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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

To evaluate these chances, one has to understand what “suffering” is. It may (or may not) be purely evolutional thing which cannot be easily reproduced in a dish. Perhaps the whole thing is a plague that only emerges in/for natural-life conditions. While the configuration space is likely(?) almost infinite, the natural selector is only one.

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Well.... no. It's only necessary to know whether suffering exists (it does). After that it's sufficient to consider whether there's a greater than zero chance of creating it (there seems to be).

That's enough to say "let's not do this until we have better data".

If it turns out the second step is unknowable, that's enough to say "let's never do this".

These are subjective decisions, and some may suggest that there are gains that outweigh the potential suffering. I am currently unconvinced.

> After that it's sufficient to consider whether there's a greater than zero chance of creating it (there seems to be).

That is a Kantian, deontological approach, an ethical framework not shared by all. The utilitarian would ask how much suffering would be caused as compared to how much good it would produce.

Pong playing? Infinite good!

Erm no. I'm not advocating morality driven by "duty". I'm pointing out the pragmatic issue that we don't know where we're heading, so perhaps we should pause and have a good hard think about the possibilities :)

Utilitarianism also comes with its own issues, of course. Exploitation of minorities and the disempowered, for example (including manufactured brains-in-vats, it seems).

I agree and am unconvinced too. But currently we also agree to create suffering at the industrial scale in mice. Pretty strange choice of principles.

Indeed. Although some of us try to opt out of that stuff too, as much as possible.

The ethical questions raised by anomalous situations like this indicate that our historical decisions may need revising.

But it's always unknowable. The only consciousness/suffering one truly knows is one's own. We just use heuristics like "this human/animal behaves like I do when suffering". Where we draw the line is completely arbitrary.

My second step still stands :)

The unique data-point here is that we are creating these "mini brains". I'm not invoking a knee-jerk "sCiEnTiSTs pLaY g0d OMG!" reaction, but I will invoke Goldblum's Objection: "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should".

Like several others in this thread, I'm bemused that this passed bio-ethics. Drawing the line isn't entirely arbitrary, ethics panels do it every day. We already have the tools, but it seems that in this case we don't know whether to apply them, or which to apply.

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