ground reality that is to be explained. If you manage to explain away pain rather than explain it, you haven't actually answered the question at all. If your answer at the end is "pain is not real", this doesn't prove that pain is not real, it proves that your premises were wrong.
If you tell me "I'm in pain", are you actually in pain?
If you are sedated with a memory blocker, and are then hurt, but you don't remember it afterward, were you actually in pain? (This isn't an academic question - many medical procedures simply paralyze the patient and add a memory blocker, but don't provide much analgesia. The patient can not express pain, and does not remember it. So does the pain they felt matter?)
You want an explanation of the wrong "ground reality", you are discussing the wrong question, it's not "is pain" real.
It's all about the subjective experience of pain, and can a robot share in that? Can a person in a coma share in that? Can an animal?
> If a computer prints on the screen "I'm in pain", is it actually in pain?
Maybe. If you SMS me that you are in pain, are you in pain? "I'm in pain" is evidence of someone being in pain. But being in pain, the referent, is just being in pain. There's no additional indirection.
> If you are sedated with a memory blocker, and are then hurt, but you don't remember it afterward, were you actually in pain?
Yes.
> You want an explanation of the wrong "ground reality", you are discussing the wrong question, it's not "is pain" real.
No, this is an issue that was actually brought up.
> > maybe [...] you [...] [don't] actually feel pain
All reason is grounded in experience. If I know anything, it's the things that I experience directly. Pain is probably the most direct experience there is.
edit:
> It's all about the subjective experience of pain, and can a robot share in that? Can a person in a coma share in that? Can an animal?
Yes. No. Yes.
These are not difficult questions to answer... You're phrasing it like there's some kind of philosophical difficulty here, but I don't think there is. If you define pain as an aversive sensory experience, ie. a sensory experience that makes you wish it would stop (this definition covers disgust and discomfort as well, and I think that's valid), then it seems clear that anything that can form goals (and yes, a memory blocked sedated person can form goals, they just can't act on them) can experience pain. I think the objection to computers is just that we rely too much on our empathy to determine when something "is in pain". I think an NPC in a game that moves away from a fire is experiencing pain, even though its mind is extremely simple, just like an amoeba would when it avoids a harmful chemical. It doesn't have such a thing as a qualia of pain, maybe (I'm not convinced!) - but that's hardly necessary.
I feel we must overcome our distrust of functional descriptions. Pain is a functional pattern, and not a very complex one.
Science fiction and moral philosophy depict "model organisms" as physical replicas of organic ones for a reason. Our moral ponderings are driven by moral feelings, and they need to trigger feelings for the reasoning to be interesting. The neocortex court only debates when limbic prosecutors press charges.
Ultimately, the task here is software that answer questions, not software that is a mouse. If software those two converge, we have a moral dilemma. Seems unlikely though.
You can't do this to anyone real but you can easily save and then restore the state of the simulation at any point.
Torturing someone in a simulation is not any different than imagining someone being tortured, or performing lots of arithmetic operations.
So the only logical thing is to admit that torturing/killing/hunting a species to extinction is bad not because of pain, but because of stealing computational resources belonging to someone else/some other sophisticated computational process.
Isn't it? Our imaginations are predictive, not simulative.
> Torturing someone in a simulation is not any different than […] performing lots of arithmetic operations.
Near as we can tell, the universe itself just performs lots of arithmetic operations.
I'm going to give an example similar to:
> If you torture someone then use a time machine to restore him to the initial state, did you do anything bad?
to make a point. If you create a person, torture them, then incinerate the person to restore them to the original state, did you do anything bad? If you're privileging "the present state of the universe, excluding historical events, even when evidence of those historical events is apparent in the present state of the universe", you're taking a very niche ethical viewpoint: one where anything can be undone by killing everyone involved.
> So the only logical thing is to admit that torturing/killing/hunting a species to extinction is bad not because of pain, but because of stealing computational resources belonging to someone else/some other sophisticated computational process.
I'd call this the principle of explosion, but I don't actually see how this can even follow from what you said earlier.
I would not say that a body incapable of feeling pain is an "inadequate replica". A human or animal under anaesthetic does not feel pain - are they inadequate. You can certainly perform surgery on an unconscious person, and you can administer medications to them.
[edit] I should have added that I am totally in agreement that we are not even close to being able to simulate a human body with any degree of accuracy.
The University of Nevada used a 360 TFLOP supercomputer to simulate a mouse brain. They managed to simulate the neurons firing once every ten seconds. In reality neurons fire an average of 200 times per second. Even if their model was fully accurate, that means you need 720PFLOPS to simulate just the brain of a single mouse.
Barring computers based on completely different principles or a revolution in the way we understand physics, a installation at a single facility will never be able to fully simulate hundreds of experimental mice.
It gets insanely more complicated for humans. If you decide to drill a hole in a piece of wood, your brain will process a ridiculous amount of information just for that single purpose, plus it's always running primitive functions like any other animal. Realtime.
I don't see any computer doing that anytime soon.
Simulations are useful for making calculations. Say I'm convinced that buildings work a certain way and I have a finite element model of one. I don't know what the predictions are for a new building of a certain shape, so I shove it in a computer to tell me. The computer tells me what I should predict assuming that my finite elements ideas were correct. What it won't tell me is whether there's some aspect of that model that doesn't correspond to what the building is actually gonna be made of.
Our computer models are like unit tests. They are relatively self-contained and quick to run. However, they cannot test all the interactions and stuff we do t know about, so we have animal testing as a kind of integration test to make sure stuff works like expected.
And a phase 3 clinical trial is like pre-prod. When you think everything works, you expose test it in the real world with very careful monitoring and plan to keep it from going out into prod if problems are found.
They use mice to experiment with, BUT through breeding the current lab mice are more resilient then humans. Which can imply that certain drugs getting passed for human testing because they did well with mice. Today's lab mice are more resilient, but the same drug can damage humans.
Bret Weinstein talks about this on JRE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=9597s
Many commenters have noted that biological systems are mind-numbingly complex, and we're not even close modeling these systems in a way that's useful for testing novel hypotheses of biology researchers.
The field in which I work, neuroscience, frequently does employ computational modeling, but this modeling is primarily used to provide a mechanistic link between inputs and outputs observed in an in vivo experiment. Present a sensory signal to an animal, observe something about neural dynamics in a brain region, THEN use simplified biologically-inspired elements to provide a plausible mechanism between the two. Even the state-of-the-art in silico model is always child's play compared to the real thing. We definitely don’t know enough about that real thing to build a model that would circumvent its need. This author also works in a neuroscience lab – they should know better.
Why would we put mice in computer chips if we can have pseudo human bodies in the real world?
Because a lot of the existing data was gathered on mice.
In the same vain I could see (and even hope) some mice tests could be decreased or removed as better models and simulations gets created. That would be quicker and more cost efficient for everyone. But in the end you want a real world test before giving it to a human. And maybe we could find better things than mice for that as well, but right now I think that is the best we have got. I am not a medical researcher though so I don't know if there are alternatives out there.
If I remember correctly, they had some success in rejecting animal studies. Things like, we don't know what this will do overall, but we're pretty sure the kidneys or liver will fail like X, so don't bother with the wet lab. Or possibly try the wet lab at small scale so they can validate the model.
We're far far away from full simulation. But we know a whole lot about mice. I internalized those conversations as, my friend writes type checkers for drugs against mouse hardware.
Personally I think living 2D animals in a petri dish would be metal as fuck.
https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-experimentation...
sk0g and hobofan point out a key benefit of animal testing, explain why there is no alternative at present, and rather than addressing that or acknowleding the point, you respond with non-sequiturs.
Try to learn to separate what you want to be true "animal testing is pointless" vs what is actually true "animal testing has benefits that cannot be sensibly found any other way". Then we can productively move towards eliminating animal testing. But if you won't even listen to others points, how do you hope to convince them of anything?
Though you can avoid it if you really want to, if you study biochemistry, you will learn how to do animal testing and are taught about all the ethics involved, how to do the testing in the most humane way, and how to avoid (or minimize) doing it in the first place if possible.
I've been going through the list of recent Nobel Prizes and the research for these involved animal testing: Nobel Prize for medicine 2018 (mice), 2017 (flys), 2014 (rats), 2012 (frogs, mice). Older research made before we had good tools to work with cell cultures, etc. will probably skew even more towards animal testing.
All that I read are pointless science articles about aging in mice as if that applied to humans.
No, probably not. I'm sure they are just giving Nobel Prizes for Medicine out for funny discoveries rather than for findings that form the basis of most of our current and future medicine.
> Could they be done without testing?
Sure they could! But scientists just love to make animals suffer!
Yes, just like they give oscars to pointless movies. Even roman numerals had its fervent defenders.
Oddly enough, our own cat loves chocolate and (following a near miss & visit to the vet) now appears to resent having had that avenue of pleasure permanently blocked.