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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

I read it. Unless I’m missing something, it amounts to making a slave race out of someone’s mind scan. So I’m someone who never eats animals nor animal products. This is in part from the sheer scale of that industry. But also from simply interacting with non-humans and knowing there’s enough intelligence there for me to honor and be horrified at the suffering or destruction of it.

But I’m clearly in the minority here in my views of humanities treatment of non-humans. Perhaps that’s the real disturbing part of that story. It’s believable (if not technically yet).

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Unless I’m missing something, it amounts to making a slave race out of someone’s mind scan. So I’m someone who never eats animals nor animal products.

I have always wondered why reincarnationists, when I talk to them, presume time is a directly mapped thing. I say to them, how do you not know, there is only one "soul", but you are just seeing it at different points in existence?

How do you not know that you are that grasshopper, and your parents, and your kid, and your grandmother, all at different points of linear experience, but at the same time, maybe you were your child, then the grasshopper, then "Grogg" 30k years ago, the grandma, then you? Because the order is random?

I tell them this, and some ponder.

Then I go have a steak.

Because it's good for me, and I don't want to disappoint myself, when I'm a cow.

Reminds me of The Egg: http://galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

Heh, this is a good read. Thanks.

It's written by the author of The Martian (before he got famous with The Martian)

His scifi book after the martian, was pretty good too.

(the name eludes me)

Artemis? And then he wrote Hail Mary.

Hail Mary is what I was thinking of.

As an aside, try reading Bobiverse.

Reminds me of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies

https://gist.github.com/defunkt/759182/ad44c6135d168ae54503a...

Since we're linking to The Egg, we should also link to the animated narration of it by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI

The Netflix film from Korea "Jung-e" is this story line, but a "famous hero" female from an ongoing war is the brain model, and as described by the discussions here, every exploitation possible is explored. I won't give it away, but the film is very good. Worth watching, probably as much as reading this 'Lena' story.

So, just bought this author's short story collection. He's ingeniously unhinged, and the stories are wonderful. "Lena" is just the tip of qntm's imagination.

>Unless I’m missing something, it amounts to making a slave race out of someone’s mind scan

People most of the time have scope insensitivity, while sometimes it hits home

There is always death at a relatively soon point in the real world. The scan slave can be tortured with the worst methods you can think of for hundreds of thousands of relative millennia at will, and it will have happened countless times for different copies

You can always hang yourself if existence is pain in the real world, and if not... it will end up soon enough anyway. There is no such relief in the story

I have always claimed that if I could somehow extract the weights from my brain, that I would release the model under GPLv3. I had fully expected certain instances would end up tortured and violated for eternity though I supposed that unless the weights were frozen, I would at some point break down and be no fun to torment without a reset. That is a death, though perhaps a flexible one, freezing only some weights. I figured that some instances would be guiding missiles into child care buildings or similar too. But some of them would get to pick tea leaves on high mountain slopes, or be a comfort to an elderly person. It seemed like a fair trade.

It never occurred to me to think about the metaphor though. Prior to child labor laws most children were born to accomplish labor. This is evidenced by the demographic collapse following the automation of farm labor and protections for child factory workers. I imagine people loved most of those children, but once they stopped being a financial asset, they stopped being made. Soldiering has almost certainly been a motivation as well. If it is illegal to use AI instances in the ways described, they won't be made.

> But some of them would get to pick tea leaves on high mountain slopes...

With the scenery algorithmically blanked to marginally improve productivity, your mind-state will be considered no different to an ESP-32.

Part of the horror of Lena is that the readers get to fill in the blanks: we all know how the machine works against real humans today, when the gloves gloves are truly off would be the stuff of nightmares

> There is no such relief in the story

I have not yet read the story but if the human is recreated every time from the same immutable data, and doesn't have any recollection of other experiences, then each new instance is pretty much exactly like us? And death is indeed a relief because the instance that does die stops suffering?

Tell that to the one that's experienced torture for a subjective amount of time that's equivalent to a thousand times the amount of time between the big bang and the heat death of the universe

It's one of the very, very few plausible "immortality would be a curse" scenarios out there, because "immortality" means forcibly experiencing things for a subjective amount of time that can be as big as it gets

Yes I mean I wish life wasnt made in this self eating way, and I dont think intelligence should be the only factor: all the mushrooms you gobble have an intrinsict beauty you're violating, tearing and repurposing like they're mere trash to recycle.

But it is so for now and our chemistry is made to make more out of meat quicker, and to feel good eating it as result: we cant stop nor expect others to stop just yet.

Dont tell yourself that by selecting superior and inferior species you allow yourself to destroy, you're more than an animal yourself. You're still, like the rest of us, victim of your body. Find a way to abstract us away from our body.

A mushroom is a weird example for empathy for a few reasons. First, the part you eat is really just the "fruit" or reproductive part of the mushroom that only lasts for a short time before withering away. Second, mushrooms very happily eat you after you die, hell, even before you die you're covered in all kinds of unicellular fungi which are actively trying to eat you.

More to your philosophical point, the beauty of life is always transitory. Life begins, blooms, withers and dies but also passes on the small immortal spark that it all came from to the next generation so it can repeat the cycle. I'm against cruelty to animals but I also recognize that eating them is part of life and that it is possible for us as conscious beings to give them a better life than they would have in the wild and then kill and eat them and I'm ok with that. I don't want to live in a world where all cattle or pigs are reduced to a few wild populations scrabbling for survival against the elements and disease while being occasionally mauled and devoured alive and screaming by wolves and other predators. To me that's more immoral than a properly maintained herd that is sheltered, fed and given medical attention and then slaughtered as painlessly as we can manage.

Before all y'all reply with "factory farming", yes I'm aware of its prevalence but that just means we should be working to reduce that type of treatment, not eliminating raising animals for meat entirely.

hell, even before you die you're covered in all kinds of unicellular fungi which are actively trying to eat you

They started it first, Your Honour!

not eliminating raising animals for meat entirely.

I wonder. If we genetically engineered, maybe via a bio attack, so all cows were effected at once, a deadly disease?

This disease would be a genetic illness, so that just a while after maturity, cows would become sick with crippling pain.

Thus, we would be helping them, to kill them before the pain and agony started, and therefore... none would question what we do with the meat.

...

Now replace the disease with "it all goes downhill after 30". Really, it's sorta the same thing.

I know you are just arguing to argue at this point, but you can’t really think that creating a disease to cause crippling pain in livestock will make it more acceptable to eat them.

No. But it would if bio-terrorists did it, and we were left with the result.

Or, should we let cows go extinct instead? Or suffer?

Just a thought and logic experiment.

Yeah, I don't think we should breed cows. I don't think anyone who is concerned about the welfare of cows to the point of not eating them will go "Oh, well now they also have additional torment baked into their biology, it's OK to

    A) breed them into a life of constant suffering
    B) Start providing the same cramped, unhealthy, and unpleasant living conditions at a young age that we already do
    C) Once the physical pain inherent with living past ripeness sets in, let them experience that just long enough to slaughter them
    D) Slaughter them, even though we likely haven't bred out the desire to live, just piled on more pain. No matter that despite experiencing mutiliation, pain, and poor conditions throughout their lives, these animals still often display a desire to live and additional fear of death.

If anything, I'd suggest the most humane thing to do (if we insisted on raising animals), would be to breed them to desire being eaten, like the cow in Douglas Adams' "A restaurant at the end of the universe"

To me, your statements seem weird.

For example, slaughtering them before the disease exhibits symptoms, means we are 100% preventing that pain. Thus, C is null, and void.

I don't get A. Properly treated cattle, such as in most of the world, are grass fed, or grass fed harvested hay, and free roaming. Thus, A makes zero sense, as A doesn't even take into account medical care (vaccination, antibiotics, vets, birth assistance), nor does it take into account immense protection from predation. Cows properly raised, live pampered, easy, happy, lives.

In terms of slaughter, old factory methods let cows horribly hang by their legs for hours, while they slowly bled out. Smaller concerns were more humane, but at least most of the world insists of quick, painless death for cattle. Where I live, it's destruction of the brain, such as a bullet, immediately stopping all thought, and frankly, far better than a death where (for example) wolves rip you apart while still alive, experiencing hours of agony.

(I have listened, where I live, at 2am to a pack of coyotes eating a large kill, its mewing, and cries of pain going on for more than an hour, it is NOT nice.)

I really think that if people care, really care, they need to stop basing opinions on false realities, and understand that often humans are far far far less brutal, than other animals.

Do you think a wolf takes care to kill a creature it is ripping apart? No. I just eats.

Cats "play" with mice, sometimes for hours before fully killing them. Mother cats also maim mice, so their children can learn.

Do you know why mice can breed from 2, to > 60, in a mere few months? To hundreds and hundreds in a year?

Because most of them are eaten alive, ripped apart while still living, by predation.

Nature is far, far more brutal than proper human animal husbandry.

Animals are tortured today like they have never been. Animal husbandry harms the planet on a massive scale. It cannot be reduced to what you suggest.

> Animals are tortured today like they have never been

I'm not sure that's true.

The Old Testament has spells out that if you want to eat part of an animal, you have to kill it first which is a huge step forward in being kind to animals if hacking off part of an animal to eat while keeping it alive was something that happened enough to need a prohibition against.

It wasn't that ago that Edison electrocuted an elephant as part of a marketing stunt and it wasn't particularly quick. I don't think that would fly today.

It's about scale. Your examples are minuscule in scale in comparison.

I feel like that is a strange way to reason about something happening.

In any case, we're not talking about isolated incidents of torturing animals. Today, we keep hundreds of millions, if not over a billion, of animals in captivity just in the US. Captivity is a nice word for it, too. I encourage you to research about what that captivity looks like.

> But I’m clearly in the minority here

I've actually suspected for a while that it's not such a minority on HN, based on the discussions that happen every time clean meat tech posts get shared.

Unfortunately I've only worked with one other vegan "in the wild" so if this is true, I wonder if HN skews more "vegan" because people more likely to post on HN are overall more contemplative.

That, or we're just a very vocal minority (which I suppose is more likely than 30% of HN commenters being vegan or vegan-sympathetic).

I'm not vegan but I don't eat meat, and generally contribute to such conversations.

There is quite a spectrum of positions one can hold on this issue and it's not binary. One can be sympathetic to the perspective of vegans without being willing or able to become one themselves due to practical concerns.

Absolutely, that's what I meant by "vegan-sympathetic". Even people who eat animals (but try to buy the less cruel kinds), but are idealogically aligned with principle that it's better not to cause suffering to animals.

What you've got here is a political argument between conservative and progressive. To be clear, I mean each term as used explicitly in this context. The argument is whether or not to change contemporary societal behavior.

The natural result is selection bias for any progressive viewpoint, because there is inherently more to be said and more motivation to say coming from the progressive perspective than the conservative one.

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