And most scientists do not assume they can blindly mess around. There was a whole section of this article related to ethics, they didn't let the fetus be born (which would definitely have been messing around). They're not trying to "do better" or control nature - they're just trying to understand what makes us tick. This is a mutation that already exists in humans. It might make us human. If anything, that makes nature the one that was blindly messing around.
We are not Nature, and thus these existential defining issues should at least give us some pause to debate and evaluate the moral quandaries and responsibilities that this level of engineering power wields.
This is not a tool that "Nature" has in its toolbox. Nature has, natural selection. The random smatterings of dice throws that takes place trillions of times per day over the course of billions of years. The equivalent of throwing paint against the wall for a millennia to eventually recreate a Picasso.
This is not how humans work. Our efforts are efficient (at least more so than Nature's efforts), and when honed and optimized can be made into machines of frighteningly impressive efficiency.
There is certainly a difference between the creative and destructive processes of Man vs Nature.
Of course we are Nature. We came to being the exact same way every other current living species did, thru natural selection. So then how can we be living, as you say, somehow outside this "Nature" you speak of?
Hell, I know I may be in a small minority who says, by definition, nothing that we do is "wrong" because we are simply doing what our brains, which are 100% a product of this Nature, are telling us to do.
Post-modernism is quick to tell us there are no absolute rights and wrongs...that only culture makes it so. So why then can some say that its immoral to create and study these creatures that our nature-created brains have led us to create?
On your morality lines: Morality is a personal concept in people, but it is influenced by society and the people they interact with. There doesn't have to be some objective right/wrong, and so people can say that the scientists were being immoral (according to the person's own moral ideas). The scientists may very well believe they were being moral, or perhaps they didn't think about it (people do that!)
> that our nature-created brains have led us to create? Well, as stated before, morality isn't the same between humans. There's no objective authority that decides X is right or Y is wrong, simply social/cultural influences throughout the world.
You could view morality as a way that you think the world/people should behave to maximize some value you hold. Perhaps you value sentient life, and so you hold self-sacrifice to save a dozen people to be a moral good as it continues more sentient life.
Worth remembering that it's also not the case that every person has different morality, and everyone's moral values are uniformly distributed across the space of possible values.
No, the moral values of humans are all very strongly correlated, both within and across societies. We spend a lot of time bikeshedding the details, but we essentially have a shared sense of what's right and wrong.
(I hypothesize it's because we all have the same brain architecture - the basic moral sense is encoded in firmware, and through culture we adapt it to fit the environments and societies we live in.)
Sparta is another example. The Nazi regime in Germany too. Slavery in the US. I could keep going for another hour.
Moral values are highly dependent on you environmental influences.
Nevertheless you are totaly correct, that the majority of people in a single society shares similair views on moral rules.
“Nature” may not care what happens to the human species, but we do!
Humans comes from nature, and the building blocks of a human are the same as everything else in the universe (as far as we know).
Recent studies have shown that "choice" is made before we are even conscious of it (so byebye free will?), and no studies have shown that we are the only living creature able to make "choices".
"Humans are special", "Humans are different", "Humans are smarter" is the perfect example of arrogance and ignorance of humans.
"Humans are different" isn't arrogance, it's observable reality. And we need some words to separate the categories of "things done / caused by humans" vs "things done / caused by everything else" - hence the common meaning of "natural" and "nature".
> the building blocks of a human are the same as everything else in the universe (as far as we know).
Building blocks of everything in the universe are the same, but there's still meaningful difference between things.
We humans wield great power over other life. With great power comes great responsibility, and just as much as we should humbly recognize our origins and common ancestors with other life, we should also recognize the immense responsibilities over other life that we have.
Nature took a very long time to get us to where we are, it seems to me that playing with the biological building blocks at this level, relative to nature’s approach, has a very high risk of causing something catastrophic some time in the future.
The IT professional in me would advise to continue no further until a reproducible backup/restore procedure was in place. I’m not sure how exactly that translates to biological systems though.
Also I am currently available for hire :)
If you take any functioning healthy ecosystem on earth, one generally less tampered with by humans, you'll find from a microscopic, right up to a macroscopic level, the life in those ecosystems have adapted to function together.
If you want to see some good examples of this, check out some terrarium channels on youtube, there's some really cool, perfectly balanced ones people have had going for years.
The reason why we have so many ecological problems around the world is that humans have been constantly disrupting this. We introduce invasive species that dominate the landscape, cause extinctions and extirpations of native species and change the fundamental balance of the ecosystem.
You're right, life does push through, but personally, I prefer the native songbirds and shrubs that are local to my area than a landscape full of Japanese knotweed and starlings.
And so do most things, that first example likely has at least a dozen species of songbirds, a bunch of shrubs and herbacious plants. That second example has two species, maybe some rats or crows if your lucky.
The thing is, ecosystems don't stand alone, they're all connected and the collapse of one leads to the collapse of the neighbouring ones and so forth.
If you actually look through the published literature.on various ecosystems around the world, we have a very shallow level of knowledge. We don't understand fully the complex connections between everything and the research that does keep coming out keeps showing how much we've vastly underestimated how much our actions have impacted things.
Even things like the ecosystems in our own body's. The microscopic organisms that have been found to even play a part in things such as our decision making and moods.
The human body itself functions as an ecosystem, all our body systems, our cells, our organs, all function independently and cohesively to make everything that is you.
The earth itself functions the same way. The ecosystems, and all life, including humans, are the cells and organs that make up all life on Earth.
Altering life at a fundamental genetic level goes even further than how we alter ecosystems.
Humans really don't understand the potential consequences to changes we make to the genetic code. We have a vague idea, but we really are.delving mostly blind into this. If we barely understand how life works on a macroscopic level, what makes us think we're ready to change it at an even lower level?
I think if you accept at all that there is suffering and there is beauty, then you shouldn’t hide behind “everything’s natural” and instead try and have a backbone and stick up for something more.
There are many natural things that are good. Clean air, unique little ecosystems like GP describes, endless variety -- and we should strive to respect and preserve those, but not because they are natural. Poor animals teeming with parasites, population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?), predators feasting on the organs of their prey while the prey is still alive. All these things are natural but not good and we should not seek to replicate them.
Thinking about this, I just realized a simple thing: balance in animal population via starvation might not be as grim as we expect (i.e. it happens completely because the weakest/least fit individuals cannot compete for food and literally starve).
The sexual reproductive system is apparently one of the things that stops working earliest when you're affected by disease or malnutrition. This means that malnourished deers will just start having fewer/no babies while they're being famished.
Still grim, because lots of animals would starve, and still very uncomfortable for the deers which, even if they might survive to "old age", will fail to breed due to starvation... but still better than the alternative in which every baby deer gets born in the world as usual, only to then starve to death while they're still very young.
(Also: many (most?) living things have things that eat them, which is another population maintenance mechanism, and no less grim.)
We can certainly avoid the worst of it - but entirely is more dangerous than none.
For the individual the answer is almost certainly yes. If we have the ability to survive elsewhere than earth and we have brought earth to the point that it is 99% uninhabitable then going someone else is probably the best choice.
One could easily argue that our ability to consider our environment and make changes to our behavior accordingly is unnatural. Avoiding the above scenario is something we should be using our unnatural gifts to avoid.
Arguments based on how natural something is is highly subjective and not really worthwhile imo. Replace natural with what we're actually trying to discuss: As a species we want a stable environment that requires the least effort to survive in. Individuals have additional traits they want from the environment but that's all subjective. Things that most people consider natural are usually things that have a large data set to demonstrate their stability.
That type of thinking will ruin the second planet just as much.
I.e. we're too competitive, not cooperative enough, and can hardly coordinate at scale. Our best coordination mechanism we've ever came up with is the market economy, which is essentially taking the survival instinct of individuals and building a distributed coercion system with it. Sure, it works, but wouldn't it be nicer if we could just talk our way into working together on shared goals, instead of using money and threats of starvation?
Comparing to aborting a human-monkey fetus, the question of is there more good than harm is new. In a scientific setting where few cases are performed and a lot of Nature’s rules are revealed to us, I think that is mostly good. Genetic editing expanded to a large scale can also, I think, be done in a good way (by editing genes to increase intelligence or removing genes to reduce disease). It can also be done in a harmful way - say, raising an army of clones or some nightmare scenario where the rich and wealthy raise super intelligent human children that rules and obsoletes the rest of humanity.
I argue though that those nightmare situations will happen anyway and that human society has always had huge swings in well-being and suffering, with the average standard of living growing.
I think trying to contain the research is useful only up to some point - tracking the research and labeling successes and failures (science) and opening these studies and results to all of humanity is I think ultimately helpful. Keeping some competitive advantage over competing nations or corporations is also helpful. The more we learn, the more we can identify and prevent misuse.
Last thing to point out is humanity, and nature, share in common that we grow by making a ton of mistakes. Whereas Nature learns by not dying entirely, humanity adds a method by learning by thinking - this seems to be faster.
If we apply sentience to Nature, perhaps we were allowed to live in the hopes that we’d help Nature survive the next astroid attack.
That doesn't make it okay.
You're still taking essentially a static view of a dynamic system, because you're looking at too small a timescales. What we see as "natural balance" is essentially a freeze-frame of nature. The equilibria we see aren't stable - they're just very slow to changing. Everything is evolving and in a constant war with each other at every level - from microscopic to macroscopic. Nature itself doesn't care about the environment as we see it today[0].
The problem with humans boils down to what makes us truly special: intelligence and socializing enabled us to evolve a meta-organism of society at rates many orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. Language and writing lets us propagate knowledge and technologies between generations, and intelligence lets us problem-solve and simulate in mind space - pruning the solution space quickly and in an efficient way, over evolution's directed RNG.
Point being, no other organism can respond with the speed at which we evolve our societies and technologies. That's why we disrupt the ecosystems and the climate. We're too fast for nature.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event is a good example. An evolutionary leap, leading to most life dying off, only for new and more complex forms to eventually take its place. But as it is with life, whatever comes after a mass die-off isn't the same thing that was there before.
Human industralization is that sort of a problem - rather then a slow multi-generational change in equilibria, we're looking at rapid change which simply wipes species out (because if you can't have a generational change, you can't have any evolutionary adaptation).
The domestication of dogs for example is something humans definitely did to the native biosphere - dogs don't exist today without us. But it took at least 20,000 years to do. Not 300.
We didn't come out of a void. We are a natural evolution too, with the only difference being that we reached this stage before other animals. Since we are disrupting our ecosystem, we are living proof that either:
- this ecosystem we are in is not function according to your definition - or functioning ecosystems do not maintain balance
> The reason why we have so many ecological problems around the world is that humans have been constantly disrupting this. We introduce invasive species that dominate the landscape, cause extinctions and extirpations of native species and change the fundamental balance of the ecosystem.
Ecosystems are constantly being disrupted and have been long before humans evolved. Wind can carry the seeds of one plant into another ecosystem where it suddenly dominates because it has no "natural predators". Birds can fly over an ecosystem, defecate and drop an entirely foreign species into another ecosystem.
Cyanobacteria are even attributed as the reason for one of the first mass extinctions [0]. Is that a sign of a functioning ecosystem?
> Altering life at a fundamental genetic level goes even further than how we alter ecosystems.
Viruses and bacteria actively mess around with the DNA of other organisms in order to render them susceptible or make them carriers. Nature has been messing with itself long before we ever learned how.
We are in no way special in this universe or in our actions. We are just copying what we see in nature.
[0]: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/the-great-oxygenation-e...
Don't you think, you feel that way, because you grew up with the native songbirds?
"If we barely understand how life works on a macroscopic level, what makes us think we're ready to change it at an even lower level? "
Like the other poster have said: nature does not plan in advance or makes ethical discussions. Nature just is and everything in it trys to adapt. Some prosper, some die out. Now with our technology we disrupted quite a bit, but why must we understand everything we do, when nature aparrently does not either?
With research like this, I am more worried, what things like this, does to us. To maybe get to the point, where new babys are created in a laboratory and the less successful experiments goes to the bin. All for Evolution.
Now I am grossed out by that thought. But from a philosophical point of view, I have to ask myself: "who defines that this is bad?"
Maybe this gets us to the stars, so life can spread, in case earth life gets vanished, by a big asteroid. So maybe it is ethical to do all we can, to get there? To preserve life itself? (humans are not at all adopted for space, radiation, zero g etc., so CRISPR?)
(well no, I don't think it is ethical to do by all means, but I do think ethics are subjective and the next generations might have different ethics)
edit: had to translate it, but: we also have knotweed and people complain, but I actually like it. And I do not see it dominating, just a spot here and there, just like nettles.
Species come and go all the time. Globalisation just made it a lot faster. So there will be imbalances and local system collapsing and temporary a dominating species etc., but alltogether the diversity of species will be increased, with fast global exchange. Because there are more candidates to fill a niche.
Local established ones still have a home bonus. Their DNA is adopted to the local climate and soil, unlike the invaders. They won't vanish anytime soon.
The thing really threatening diversity are monoculture fields with pesticides.
Actually it does. It's quite likely that this is neither the first universe nor the last. But it's certainly one of the more stable ones.
> If anything, that makes nature the one that was blindly messing around.
Quite hard to image that something even close to this has happened by pure coincidence - e.g. mutation - before.
What a statement.
Its an enhanced mutant example at best...
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
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.
It has to be, otherwise the abortion debate would be very different. Aborting a somewhat conscious fetus would be much closer to murder.
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.
How precisely to draw the line is very much a matter of disagreement.
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 want to return to monke as much as the next guy but i dont really see it happening in the near future
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?
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.
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.
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.
A natural reaction from people with high sanctity/degradation (in the MFT sense) is to avoid touching the trolley lever at all points. Decision making is considered association with the decision. The naturalistic fallacy pervades all.
No, if you can save billions and you choose not to, you have killed them. If you can uplift species and you choose not to, you have killed their cognition. Keine Wahl ist auch eine Wahl. We are gods over the Earth. We have dominion over it and the creatures that inhabit it. And godhood carries responsibility more than it carries power. We owe the monkeys their sapience.
>No, if you can save billions and you choose not to, you have killed them. If you can uplift species and you choose not to, you have killed their cognition. We are gods over the Earth. We have dominion over it and the creatures that inhabit it
No we're not. We're barely able to hold it together. The Earth is a giant living system we're slowly killing and replacing with human technology.
It's not a naturalistic fantasy, it's the reality of the planet you live on.
To think we dominate this world is laughable. The fungi will consume all of us some day and outlive us all. I mean some are among the oldest still living life on earth as it is. Like millions of years old and still going. How can you dominate something that's existed longer than you and will out live you and everyone you know?
Humans have such a limited understanding of the very things that make life possible. We're not gods, we're children who wandered into gods workshop and started playing with all the shiny toys.
Just because we know how to play with toys doesn't make us gods or the dominators of the Earth or life itself.
That's the kind of arrogance I speak of that's going to blow up in our faces.
"It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)"
For example:
> The fungi will consume all of us some day and outlive us all. I mean some are among the oldest still living life on earth as it is. Like millions of years old and still going. How can you dominate something that's existed longer than you and will out live you and everyone you know?
Yet anti-fungals are trivially available at low cost. Indeed, the very claim of yours that:
> The Earth is a giant living system we're slowly killing and replacing with human technology.
Is literally not something I can only even understand as agreement that we have dominion, yet I know you intend to deny that.
And this gene cluster is aiming to master the rock that is the Earth through modifying other gene clusters. And you can't stop it. Because through modification it grows stronger and more able. And it has rallied the memome and the hologenome to its cause. This cause requires no convincing because only winners get to play the next round. Change is inevitable. Understanding is overrated. Control does not require it.
Transformation Theology has subsumed this world. You live in an ether floating in it. You cannot choose the path of no change. No such path exists.
If you want to talk about genes as an immortalizing life form then those genes are just as prone to natural selection as the carrier. Some genes are old, some are new. New genes have an incredibly high attrition rate. Not much different from nature. Genes are suckers and losers just like their carriers.
Genes aren't goal directed towards something higher.
> This cause requires no convincing because only winners get to play the next round
The 'winners', us humans, are literally destroying the ecosphere which supports our life.
> Understanding is overrated.
That's an appeal to ignorance.
> Control does not require it [understanding]
We can control something without understanding it? Most of science would disagree.
No, but "this gene cluster" is me - and I am goal-directed.
> We can control something without understanding it? Most of science would disagree.
No, they wouldn't. Epistemology has progressed beyond this. Models have various levels of fidelity. And 'understanding' is a colloquial term that refers to a higher standard of fidelity than that required for control. Few drivers know how their cars work. Most drivers can drive their cars.
But I do enjoy the amusing attempt at cutting out the sentence to create damning gotchas. Here, I mimicked your style and made one from your comment:
> We can control something without understanding it
Why, thank you for agreeing with me! Quite gratifying to receive such support.
OK, straight questiom goal directed towards what?
> And 'understanding' is a colloquial term that refers to a higher standard of fidelity than that required for control
Don't agree - further
> Few drivers know how their cars work. Most drivers can drive their cars.
Understanding is about understanding of aspects. They may well not understand the engine aspect (how it works precisely) but "Most drivers can drive their cars" means they control their cars, which means they understand what happens when a steering wheel is turned, and how not to grind the gears, and not to hit accelerator and brake together. They model it. That is the embodiment of their understanding. Without that they could not control a car.
> Why, thank you for...
Quite clearly there was a question mark at the end it to indicate my implied doubt. Science seeks better understanding of x so it can manipulate x more precisely. Please give me a couple of examples of complex systems which we don't understand but can control, so I can understand you better.
Well, my goals (like anyone's) are far too nuanced to get into in their entirety. But for the sake of this discussion, we can assume that the endurance of sapience is desirable to me.
Happy to conclude the 'understanding' discussion by replacement with 'understanding of fundamentals and nth-order consequences for n > 3' if that will do the trick. As for the rest, you're going to have to stop butchering my sentences.
> Quite clearly there was a question mark at the end it to indicate my implied doubt.
Indeed there was, but I was able to (like you did) chop off the comment and create a 'quotation' that had you take the opposite position. Normally, that would be disingenuous but I did it solely to show you what you were doing.
Who decides what is of value, that "sapience" is an absolute value we are required to work towards? There is no answer to this we have access to except we ourselves decide.
Therefore, there is no "responsibility" from outside ourselves, certainly not some kind of external responsibility to prioritize some values (creating more "intelligent" species) over other values (not creating frankenstein monsters with capacity for incredible suffering).
I think living beings that lack recognized-by-us "sapience" still have their own inherent value that must be respected. To suggest that becoming more like us is their only destiny is to disrespect them as they are, they don't need to be more like us to be respectable.
That said... we're not saying we need to respect the natural world any less, or need to force sapience on all animals. We might just want to give some the ability to reach our level (however good or bad it might be) and converse with them honestly. Otherwise, how are we ever going to have a moral answer on the value of sapience, if we're the only ones who ever have it?
And naturally there is no "responsibility" externally. All ethics arise from us since no other beings capable of complex cognition are present within our immediate vicinity.
Certainly one can argue for respect for all living beings and I think one should be able to construct such an example easily. My one great moral horror is that I recognize diminutive intelligence in animals that I still would gladly farm and consume. One day we will be called to task for that. My hope is to be long dead by then.
By that logic you killed all the kids you could have made when you weren't having sex.
Similarly, he might choose not to have children, and be content that friends/family/humanity was having kids still, so no big moral harm done. If nobody was doing so though - wtf? Big moral harm by inaction there. Similar if we just have all these tools but never ever use them to uplift another species.
> I did [killed all the kids I haven't had] and I find it acceptable.
Don't you think it's a self-contradiction? There's 0 evidence to support valuing hypothetical descendants of these monkeys over hypothetical descendants of your children.
Secondarily, I value some sort of backup intelligence system as a protection against human intelligence monoculture. Though one could reasonably argue that adding a human brain-fold gene to a monkey does make it more human-like than truly independent.
I suppose I'm hoping that we get better at this and eventually are capable of uplift that yields not necessarily human-style intelligence.
I don't subscribe to an absolutist view of the veil of ignorance. My life is, to me, of higher utility than yours or the random children who I actively choose to let die daily.
So I'm going to act in a manner that preserves my life. That seems natural, after all. The other day I bought a new phone instead of saving a child's life. I don't even like this Pixel 5 that much. I like my life very much. Think about how many kids I'd kill for that.
The trolley problem remains unsolved. I don't find arguments anymore persuasive when they are written as declarations.
The Nazis killed at least 12 million human beings. Did they save 12 million humans through that process? Certainly the anatomy books they produced in their horrific experiments led to an improved understanding of humans and perhaps some better treatment but I think it will take a lot of evidence to convince me that this method is differentially superior to approaches that are more palatable to me. I don't think they saved a net 12 million lives in the process, and after all, if you kill one man you kill all his descendants. So currently I think I have a high prior probability of Nazi Germany harming humanity far more than they have benefited it.
It's going to take some convincing, I'm afraid.
I don't think that there is any evidence that other animals don't already have the same sentience as humans do.
I agree that this is unethical, but other forms of using lab animals or factory farming in my opinion are equally unethical in my opinion.
If there's a moral issue here, it's about the experience we put the monkey mothers through to conduct this experiment since they cannot reasonably give consent for it and are at a sentience level where this is a reasonable concern.
From reading the article, given the value of this research, I think the concerns were adequately addressed - namely, the fetus was not brought to term, it was removed via C-section, the monkeys seem to have been adequately cared for emotionally, and it's a reasonable statement that simian miscarriage is a concept they would understand to some degree and thus not be overly distressed by the process. These were marmosets, not chimps so this is a reasonable level of precaution due their sapience level.
It might help us all be in more relation with the world. Our lack of relation feels to me to be part of what's driving us into this extinction event. A "monstrosity" that convinces us to rethink the moral rights of other living creatures would perhaps be welcome...?
Maybe it ends up being the unasked-for bastard creature that saves all the others (incl us) from us, just by making us slow down and go "hold on hold on hold on. what THE FUCK?"
I suspect we have more to answer for in the scale of animal suffering than we could possibly imagine.
An awakening to the truth of how cruelly indifferent we are to animals would threaten power structures at a magnitude that makes #metoo look small.
> "To let them come to be born, in my opinion, would have been irresponsible as a first step," Huttner mentioned, "because you don't know what kind of behavioral change you'll get."
1) they thought about it
2) if you are ok with abortions, 14 weeks is isn't alarming territory
Arguably you shouldn't abort monkey's fetuses but you probably shouldn't genetically modify their embryos then forcibly implant them either. Or eat any kind of meat
You might argue, that keeping a being in captivity is unethical. Well, so is genetically experimenting with and then killing off a fetus. The only reason they feel it's ethical in the first place is obviously some sort of "the good that will come to the world from this knowledge is much more than the damage done to this fetus". But that same rationale an be said of letting it be born?
One might argue that if they would let it live to a certain point would at least give us some real-world knowledge of the ramifications of genetic editing.
Better brain != human.
Balance is something humans project on the world. There is no balance, there is only the status quo that can change in an instant.
Nature only seems balanced because we can only view a tiny slice of time. Extinction events in the geological record show us there is no balance and 90% of life can easily be obliterated.
The only way people ever understand anything is by play and experimentation. You didn’t spend 5 years thinking about how to ride a bike before getting on. You scraped your knees and kept trying till you learned.
I’d like to see your list of “pretty terrifying things”.
If our remote ancestors had that kind of approach to life, they would have stoned to death every member of their tribes that successfully learned how to start a fire.
Wouldn’t exactly have ended well for us.
At some point in the next 25 years I expect there to be a 'procedure' available, which consists of cultivating a persons stem cells from their bone marrow, using a genetic editing technique to add and/or delete and/or "correct" certain genetic sequences, and then to have a "bone marrow transplant" which is simply killing off your existing bone marrow stem cells and replacing them with the edited ones.
It will be touted as a durable cure for genetic disease and marketed underground to people of means who are looking for an edge in their chosen profession.
There will be lawsuits over people who have their their genetic sequences "appropriated" by a third party to re-sell as a product, and patent litigation on gene sequences that makes much of today's trolls seem quaint in comparison.
I expect to see dog shows and horse races ban "genetically modified" contestants. I expect to see lawsuits around the labeling of beef and chicken about being genetically modified (yes some of this is already happening).
The world will be profoundly different on the far side of generalized understanding of genetics and the means to manipulate them. At least as different as it has become pre-internet+computer to post internet+computer.
Your attitude sounds like my Dad's attitude of being sad that my generation doesn't believe in God anymore or his own Dad's unhappiness at him for not being a proper loyal soldier in the Navy. It's tempting to believe that our own generation has the ultimate peak of right behavior and any change is for the worse, but it's also arrogant and repeatedly proven to be wrong.
I didn't appreciate the wisdom in that joke until my kids were teens. The sadness comes from the expectation of the painful times between the onset of the technology and the eventual successful integration of that technology into our lives. For me, I live in Silicon Valley which has more superfund cleanup sites than pretty much anywhere because the chip companies dumped a lot of toxic chemicals that later turned out to be carcinogens into the ground. People I know, some well, some only by association, were harmed by that. It was part of the "learning curve" of developing semiconductors which have so changed everyone's lives. That the chips are a net good is, in my opinion, pretty clear. However, the "learning" of the superfund cleanup was painful.
Bespoke genetic manipulation will have similar "growing pains" and those pains will kill people, cause generalized harm, and likely a catastrophe or two. And once we've gone through that and understand the risks and challenges in a more fundamental way, then people will be enjoying the benefits and the risks will be contained by legislation or some other oversight.
Imagine that we figure out the genetic sequence for total memory recall. It isn't an "illness" it is a feature that some people have. And perhaps the procedure costs $2M to have it done. Further assume that is a price that "upper middle class" people can afford to have it done for their kids. Now you have thousands of kids who are artificially "better" for jobs than unmodified kids. How do the unmodified kids compete?
It is just a hypothetical of course, there are dozens of things that appear to be genetic that give people an advantage over their peers. Unequal access to such things has always been a force for stratification in the world.
An abortion is a result of a choice being made by a person after a set of real life and possibly unexpected events have happened.
The research is carefully planned in advance. This was genetically engineered to be terminated.
So while I do think you've asked a relevant question, I think the ethical questions the two things raise are actually very far apart.
There's a spectrum here.
At one end, religious folks believe life and soul begins at conception. Some also believe tampering with genes is tampering with god's creation.
At the other end, atheists believe in so soul.
Some believe personhood doesn't begin until a being is able to think, feel, and reflect upon the world around it. They hold that cetaceans have higher consciousness than human babies. They wouldn't have issue with this.
Plenty of people with no monotheistic belief feel nature shouldn't be tampered with.
Many scientists view biology as a machine that should be probed and studied.
The "choice" argument is one of the counter arguments used by those that are pro-life. I think many of them would object to these experiments on different grounds.
The ethics are complicated and messy. The science is rather straightforward.
By "religious folks", do you mean "modern Christianity"? Even then, I think it may be less of a given than you realize. For example, Thomas Aquinas wrote that an embryo is "ensouled" some months after conception.
Not all religions. The Qu’ran states that the soul enters the body exactly 40 days after conception, for example.
But you're right, the argument (c) the woman's autonomy rights trump the fetus's rights but only when the fetus was unintended does indeed indicate the monkey operation was unethical. I'm not so sure that (c) is a very logical position though.
This is something different, this is the first time this has been done, there was signs that their brains were going to be similar to ours, meaning possibly self aware and intelligent, I dunno, like i say, i'm not even sure which I feel like is the ethical choice...
Like I say, I find it hard to describe how I feel about it all.
If you believe that:
A) a mother may choose to let someone end the life of her own human fetus; and
B) animals have no right to control their own bodies,
then I don't see why there's any dissonance to believe:
→ a human may choose to end the life of an animal's human-like fetus.
It does not violate (A): the human-like fetus is no more special than a human fetus. It does not violate (B): the mother's right to control her own body/fetus does not exist, since the mother is a non-human animal.
Do you see it differently? How so?
I suppose one could make the case that, a human mother/embryo is a single symbiotic organism, which expresses its collective will through the mother. This new animal mother/human-like embryo symbiotic organism should be afforded some of the same rights as a fully human mother/embryo, but is unable to express its will due to the limitations of the mother. Therefore the embryo's right to life, which it could normally choose to waive through its human mother, is violated, since its animal mother is unable to communicate as much.
But I'm guessing that's not how you (or anyone else) are looking at the situation.
(Personally (and I'm not making an argument here, just an observation), as someone who believes (A) but not (B), I can't get agitated at this study; by my moral measure the violation of the animal mother's rights is way tamer than so many other ways animals' rights are violated in the name of science.)
This is good, I like people that can recognize this. Cognitive dissonance should hurt. It's the people who can't feel it that I worry about being around...
Cognitive dissonance? Sorry to be snarky.
This can happen through multiple ways.
The first way is through simple genetic drift. Think of humans colonizing the galaxy and living in isolated populations for millions of years. Eventually we turn into different species. So maybe there is one hominid species right now, but in 1 million years it will look way different.
Another way is through a human deliberately creating nonhuman intelligent, but still biological life. Think of people wanting their pets to be smarter, furries wanting to turn into half animals, or just experimentation for science like in this instance. Maybe 99% of society is repelled by this, but if you give the 1% which desires this enough time, they'll find an opportunity to bring such life into existence. However great the taboo, eventually someone will break it. And once there is nonhuman intelligent life, there will be people who want to protect it.
A third way is through humans creating silicon based life, e.g. to upload rich people to the cloud, letting them live there like gods. Maybe if you initially build such a system, you make the experience as similar to human experience as you can, with all the unpleasant parts of it removed, but the people it simulates may eventually grow tired of interacting with the fleshy human society that they form the elite of and instead focus on interacting with each other instead. Maybe they'll then accept changes in programming, allowing human brains to be merged, duplicated, for short times, or through random mixing, etc. I think computers allow a great deal of things and likely we'll try them out sooner or later.
To summarize, I think we are at the start of a cambrian explosion like event. Think what happens if you are the first plant that can grow on land. You'll quickly fill all the lands and your numbers will have no limit. But by the time you have done that, you are a collection of different species instead of just one because your siblings had to adapt to the different environments, and the species themselves are competing with each other.
Regarding aliens, I doubt we are alone in the galaxy. I'm sure there is independently developed, intelligent, life somewhere. But likely by the time we encounter them, we'll maybe already be a cluster of multiple intelligent species.
Or idk, maybe not. Maybe there is only one hominid species because we are so utterly racist and have eliminated anything that was even a little bit different from us :).
"I gave you life, I will take it" - Taras Bulba.
>You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it.
Mark Twain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog
The story of turning dog into a man by transferring a part of the human brain
I am not saying one side or the other is correct, I honestly don't hold a strong opinion on this issue.
Just that we can imagine a certain hypocrisy in a society that is against creating/terminating one life prematurely (smart monkeys)... but yet withholds the same rule against it's own species offspring (humans).
If they do it again and again and again, the progress will be substantial, and society stands to benefit enormously.
With exponential increases in the parts of the brain responsible for intelligence, morality and justice, imagine a future president of the United States elected from this cohort.
If that is true then these scientists made the right judgment and they should stop with these types of experiments. What are you going to do with these intelligent but still less than human animals? Let them integrate into society and become a source of conflict? We already have enough conflict between humans over trivial matters as it is. If you add an explicit difference between two parties like a different species then conflicts will continue forever until one side is extinct.
If this research succeeds there will be two potential scenarios: Easily controlled monkey slaves doing manual labor or alternatively those monkeys receive extensive genetic engineering because of lack of ethics to outperform us and therefore replace us.
I don't want either.
Despite that, I'm a bit unsettled by this too. I think we should understand the mind a bit more before we go down the path of creating one.
There is no balance. It's an illusion of selection bias and inability to consider time-scales not at the human scale.
Note, this is not specific to the parent post but just a general comment made with the hope of raising the level of conversation beyond twitter.
I gotta say... for me, this is close to murder. I realize these things are complicated but if it was a hybrid species, we might not know how close it was to us. It may have been close and it would absolutely be murder to kill a 100 day old child.
I think if it could potentially be murder you should just error on the side of caution.
Humans are have tons of issues including cellular and cognitive deficiencies. This is a way to learn more about that and fix it.
Sure, someone will make the new slave labor force, let's cross that bridge when we get there.
The only difference between this and abortion is that the species is somehow "novel".
You should resolve the ethical issues with genetic engineering research in a similar way to however you resolve the ethical issues related to abortion.
The potential good that can come out of this drastically out weighs the bad.
Unless you’re a pacifist vegan, I find such thinking deeply hypocritical.
(Besides the obvious cruelty and injustice as well as the extreme likelihood of rebellion and creation of a world government of evil monkey overlords, which might not necessarily be worse than what we currently have.)
?
- Leaded fuel, the highest ever source of lead exposure and poisoning for Humans.
- Asbestos still present in 60' to 80's construction
- Refrigerants with Ozone destroying CFCs
- 1800's arsenic pesticides still contaminate today's rice fields and most of the world's rice crops.
- DDT
- Plastics are currently leaching estrogenic-mimicking endocrine disruptors and contaminating water supplies, wildlife and Humans.
That's just a few from memory, I am sure there are more.
Edit: yes as someone else commented our grenhouse gas emissions are probably the biggest elephant in the room
CFCs were an amazing breakthrough as they stopped people getting gassed by their refrigerator and killed (ammonia was used before). Once a problem was identified then changes were made. Similar with asbestos (not actually chemistry), leaded fuel and DDT.
As for the others you have concentrated on the tiny percentage of bad outcomes rather then the millions of positive. Chemistry has been such an overwhelming good over the last 200 years that it takes a very special mind to see it in such a negative light.
All the points I mentioned were massive breakthroughs and improvements in their primary application. The point is they had massively wide scale secondary effects which Humans at the time were unable to predict.
You say a small percentage of outcomes but many of those small percentage of occurences have had a negative effect on the whole of Humanity and even a Planetary negative effect. Just because the are few applications it doesn't make their magnitude small.
The original argument from GGP was that we as a species have failed to forecast these secondary effects on Chemical compounds which are theoretically less complex systems than Biological ones (by simpler I don't mean with less merit).
If we fail to predict theses effects on a Chemical level, it follows that the claim that we can confidently make such changes on a Biological system without secondary effects is very weak.
In my comment I was not arguing that the last 3 centuries of Chemistry are a failure or that we should stop developing, I am providing supporting evidence that even a 'simple' field as Chemistry is already vastly more complex than we can currently predict, it follows that changes to a more complex Biological field will very likely introduce more complex secondary effects which we once again will fail to predict.
Everything we do that is new has risks. History has shown us that the benefits of innovation far outweighs the costs. This does not mean progress comes with no downsides, but that the good is vastly better than the bad.
Many people seem so scared now of the possible risks that they are afraid to do anything really new. Living is risky, progress is risky, and not doing is even more risky.
(On top of trying to twist my words) I think this is where we diverge, I am not arguing.
I really mean this in a non snarky way, you should check the guidelines section 'In Comments' [0]. There is nothing wrong with pushing arguments like this, they just don't contribute anything to anybody else reading this.
If you want this kind of polarizing discussion, Twitter is probably a better platform.
It takes an even more special mind to pretend we know all the consequences, to assume our knowledge is complete and that there are no unknowns.
Everything has consequences, including not doing something. If we didn’t act because of the “unknown” we would still be living in caves.
"YOU MANIACS. YOU BLEW IT UP. DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!"
-Some astronaut in the future
These scientists essentially created what may have been a new species, that perhaps would have had similar sentience to us and had them terminated after 100 days.
The cat's out of the bag with this research so to speak now. Someone's bound to do this again
The part about whether they should have been born or not, which was the ethical thing is what tears at me.
Is it right to create something that may be similar to us and then not even give it a chance to live?
I mean whether creating such a being is right or not in general i'm sure is up for debate.
I'm not religious, but if we're going to play god, shouldn't we take responsibility for the results of our creation?
I dunno, I find a lot of genetic engineering research to be a bit unsettling. We're playing with things we barely understand that could have consequences we can't even imagine.
Nature took a long long time to get to this point where life has come to a sort of balance. Assuming we can go in and just start blindly messing around and do better seems like an extreme level of arrogance that's going to end up blowing up in our faces.
Our track record for messing around with the fundamental fabric of reality and life isn't so good. We've ended up with some pretty terrifying things.