It's one thing to point out hypocrisy about the suffering that the meat industry causes as a way to encourage people to think about whether it's necessary for them to eat meat. It's another thing to point out the hypocrisy around the meat industry as a way to say "so therefore you also shouldn't care about animal testing." That's going backwards, not forwards.
You are all allowed to care about lab animals even if you eat meat, I give you my... I don't know, my "vegan blessing" or whatever. Also, you don't need the vegan movement's permission to care about animals anyway, but whatever.
The point is, try to be kind to animals when you can be. And if you want to be more consistent, be more consistently kind, not more consistently cruel.
That's a really interesting way to put it. I definitely am guilty of reacting to hypocrisy by being more and more biased towards nihilism.
If you view life and technology as evolving toward increasing complexity and power as time goes on, then morally we have the opportunity to evolve as well. We can steady state for a while at our current moral development (which is probably more egalitarian than morality was just a few hundred years ago), or we can alter our morality as life and technology advances. Given enough time, technology may become indistinguishable from the old-school gods, so morally the question becomes, are we going to become gods with all-too-human morality, with god-like love, or with demon-like selfishness?
Biasing towards nihilism is picking the demonic route.
Now you made it sound attractive tho
Same standards? Yes, I agree. At least when the species is the same (lab pig vs bacon pig). There's no guarantee that lab rats and cattle share the same answer to the question "can they suffer?"
"meet in the middle"? Strongly disagree. While we should determine the reality of the situation, the only thing I can be sure of is that the middle is the worst of both — either a specific animal is able to experience suffering, or they are not; if they are then testing on them or eating them should be repugnant, and if they are not then it should be done without care.
Unfortunately not only do I not know how to tell if any given animal can genuinely experience suffering (rather than merely act in a way that tiggers my empathy/sympathy), I don't think anyone else can either. (Same basic problem as with "is this AI sentient?")
Biochemical signalling, and pathways, along with neural responses. It helps that so much of animal genetics is similar. Here was a study in fruit flies: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190712120244.h...
Those insects in that study might be conscious, or they might not be — but as I read it, part of the hard problem of consciousness is that we still don't yet understand the question.
At the very least, not everyone values their own suffering the same. Masochists can see it as something to be cultivated, even.
You're implying that in the Venn diagram of people fixating on animal treatment at Neuralink and people stopping at McDonalds for a hamburger and chicken nuggets, the first is completely contained in the second which is not the case. You get all kinds of opinions here but they're all made by different people, some eating animals, some not eating animals.
> Feels like we should really align on what we care about?
We're not a cohesive organization but a collection of randos, how and why would we want to align on what we care about?
> We're not a cohesive organization but a collection of randos, how and why would we want to align on what we care about?
The “we” here is the collective we. Humanity and its stance regarding the environment and the animals that live in it. This is absolutely worth caring about.
I find the comparison with McDonalds unhelpful, but the general idea that humanity should evolve beyond the abuse of animals is still valid regardless.
This logic could be applied to every major advancement throughout human history. Yet here we are. Ideas grow and spread. We no longer accept slavery. Is this universal? No. Better than it’s ever been? Yes. The spread of ideas is the only way that broader collaboration can ever happen.
For a species so self interested, we’ve managed to invent the medium that I’m typing this comment from, and that in itself is proof that self interest led to global advancements that achieved more than any single group of humans could achieve by themselves.
And self interested or not, we’re still fundamentally a social species, clearly capable of understanding that survival of the collective is critical to our own survival.
If you don’t grow your own food, if you drive a car or ride a bus, live in a building you didn’t construct, stopped at a red light, baked food in an oven, and on the list goes, you are already intrinsically linked and dependent on the cooperation of a large web of other people. And it’s in your own self interest to preserve the conditions that allow that web of support to continue.
Whether one stops to consider/acknowledge this is another question, but the “collective we” is already completely interdependent, and acting in a self interested manner is modulated by education.
So what is helpful? Hopefully a growing awareness of the situations we face and the realities of what we’re doing as a species. When awareness grows, self interested behavior starts achieving new/different results. History proves this.
I see people use this “we” a lot. It’s the same kind of “we” that people use in the sense “why haven’t we gotten jet packs yet?” Well, because there is no we. Some people have jet packs, and it could be said that humanity “has” jetpacks, but that’s not really a useful assertion. Why not say “I wish there were jetpacks I could buy at reasonable prices”? Why bring all of humanity into it?
I think you've missed the point here.
My point is that it doesn't matter who you consider to be part of your "we". They are part of your we whether or not you acknowledge it. Most people never stop to consider the hundreds of thousands of people that impact their lives on a daily basis. Not stopping to think about this or choosing to ignore this doesn't change the reality of what is.
> It’s the same kind of “we” that people use in the sense “why haven’t we gotten jet packs yet?”
Sure, it's a similar kind of "we", but the impact of these we statements cannot be considered equivalent. Jetpacks and the future of earth are not in the same category. If jetpacks happen, cool! Their existence doesn't have much existential impact on me or you.
"We must stop doing a bad thing" in the context of environmental issues eventually becomes an existential statement whether you like it or not. Pondering the non-existence of jetpacks and pondering the collapse of the ecosystem that supports life cannot be lumped into the came category.
> Why bring all of humanity into it?
Because the survival of humanity depends on it, unlike the creation of jetpacks.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10130709/NIH-says-b...
There're ethical standards for animal handling in meat processing industry. And yes, they should totally be improved.
> holding up potentially revolutionary medical treatment for treatment of the other .01%.
Since when calls for following basic ethical industry standards are bad thing? Especially when they go to a company owned by billionaire, who's know for "bending" the truth about capabilities of his products. Also, there's literally 0 proof for any medical treatment coming out of Neuralink and a lot of proof that they abuse animals.
Pretty weird are generalizations like this.
By the way I do not eat at McDonalds or meat at all. But that is not relevant.
It’s popular to hate Musk for understandable reasons, and most people still recognize the utility of eating meat while questioning Musk’s plan to put chips in our brains.
The people who fixate on one aren’t necessarily the people who fixate on the other.
Another way to look at this is that NeuralLink is creating an opportunity to raise awareness about animal abuse. The “fixation” on one doesn’t come at the expense of the other, perhaps the opposite.
None of that comes close to the absolute pure nightmare horror of being an experimental subject of brain chip implants.
I understand the desire to create the technology, and the possible good it can do (tho it also opens the door to some rather intense dystopias), but it seems very cruel to do the research on animals.
Better perhaps to give inmates on death row the option of being test subjects, or recruit volunteers amongst those with terminal illnesses.
Or simply don't do the research.
For instance there is no medical research benefit to inserting the wrong implant into 25 different pigs. It just requires duplicated work and calls into question the validity of any results they might have as they might be erroneous.
Another reason is that human testing is a critical part of developing a actually useful implant and demands the utmost concern for safety. Having a culture of slapdash, reckless disregard for their animal test subjects means they will be grossly unqualified to operate on human subjects. In fact, we have already seen evidence of this by the fact that the FDA has rejected their applications to begin human clinical testing citing safety concerns.
Causing extra animal suffering while not only getting no benefit from it, but actually causing net harm is the definition of needless. Even McDonald’s is better than that; at least they provide some people something of positive value.
You say this very confidently, but my own experience has been the opposite. Are you speaking knowledgeably here?
We should have some standard for animal handling, but it's pretty dumb that we're grandfathering an industry that produces 100,000x the harm of the research labs, just because we're used to eating hamburgers, and holding up potentially revolutionary medical treatment for treatment of the other .01%.
Feels like we should really align on what we care about? Maybe meet in the middle, and hold the same standards to both?