Comment by klunger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klunger | Hacker News Reader

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I don't. It makes me sick to my stomach.

I am speaking as someone who is pro-choice, pro-GMO's and pro-stem cell research, etc. This research has crossed a line that none of the above do. It is creating a new kind of sentience, a new kind of soul.

And, what's the point? To confirm a theory about a gene? So fricking what. That really doesn't matter, not in relation to the possible consequences: someone taking this research to create a race of "sub-human" slaves that think and feel as acutely as we do. Pick your genetic engineering dystopia for where this is leading us- Brave New World, Planet of the Apes, Gattaca, even the Uplift series.

It never should have gotten approved by an ethics review board. The 100 days termination was just so they could claim to have considered ethics. If they actually seriously had done so, this project would have never left the drawing board.

Finally: I wish people would stop staying the genie is out of the bottle. The genie is whatever we humans decide to do. You can't just assume that because something is possible that it will be done. We can have moral boundaries as a society. We can say "this is a bridge too far and no one should cross it". And anyone who does will be excommunicated from the scientific world.

There is nothing inevitable about this dark path. Saying that it is inevitable just removes responsibility from whoever does it, which is just BS.

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edit: grammar, clarity

Have you ever stopped and thought about why you feel in such way towards these experiments? Why do you see sentience as the line not to cross and even go as far as to call it a "dark path"?

You use a lot of wording that are very religious sounding such as "soul", "excommunicated", "dark path", but have you considered that you cannot really excommunicate a scientist, that the mere concept of a soul might be wrong?

To be clear it makes me feel weird too, but we have to be able to discuss this instead of using inefficient red tape.

If there's any science of morality to be done, the most basic quantum of moral value is suffering. Sentient creatures have greater capacity for suffering, being aware of their pain and the injustice of their existence. If we are to bring it into existence, we are responsible for its suffering.

And if a presumably sentient creature is aborted before it attains sentience, has it suffered?

Not the commenter you are responding to, but I would assume if it has not attained sentience then it should not be considered sentient and as such is not a sentient creature.

It has to be, otherwise the abortion debate would be very different. Aborting a somewhat conscious fetus would be much closer to murder.

If you latch on to me and suck my blood, is it murder for me to remove you from my body just because you can't live without parasitically feeding off of me?

Should the biological process through which most mammals carry on their future existence be considered an act of parasitism? I think being a parasite usually requires two conditions be met: 1 is that they're separate species, and 2 is that it's bad for the creature. Children eventually grow up and generally take care of the "host" that they sucked blood from, and their existence is generally beneficial for the species, so it's hard to define as a parasite.

Re: separate species, I don't believe that's actually a requirement to meet the conditions of parasitism per Oxford Dictionary. A parasite is defined as "an organism which lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other's expense." -- Without getting into the emotional connotations of calling a child a parasite, it certainly does meet the Oxford Dictionary definition.

Re: bad for the creature, hyenas give birth through their clitoris. I'd suggest that's not great. Children cost an average of $233,000 to raise. That's certainly not great. That doesn't take into account career cost and opportunity cost of lost income. Sub-optimal too.

I'd describe children as mandatory lol.

To me this is orthogonal to religion. What concerns me is the idea of a sentient, living thing being experimented on — if it has consciousness and intelligence, is it really different from experimenting on a human?

When the scientist create a GMO chicken and they get killed by the billions to feed us, no body bats an eye. Please, "new kind of soul" is a vast over statement. When horse breeders thousands of years ago artificially bred into existence new horses, no body cared, why is this any different?

Certainly some people care a lot about factory farming. Even so, the key difference here is that brain function and intelligence are tied so tightly to the idea of human exceptionalism; that it is OK to enslave a horse but not a human, because humans have more capacity for autonomy, suffering, and so forth.

How precisely to draw the line is very much a matter of disagreement.

It's all kinda not-okay, and kinda icky. But we certainly seem to put intelligence on a higher tier. If we ever make another sentient species, we should probably not enslave them. Pinky swear, guys?

>that it is OK to enslave a horse but not a human, because humans have more capacity for autonomy, suffering, and so forth.

That's illogical. No, we enslave animals because we can. If animals were to coordinate and start a rebellion we would stop enslaving them and try to appease them through diplomatic means. Humans are known for their coordination and so monkeys with human intelligence and communication like humans would coordinate very well.

I propose my assumption instead of your own. Humans would exterminate the animals that started to rebel and even if it's an entire species.

Certain dog breeds were selected for intelligence, at what point does breeding a herding dog become an ethical dilemma?

Hey, Veedrac. You're probably bored with that by now, but I did reply to your last message- I just didn't see it in time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25063580

HN seems to hide replies once they get deep enough. I honestly think we've mostly exhausted that conversation, though.

Of course, I just didn't want you to think I've huffed off or something. Take care.

monkey != human

i want to return to monke as much as the next guy but i dont really see it happening in the near future

Are you saying increasing the brain capacity for a species other than ourselves and potentially enabling them to become (undeniably) sentient is morally wrong? One could argue that it's eventually a moral imperative - otherwise we're just wasting these skills which the planet has sacrificed so many resources for, and never giving a voice to the myriad different ways that different species can see the world. That is, if consciousness is good at all... otherwise we might as well just dull ourselves back down instead. This is also clearly not a simple task that should be undergone lightly - but it does need preparatory steps like this one for it to ever happen.

If you were a new species capable of language and philosophy, would you be happy that humans unlocked that intelligence in your people, or not?

> Are you saying increasing the brain capacity for a species other than ourselves and potentially enabling them to become (undeniably) sentient is morally wrong?

Yes. I would call it extremely irresponsible -- on the same level as having a child you know you will be unable to feed, so the child will starve and probably die. (With the same excuse: but wouldn't the child be happy that they existed at all?)

We have no idea how different species would think and feel. If we imagine them as "exactly like humans, only with more fur", well, who knows, it might turn out to be true; but if it is not -- if the difference between us and them is greater than the difference between any two humans, just like with the biological differences -- then we might create another intelligent species with incompatible values. Where "incompatible values" could mean that a reality that makes us happy would make them unhappy, and vice versa, so there is no outcome that wouldn't require lot of suffering.

The assumption that they would be "exactly like humans, only with more fur" makes sense from a Cartesian, dualistic perspective. Same souls, in different bodies, duh. But if you think that mind is a product of body, and tiny changes in the body can have dramatic impact on how the mind works, e.g. having more or less of some hormone can profoundly change your personality; then minds of different species will probably be quite different.

Then there is this practical problem, that we can't even take care of our fellow humans. People are still starving, dying in wars and genocides, etc. Even in first world we have the problem of poverty, racism, whatever.

Now imagine that into this world you introduce a new intelligent species, which might be incapable of getting a job, dealing with bureaucracy, or just interacting with majority humans in ways that humans consider acceptable. Because this society is designed for humans, it might be impossible to navigate for them. Then what? Keep them in... a big ZOO, forever? Tell them the same fate awaits their kids, and the kids of their kids, until perhaps one day humans get bored of them and decide to exterminate them? Or let them out, and then put them in prisons, because they may be unable to abstain from behaviors that are considered criminal by us? Require them to ignore their own insticts and live accordingly to our instincts, and then punish them if they are unable to comply?

Or are we going to give them an island where they can create a civilization according to their own norms? And ignore if they decide to do things that are abhorrent to us but normal for them? Are we going to trade with them? According to their norms or ours?

The only reason this works in some sci-fi books is that the other species are "exactly like humans, only with more fur". It may not work if they are fundamentally psychologically different.

Those all sound like interesting challenges rather than problems.

If the new species is capable of communication with us, then it doesn't really matter if they think like humans or not. In fact, they are much more interesting and valuable to us if they don't. Differences in values, territory, what they need to be happy, all of that can be worked out through negotiation and communication - or not, and we can just give them space and avoid our own interference as much as possible, while providing the resources they need.

I think it's important to emphasize that you're right - bringing a new species into the world as it currently stands with massive inequality and many human problems left completely unsolved isn't a good idea. Doing so after a post scarcity society has formed and there are enough resources to go around (not all that far off...) - much more reasonable. Expecting a new species to just magically integrate with society and "get jobs" is a little silly here. I think we need to differentiate the moral problem of eventually increasing another species' intelligence capabilities in the future under our best efforts at responsible conditions - vs doing so right now in this shitstorm.

Maybe what we really need first is a new religion and ethics, one that would eliminate the "playing god" dilemma and enable faster progress in the right direction. It could picture us animals as insignificant and not worthy the attention of the creator of the universe unless we reach ourselves a certain level of intelligence, consciousness and empathy.

We'd have to start by admitting that almost nobody has the faintest clue about ethics beyond simply having been brainwashed into believing whatever arbitrary ethics they believe. Just look at the nonsense and disagreement about abortion. There are so many arbitrary standards people use to advocate for allowing or forbidding abortions at various ages. In my country, they recently adjusted the legal age by a few weeks, from one arbitrary number to anther arbitrary number. Curiously, I've only met one person who advocated for "post-partum" abortion. I think most people simply refuse to allow themselves to consider that because they aren't making any attempt at being ethical and only want to reinforce their own culture or demonstrate to their peers that they're "good" people.

Yeah, you can see tribalism even here on HN in discussions on different operating systems or programming languages. We are an animal that is irrational, predatory and highly social by nature. Whether we team up to build something useful or to fight with the other tribe depends mostly on the social programming done by the institutions of power such as media, schools and churches.

These institutions also have the power to decide what defines "our" vs "their" tribe. Just the usage of the terms "pro-life" or "pro-choice" already indicates that someone identifies with a specific tribe as the language is an important part of the collective identity.

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