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In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

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Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#51

Post by BorisTheBrave »

foobar_ wrote: post #47
hobofan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, those techniques are what we are moving towards and we are slowly getting there, but for the time being they can't be universally applied.

You do understand you are just defending big pharma and cosmetics. I really doubt any new ground breaking discovery has come from animal testing.

I've never seen a more text book example of changing the subject when you don't have a real answer.

sk0g and hobofan point out a key benefit of animal testing, explain why there is no alternative at present, and rather than addressing that or acknowleding the point, you respond with non-sequiturs.

Try to learn to separate what you want to be true "animal testing is pointless" vs what is actually true "animal testing has benefits that cannot be sensibly found any other way". Then we can productively move towards eliminating animal testing. But if you won't even listen to others points, how do you hope to convince them of anything?

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#52

Post by knowmylimits »

bedobi wrote: post #6

Yeah, no. Programs and algorithms can only encode models (which are themselves imperfect) of what we already know. There's countless things we know that we don't know, and yet more that we don't know that we don't know. As bad as animal (and human) studies and trials can be, the beauty of them is we don't really have to know how or why things work, we can just do the thing and if the results are good, we have a new t…

ML models sometimes cannot be explained by humans and contains information we do not know. But they can be contained in a program or algo.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#53

Post by bserge »

causality0 wrote: post #18

This is less of a "we will replace natural meat with lab-grown meat" claim and more of a "we will eventually be able to travel to the moon using only a megajoule of energy" claim. It would take a vast change in our basic understanding of physics to effect such an innovation. The crux of the matter is that mouse bodies don't simulate mouse bodies, they are mouse bodies. The idea you could have something the size of a…

It's absolutely amazing to me how efficient and powerful brains are. Just the simple action of say, moving from one side of a yard to another involves realtime sensor information, motor control and feedback, threat assessment and decision making, previous experience recall and more. In mere miliseconds even in mice.

It gets insanely more complicated for humans. If you decide to drill a hole in a piece of wood, your brain will process a ridiculous amount of information just for that single purpose, plus it's always running primitive functions like any other animal. Realtime.

I don't see any computer doing that anytime soon.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#54

Post by hobofan »

foobar_ wrote: post #47
hobofan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, those techniques are what we are moving towards and we are slowly getting there, but for the time being they can't be universally applied.

You do understand you are just defending big pharma and cosmetics. I really doubt any new ground breaking discovery has come from animal testing.

Animal testing is all over biochemistry and biology, is not just used for pharmaceutical and cosmetics testing. Many ground braking discoveries have been (and are still being made) via animal testing. There are whole subdisciplines that are based around animal testing like developmental or behavioural biology.

Though you can avoid it if you really want to, if you study biochemistry, you will learn how to do animal testing and are taught about all the ethics involved, how to do the testing in the most humane way, and how to avoid (or minimize) doing it in the first place if possible.

I've been going through the list of recent Nobel Prizes and the research for these involved animal testing: Nobel Prize for medicine 2018 (mice), 2017 (flys), 2014 (rats), 2012 (frogs, mice). Older research made before we had good tools to work with cell cultures, etc. will probably skew even more towards animal testing.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#55

Post by chr1 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #19
bedobi wrote: post #6

Yeah, no. Programs and algorithms can only encode models (which are themselves imperfect) of what we already know. There's countless things we know that we don't know, and yet more that we don't know that we don't know. As bad as animal (and human) studies and trials can be, the beauty of them is we don't really have to know how or why things work, we can just do the thing and if the results are good, we have a new t…

I would argue we can't even model those things. Non-linear, dynamic systems are not predictable beyond a certain point even if you have a perfect model. Uncertainty with models of dynamic systems like biological ones, increases exponentially as a function of time. And they are highly sensitive to initial conditions, so if your input is off from reality by even the tiniest amount, reality will veer off dramatically fr…

While individual trajectories of non-linear systems are not predictable, they all end up on an attractor and usually all we are interested in, is the attractor.

That is when performing a test on a mouse we are not measuring what a particular mouse would do, but what the mice do on average. So as long as model behaves like a mouse it can be useful, even though it would not behave like any particular mouse.

Also it's important to remember that the question is not about all or nothing, when we get a model most likely instead of 100 experiments on real mice we will be doing millions on virtual mice, and then 10 on real mice to verify the results.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#57

Post by chr1 »

cellis wrote: post #20

Who here has watched as much Black Mirror/Westworld as I have and know how this ends? My question is, if a robot is engineered well enough to replicate the "real" thing, then when you test on it, aren't you just shifting the torture from "living" to another thing yet to be granted the rights of the living? If you answer "no", then you have to admit that the model is incomplete and it does not in fact feel pain and is…

If you torture someone then use a time machine to restore him to the initial state, did you do anything bad?

You can't do this to anyone real but you can easily save and then restore the state of the simulation at any point.

Torturing someone in a simulation is not any different than imagining someone being tortured, or performing lots of arithmetic operations.

So the only logical thing is to admit that torturing/killing/hunting a species to extinction is bad not because of pain, but because of stealing computational resources belonging to someone else/some other sophisticated computational process.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#58

Post by wizzwizz4 »

chr1 wrote: post #57
cellis wrote: post #20

Who here has watched as much Black Mirror/Westworld as I have and know how this ends? My question is, if a robot is engineered well enough to replicate the "real" thing, then when you test on it, aren't you just shifting the torture from "living" to another thing yet to be granted the rights of the living? If you answer "no", then you have to admit that the model is incomplete and it does not in fact feel pain and is…

If you torture someone then use a time machine to restore him to the initial state, did you do anything bad? You can't do this to anyone real but you can easily save and then restore the state of the simulation at any point. Torturing someone in a simulation is not any different than imagining someone being tortured, or performing lots of arithmetic operations. So the only logical thing is to admit that torturing/kil…

> Torturing someone in a simulation is not any different than imagining someone being tortured,

Isn't it? Our imaginations are predictive, not simulative.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#59

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dTal wrote: post #34
ars wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask the reverse question - if the Robot version of a mouse is sufficiently similar to a mouse, maybe the mouse also doesn't actually feel pain, and is really a kind of biological robot. Maybe so are you. Dualism holds that living entities are special, and can never be replicated artificially. So your question can actually be turned into dualism vs monism (which is not a question with a settled answer).

This comment doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the existence of a robot copy imply a lack of pain? How can you argue that whether humans feel pain is an unsolved question? Shall we experiment on you instead?

Many philosophers are confused. Free will is a solved problem (we have free will regardless of the metaphysical premise, unless you're using a weird definition of free will, and even I can prove it for any given metaphysical premise), yet they're still working on it.

If somebody links "free will" to "determinism", they're very confused about what free will is.

There are a lot of philosophers doing genuinely useful work, but so much of the field is pre-occupied with trivial (and non-trivial) variations of the "if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?" koan.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#60

Post by ausbah »

chrisco255 wrote: post #49
stewbrew wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are companies who make money by wasting time like that. I'm no expert in this field but from what I gather sometimes Mickey Mouse Models can help too. Economics is built on such models.

The GDP of an economy can be described in 5 variables. The non-linear dynamic processes like what occurs at the cellular level and at the organism level in a biological system, cannot be modeled with any degree of certainty. The complex chemical interactions of medicines with complex organisms like mice cannot be modeled with any degree of certainty, neither in the short term nor the long term. Uncertainty is an expo…

domain bias much?
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