Hacker News Reader

Comment by eye8one2 | Hacker News Reader

Just because we can doesn't mean we should.

Why not? I'd like to live as long as possible, and I'm not squeamish about life forms with consciousness at the level of what we eat every day.

You're free not to use the outputs if you have personal objections.

Well, if media is making us aware that scientists are already doing this using mices, you can be pretty sure that by now, at some random place in the world, somebody is already trying it using human fetuses. Oh boy how quickly we are running into the dystopia.

I'm not sure it really plays out like that. At least the 'monkeys and typewriters' scale setup is not there, I think.

Maybe if you asked me five years ago, I'd have ventured that China will try some out-there genetic stuff with some successes, but we haven't really seen much. And (not to get into politics) but China is not too concerned about traditional Western ethical boundaries, it seems.

There's nothing unethical about artificial wombs if they work well, it's the whole "just because I can build it doesn't mean it will result in a healthy baby" aspect where the problem lies.

The whole issue is unethical as... For starters, to reach the "work well" status is going to require a ton of failures, at any level of the "pregnancy". Anyway, any possible concern we could express about it doesn't matter at all, somebody is going to do it. Of course it won't be shown in the news.

The dystopia of gender equality, where a women don't have to spend 9 months being a life support system in their 20s/30s.

And other people aren’t squeamish about murder or genocide. Just because one person, or you, aren’t squeamish about something doesn’t make it right for society. That’s why we look to history and anticipate possible future consequences and make decisions about current regulations based on the future we want to bring about.

I prefer a future without harvesting humans for the members of dynasties that can afford it, while those with ethics are left behind or destroyed.

300 years ago: I'm not squeamish about life forms with consciousness at the level of what we enslave every day.

The cases aren't the same, but the lazy callousness is.

The difference is, we know that slaves have equally developed consciousness. So that wasn't based in fact.

Animals don't have human-level consciousness. We're not going to discover some day that they do.

Prove it - we do't understand consciousness enough to make such claims. Or at least have the wisdom to apply the precautionary principle when you don't know.

Proof is a Math thing. I'm comfortable with the weight of evidence from all the tests we devise for this purpose, combined with the fact we actively strive to show the consciousness of animals in a way we never did with slaves. You're free to disagree and consider it hubris, many animal rights activists do.

N.B. I don't believe we fully understand consciousness. Just that factory farm animal consciousness is categorically not at a human level.

Proof is a Math and Logic thing.

If we're being pedantic, I just consider Logic a branch of Mathematics.

and I consider mathematics a branch of logic

If it's about reason and what we can know, it belongs to epistemology. Since you're being categorical.

Isn't it the other way around?

Technically I'm not sure it's really true either way. Well, there's some debate that we could get bogged down in, but really I'm just an old Math major having fun with that comment.

What are you talking about?? Only the conscious can feel pain now? Or the misery of being separated from its nursing offspring? Results of all of these things measurably correlate with human hormonal and physiological responses. Again what are you talking about???

It's a science, not a 'math thing'. Yours in an old fashioned conservative retreat into avoiding reason or ethical considerations.

BTW I don't consider myself an activist.

Their first point is one of epistemology. You asked them to prove it but that's outside of the scope of science. Proof is deductive and certain, whereas science (outside of math) is empirical and only asymptotes on certainty as theories remain unrefuted. Scientists have theories that can at best converge on truth and don't think in terms of proof.

This notwithstanding, the ethical concerns seem premature. Shouldn't we wait for information on an actual concrete proposal? Perhaps it can be done with very little of the brain and when coupled with FMRI we can be sure enough that it isn't experiencing conscious states. But all this seems premature and subject to the actual details.

We know animals are not as smart as us. That doesn't necessary tell us anything about consciousness. We have no way to measure consciousness so your claim about "human-level consciousness" (whatever that means) is just speculation.

This is so trite. How do you feel about artificial legs? Hearts?

There are a lot of women who would love to have children, but have PCOS, hysterectomies, or other problems becoming pregnant naturally. Why is it totally OK for me to wear glasses, half the country to have an artificial hip, but totally 100% unnatural and terrible for women to use an artificial womb?

It's not if it's developed ethically. The price of this research is often paid by the suffering of countless animals. Aa externality that may be slightly less odious if it is at least there to reduce our suffering, not simply cash in on making more humans.

I don't think you understand the human condition (or how to think outside your own life) if you think that infertility doesn't count as suffering.

Trying for a kid with my partner actually. It doesn't mean we're entitled to one or that my child will have more of a right to exist than 100s of some other mammals.

And I think it's clear that I am considering more than just my own life.

I personally believe your child has more right to exist than 1 mouse, 1,000 mice, or 1,000,000 mice.

People are people. It's a different bar, and I'm not going to equate people lives with animal lives.

A bar set by people, in the interest of people. What we personally believe is subject to biases, in this case speciesism. A human would say what you say, a monkey's claim to superiority might be branch selection skills. What makes your red line inherently stronger?

And it's not like you defined one or attempt to find a rational underpinning to check for your bias. That's the tribal, conservative basis for many of the injustices over immutable differences we see every day (racial, sexual etc.)

Rational inquiry is about transcending this.

There’s literally a part of the article that expounds on how this could reduce or eliminate the need to sacrifice mice when studying certain domains.

And if its development requires the sacrifice of as many mice as it saves then it only breaks even. Ethically, that case hasn't been made. And what comes out shouldn't suffer.

We really should though. If we can get this to work it would mean we could save lots of species that are endangered. Elephants and rhinos come to mind.

unless those species are dying because of human activity, why would we want to save them?

I don’t think there’s an ecosystem left that is free from influence from human activity so you would have to include all of them for that reason alone. Preserving genetic diversity is probably a good enough reason, you never know when that next asteroid is due.

genetic diversity for its own sake is hard to justify as a goal, or else indeed we wouldnt be fighting this virus to extinction

It's really easy to justify. A very prominent example of why would be penicillin. Who knows how many useful things we'll find and where?

Because elephants and rhinos are cool and interesting, and their existence doesn't cause substantial harm to us or the planet. Do we really need another reason?

"Unless"? Yes that is exactly why they are threatened. Have you been living under a rock?

There some less-ethically challenging reasons, explained well in their nature paper, namely that using controlled environment they learn a ton of things about how embryos grow

> The ability to remove a mammalian embryo from the uterine environment and grow it normally in controlled conditions constitutes a powerful tool to characterize the effect of different perturbations on development during the period from gastrulation to organogenesis, that can be combined with genetic modification, chemical screens, tissue manipulation and microscopy methods

Humans aren't going to stop consuming meat any time soon. It makes sense to try create more efficient 'farms' to minimize waste and engineer meat without a central nervous system.

We do what we must because we can.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com