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Comment by modzu | Hacker News Reader

i mean, they're dead. who cares.

now if the Smithsonian killed them for their brains...

Their family and descendants, to begin with.

And, when the tech advances and we can start to understand the brain better and start to get information from it regardless of its state, Its owner will care.

Ask the same question about AI training. "We're just scraping what's available on the internet, who cares?"

This is an extremely dangerous stance.

> And, when the tech advances and we can start to understand the brain better and start to get information from it regardless of its state, Its owner will care.

That’s never happening. But if it did—-mind reading of hundred year old dead brains—-what an incredible source of historical information they would have.

my initial reaction too, but I guess what they actually meant is that learning from the dead brains will be one of the factors that allow us to develop the functionality of reading the minds of the living.

Yes, it's a future looking comment. We should take lessons from today and prevent future problems around it.

List concrete dangers.

What?

GP said "this is extremely dangerous" and is being asked to give specific, concrete (as opposed to abstract or theoretical) examples of what those dangers might be.

I read the comment several times and "concrete" parsed as a noun each time. I think it was too early.

I know you don't care, but making people feel bad on purpose is bad.

We have no way to control how someone feels. As such we have no obligation to change how we act because someone says it will make them feel bad.

They aren't making people feel bad on purpose. Their purpose is to study the brains. It happens that to do that, a side effect is someone gets hurt feelings.

Why do you think the Smithsonian is doing this to make people feel bad? !

I don't think making people feel bad was the primary purpose, but I do think the people who collected these brains knew the families of the dead wouldn't like it, and did it anyway because they didn't care. That's what I mean by "on purpose".

I'm also referring to the people who did this 100 years ago. I don't have much of a problem with the Smithsonian of today based on the information in the article.

The problem with this is that anyone (or their relatives) can dislike anything. I don't like pesto, so I don't think anyone else should eat it because that would make me feel bad...

We have cultural values about respecting the dead and respecting bodily autonomy. If you asked me not to eat pesto at your relative's funeral, or not to use the corpse's hand to stir my pesto pot, I wouldn't, even though I know nobody would be harmed and it's just about your feelings.

If you asked me not to eat pesto on a normal day in your house, again I wouldn't, because that's a small sacrifice to make you feel better, and I value being a nice person. If you asked me not to do it in my own home when you aren't around, I would, because that crosses a boundary where doing what you ask is no longer worth sacrificing my own freedom.

In this particular case, the doctors and anthropologists want to research brains. They know that if they ask "may I harvest your relative's brain in order to prove its inferiority to the white race" the answer will be "no". Taking the brain anyway is therefore wrong - but does the utility of this research outweigh the moral issue of non-consent? No, it doesn't. There are some hypothetical scenarios where taking brains without consent would be worth it, maybe during a prion pandemic or something, but this is not one of them.

It's not like you'll never get consent - plenty of people are willing to happily donate their bodies for research, I probably would be if anyone asked.

-removed by author-

The concrete danger of taking brains without consent is that it upsets the family of the deceased, and the rights of bodily autonomy and respect for the deceased outweigh the rights of an unrelated person to have a specific body part in their collection.

A second danger in this particular case is that a brain may be used as evidence for a political program to restrict the rights of some population. It is totally legitimate to deny access to your body or your family's body if you don't want it to be used for this purpose. Scientists are human beings and not objective, and just calling something "research" does not magically make it objective. In this case, the research program was a political tool of no scientific value.

I'm sorry for my short reply before, I thought the article made both of these points very clear.

A couple of things coming into my mind:

    - Leaking of personal/corporate/state secrets.
    - Even more advanced, forced interrogation techniques.
    - Blackmailing (drug, extract, blackmail) on living persons.

This is bad enough, considering governments and three letter agencies will love to use this on high value targets.

Literally what are you talking about? This discussion is about donating the brains of deceased people.

Legally in some jurisdictions all corpses belong to the state.

And, when the tech advances and we can start to understand the brain better and start to get information from it regardless of its state, Its owner will care.

So you're saying there's a chance it's not too late to ask for their consent?

No, I mean, it's not too early to ask for consent before they die. We should start doing it.

When you're dead, your body is the property of your estate - your heirs. They may care.

False, though that’s a common belief. “There is a well-established general rule that when a human being dies, property in their body does not vest in anyone. Therefore, the simple answer to the headline question is that no one owns your body when you die (Williams v Williams (1882)). However, certain people are able to exercise rights over a body.

In Dobson v North Tyneside Health Authority [1996], the Court of Appeal concluded that personal representatives have a right to the custody and possession of the deceased’s body until its proper disposal.”

https://www.hcrlaw.com/blog/who-owns-your-body-after-you-die...

Right. (Probably in most states) nobody owns plain old dead bodies. However, Australian and English courts have held that people can own objects made with remains as long as skill was applied. Not sure if there's similar case law in the US. So there might be value in deciding who rightfully owns these specimens.

This discussion is a little tangential. The article is discussing the ethics, not legality, of how the samples were collected.

Well, OK, right to custody and possession. That still includes the right to control whether someone takes the brain out.

People who want to make a fuss, because they're incapable of making anything worthwhile like science or art...

Correct. This is why I recommend gathering body parts from Arlington cemetery.

You should go there to see all the people who's lives were cut short trying to actually do something. Not making pointless fusses about things for 100 years ago that affect no one alive today.

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