And making something like this illegal often has unintended side effects. What if brain organoid research is what ends up curing alzheimer's?
Advocating for outlawing parts of research just on the basis that in the future they could potentially turn unethical is very shortsighted in my opinion.
Those were unethical experiments from the onset.
If anything, my argument would be more "just because unit 731 ended up doing live vivisections of humans, that doesn't mean we should have outlawed dissection of dead humans centuries earlier".
I don't think it's a good idea at all to try to outlaw totally reasonable research just because we can imagine a future where people end up doing a much more extreme much more problematic similar thing.
It would be the end of science. (and the end of any culture really... we're very good at imagining future dystopias and armageddons)
No proof is required beyond psuedoscientific tests and the "saints" of this belief system must be given absolute authority over the system to ensure no one commits any sins.
>that just pops out if you have a large enough system.
certainly not a claim I would make.
>No proof is required
Isn't it legitimate to reason on a more abstract level and try to make inferences that way?
>psuedoscientific tests
no clue what you're referring to here or in the rest of your comments about saints and authorities and sins. Another parallel to religion could be drawn w.r.t. the idea that only human souls could ever feel suffering but I don't think it's such a productive level to have this conversation on.
Given the complexity of behavior observed in nature that doesn't require conscious experience, yet is more advanced than what we can achieve in circuitry, I think it would be too early to close off this area of research.
How sure are you that the human brain cells in the vat are not aware and suffering?
What's going on here? Answer: Fallacy of affirmation of the consequent.
That doesn't follow. You could, for example, be a substance dualist. Alternatively you could suspect that there exists some special as yet undocumented property of the human CNS that is required as a prerequisite. Or etc.
If you want to argue against wetware then we need a better argument than this. The same ideas were used to argue against stem cell research, IVF, and many other treatments and ideas that have saved and helped lives. Unit 731 isn't an apt comparison because cells are not inherently sentient to our knowledge. If they were it would absolutely shatter the profession of medical ethics as we know it.
We know that human brain cells in sufficiently large and complex assemblages are sentient (I don't know if the word "inherently" has any purpose here). We know this research aims at making the assemblages larger and more complex. It's a fundamentally different kind of argument IMO compared to those against e.g. stem cells or IVF.
(Slight aside but did you know that they're also doing tests on whole human brains taken from corpses, and they give them tranquilizers "just to be sure"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212992)
You write as if objections to (certain kinds of) stem cell research, IVF, etc. have been roundly defeated in some way simply because they've "saved and helped lives". This is naked utilitarianism and I hope I don't have to rehearse the reasons why utilitarianism fails utterly as moral theory.
What if the only reason we don’t believe they are conscious is because they have no mouth to scream with?
Also, it occurs to me that a right-to-lifer would have to be against such biotech to remain consistent.
I find it all incredibly fascinating but ethically highly fraught.
i know ofc that for them 'knowing' means measurements and proofs etc. but i found this excerpt tickle me a bit and wanted to highlight it :').
my first thought was a bit tongue in cheek: "who knew, working together with others that think alike is better than working alone"
Cant wait for biosofts and the ability to jack-in instead of jack-off :D
The question comes up a lot here when there are posts about whether to consider LLMs conscious.
"We're going to condemn conscious entities to slavery"
vs
"They'll always just be machines and it's dehumanizing to consider them anything else"
I think the questions would be very much different. LLMs are not made of human brain cells.
I don't know if I buy that argument or even if it makes sense. But yeah this all smacks inextricably of soul talk.
So, the use of human brain cells is different territory. Bioethically speaking, it is illicit to press human body parts (which includes cells) into service for technological ends. They can only licitly enter into service of the integral human whole (such a life-saving transplants). Using them in technology also commoditizes the human body. (The reverse is not the case: it can be licit to use cybernetic devices to restore native function within a human body.)
I wondered if anyone had written about the ethics of this type of research, they have. It's super long so I've not finished it yet, but it generally seems the standard scientific assessment is that current organoids very likely lack the organization needed for "sentience", but, that methods for detecting subjective experience in organoids are not at all well established.
From 2004.
I can't help but think of "I have no mouth, and I must scream"
All our experiments were conducted using FinalSpark's NeuroPlatform (Jordan et al., 2024), providing access to organoids over a cloud-based system, as shown in Figure 1. In this setup, forebrain organoids are cultured to approximately 500 μm in diameter (Govindan et al., 2021) and contain mature neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes displaying robust network activity. Maintained under continuous perfusion, they can remain electrophysiologically active for up to approximately 100 days under favorable conditions
This is absolutely fucked. The original argument for these human brain organoids were they're only 10k neurons. Now five minutes later they're talking about energy savings in scaling to cortex-level human brain cloud API.