We shouldn't be doing those things. The fact our legal structures haven't banned them yet does not invalidate the ethical concerns about using human brain tissue in this manner.
It's not just a cell cluster, it's a cluster of brain cells, the organ that is most likely linked to consciousness. We don't understand how that organ is linked to consciousness, so we don't know at what point and structure a cluster of neurons would develop it. Given that, this is an extremely dangerous path to start walking down.
We dont fully understand consciousness or how it works, and by experimenting with these, we could inadvertently create something capable of suffering or even self awareness. Without a clear understanding of these processes and how they work, it's downright reckless and unethical to assume theres no risk. Dbingham rightly points out that we're treading into unknown and potentially unethical territory.
I believe the most important part for ethics-concerned commenters here are ethics. But I have a hard time reasoning about it while living on a whole planet with (roughly) 90% of humans living under poverty line, 9.9% of humans living as modern-era slaves, and 100% of organisms that ever lived suffering in an incountable amount of ways. To me it’s more dangerous to leave this as is than experimenting on yet another 0.001% of biotissue.
Even when I try hard to take an ethical position, it seems moot to me. I still can’t be sure that my spinal cord isn’t suffering all these tears without me knowing. I mean yes, less suffering would be great, not even by ethics, just from empathy. But neural tissue that has no mouth and probably must scream is too effing everywhere to single some cell collections out. Nature doesn’t care. Scream if you can, and if you can not, too bad. I just can’t find this balanced view that you guys have, it feels pretty self patting on the back to me.
Can someone give me the argument for and against for why this different than the ethics of abortion?
It occurs to me that if anyone concerned about the possibility of consciousness and therefore suffering in bio-organic computing, is the consistent position to be against abortion after 2 weeks, which is when the brain begins its development in the fetus?
If the consciousness possesses a capacity for suffering, torture as you say, the taking of its life is murder.
Both are immoral…
If I cut my arm off, I'm "murdering" trillions of organisms. Is that immoral?
I think suffering is only possible to much more complex organisms. You can't mourn if you don't remember for example.
In the case of abortion, you have one being (the fetus) that isn't yet fully formed and capable of living on its own and another being (the mother) who is potentially harmed by the first being's life. Yes, it is a morally complex situation.
We don't know when the first being becomes conscious. But we know the second being is conscious. And we know the consequence of treating the fetus as a being with full rights is to deprive the mother of her rights, frequently her right to life.
Frankly, I have first hand experience with this I strongly doubt many abortion opponents have. If not for abortion, my wife would probably be dead after our wanted pregnancy turned out to be non-viable. We aborted our son while he was still alive, because if we hadn't she could have gotten sepsis as he slowly died and rotted in her belly.
People who treat abortion as a black and white moral issue the way you appear to be doing have now banned it where I live, which means my wife and I cannot risk having more children, given our history of loss. (Of which the one I described above is only a small piece.)
Abortion is morally grey. There are few other ethics cases where there is such a direct conflict between the rights of an existing being and the rights of a potential being. The only reasonable way to handle that is to allow each individual to make their own moral judgement and choice.
This is some kind of strawman. I'm confident that people who are against human cell cluster torture are also against primate torture. Or at least make the mental calculus required to justify it.
It seems the universe in the form of humans was meant to contemplate itself.
I would just say its a whole lot of trouble to get humans to do something they aren't even doing!
As for the "snacks" ... :)
So the argument pretty much turns into "my feelings" vs. Occam's Razor.
For what it’s worth, the only empirical macroevolution we’ve done, from domestication, to Monte Carlo simulations, to genetic algorithms, to LLM training, is all goal directed.
Yes...though I'd say that the teleological folks have emotional reasons to judge an ever-so-specific deity (who they already believe in) to be a conveniently minimal hypothesis. Which is a good example of a usually-necessary heuristic - pushing complexity, costs, unknowns, and other unhappy things far enough away (in real or metaphorical space/time) that you don't have to worry about them now.
> FWIW, the only empirical...
All the budget requests for sextillions of organisms, simulated for billions of years, were rejected. So, unfortunately, some large corners had to be cut...
Our brains are not that different than other primates' brains. We do abhorrent things to other primates that __demonstrably__ have similar experiential qualia as humans, mostly for the benefit of our species. But somehow objectioners are losing their marbles over a human cell cluster that has no more than a few thousand constituent cells.
The computational ability of human brains is an unintentional happenstance of billions of years of random-walk evolution; there's no reason to believe that we can't make systems that are even more efficient with intentional design. If these organoids get us there, I'm all for them.