Layman question. Is it to be assumed that doing what the article suggests between human and pig, is much more difficult if trying to merge a human and a spider?
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Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab
231–240 of 250 posts
Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many humans did I kill after jerking off?
0 but you killed some sex cells. Really dissappointed at the level of flippant and useless commentary in this thread. HN is inching closer to a tech oriented reddit every day.
I was serious. Mangling these cells packs is the same as jerking off. No human was killed, ever.
Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a contradiction if you believe experiments on human embryos should also be deemed ethical. In formal logical, that means it's not a contradiction, unless you've already ruled out that premise.
Yes. So the point of my comment was to illustrate that either they haven't thought their position through very well, or they're being disingenuous in their claimed intent to follow "all the ethical, legal, and social guidelines in place". If they want to start rocking the ethical boat, it's at best a lie of omission. Generally, I think bioethicists will look askance at attempts to skirt current guidelines around expe…
That's fair but I don't think it's quite disingenuous to follow the letter of the law, and the spirit of what the person thinks the law should be.
Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you finish reading the article? > After 10 days, there were 103 of these chimeric embryos remaining, but by day 19 only three still survived. After that, the embryos were terminated before they developed any further. Clusters of cells can't be 'tortured in a lab,' there are plenty of legitimate problems in the world to be outraged about but this really isn't one of them.
>Clusters of cells can't be 'tortured in a lab,' There is actually no way to know whether this is true. About all you can justifiably say is something like, "if it turns out that clusters of cells can experience suffering, well... we are already probably causing suffering anyway all the time to chickens and cows and who knows to what else, so it would not really be much of a change". It is tempting to say that someth…
I mean you obviously can't prove a negative, but it stands to reason that a biochemical automaton is no more capable of 'suffering' than a wristwatch. Suffering, as humans define it, is really only possible with consciousness.
Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bee and wasp foragers give each other directions to food sources every day - not usually by pheromonic recruitment, although a few species including V. mandarinia do use that method, but by communicating . As far as we know, they don't have symbolic language or anything like the same level of abstraction we do, which is reasonable when our brains outsize theirs by eight orders of magnitude, but that doesn't stop them…
Human language and animal language also differ in that people use grammars which recurse which shows a sense of abstraction (as you stated) and also objectivity. Do you see a narrow difference between human output and animal output? Would you consider that difference somehow not "useful"? I think the bird and bee examples do not provide a compelling sense of language in the same way human talking does because animal…
You see a difference of kind where I see one merely of degree, and your confidence in the sufficient extent of knowledge of nonhuman language and communication, to draw such clear delineations as you do, strikes me as unwarranted. It is a relatively recent innovation in modern understanding even to recognize that any animals beyond our own species have language; where come you by this idea that we know enough about how nonhuman language works to even attempt so broad a conclusion? - or, for that matter, even enough about how human language works? Anyone who's ever tried to explain a complex idea to someone and have them comprehend it, or tried to become a polyglot beyond the age of about ten, should have a better sense of our own limitations than you evince here.
Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. So the point of my comment was to illustrate that either they haven't thought their position through very well, or they're being disingenuous in their claimed intent to follow "all the ethical, legal, and social guidelines in place". If they want to start rocking the ethical boat, it's at best a lie of omission. Generally, I think bioethicists will look askance at attempts to skirt current guidelines around expe…
That's fair but I don't think it's quite disingenuous to follow the letter of the law, and the spirit of what the person thinks the law should be.
To me the disingenuous part would be claiming they’re going to follow the prevailing ethical guidelines (paraphrased) when in fact they disagree with those guidelines and have essentially hatched this whole monkey/human hybrid scheme to sidestep them. (hypothetically)
I’m not necessarily attaching a value judgement to this. I’m just pointing out that their public position is either poorly thought out or not entirely honest.
Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I barely knew Alex Jones existed before he was starting to get censored from all kinds of platforms. What was previously just a blip on the radar, censorship turned into a mainstream talking point.
Agreed, that's the only reason I've heard of him either.
You're both lucky. He's been around a while, and had explosively grown in prominence before deplatforming.
What has been challenging, as an adult growing up into the internet is seeing younger kids exposed to polished and talented psychopaths. These people are very, very good at exploiting social systems and have no qualms about leveraging social norms for their personal benefit. This goes well beyond partisan media. I'm sure this will all sort out someday, but it usually takes years to develop resistance to the sort of manipulation techniques they employee to leverage standard weaknesses that all people have, and the internet has given them massive leverage. People are now exposed to this well before their cognitive development is complete. It is a lot to ask of kids to be able to develop defense mechanisms to military grade propaganda while their prefrontal cortex is still a work in progress.
Anyway, Alex Jones is bad, and while I don't care for cancel culture like I said earlier, I will worry about that after the many other more pressing problems facing life on Earth are in a stabler place.
Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, on day 19 three of them are clusters of cells, how about day 280? How about year 5? I think the argument is that a majority of people would find it unethical to continue to develop viable embryos, and even more unethical to conduct research on them were they to mature.
What if we gave a dog a human brain? What if we gave a robot a human consciousness? Just offering some more scenarios that didn't happen.
If you want to know what happens go read "Heart of a dog" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_a_Dog
Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author isn't dismissing the ethical issues. He is saying calling it "unnatural" in and of itself isn't grounds for making such a claim, as the world is filled with unnatural yet ethical things. In fact, he goes on for a few paragraphs touching on these more substantive issues.
The word unnatural has more connotations than simply "artificial", though. That's clearly the meaning here.
"Clearly" to you, but not at all to me. The fact that he brings up unnaturalness in one sentence and then spends the following few paragraph discussing actual ethical issues tells me he isn't dismissing ethical issues.
Saying "clearly" is not offering any counter argument; it is just an assertion.
Re: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab
#240Do you want Orcs? Because this is how you get Orcs.