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Comment by usrbinbash | Hacker News Reader

> the many thorny ethical knots this involves

On the one hand, we have tiny, artifical lumps of vat-grown neurons, that lack any self-awareness, emotions or even basic pain reception (because, you know, you kinda need a whole sensory apparatus for this).

On the other hand, we have living, breathing, feeling beings with complex social and emotional lives, capable of experiencing joy, sadness, horror, panic, friendship and attachment. Oh, and they absolutely can feel pain. Also known as pigs, cows, chickens and other vertebrate farm animals.

Now, humanity kills about 80 billion such farm animals per year. [1]

So how do the "many thorny ethical knots" compare to that if I may ask?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_slaughter

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> Now, humanity kills about 80 billion such farm animals per year. [1]

Ostensibly, those animals are killed for sustenance, where lab intelligences will be created, poked , prodded, altered and killed merely for fun or curiosity. Even if we disagree on the ethics of eating meat, hopefully we at least agree that there's a meaningful difference there, especially since we don't know where the boundary of "basic pain reception", or indeed any kind of experience, truly lies.

Except eating meat is unnecessary and ultimately unsustainable for the planet.

So really people like me who eat meat are guilty two sins -- eating intelligent creatures that don't need to be eaten and destroying the planet by doing so.

also, don't underplay the utility of this kind of research, people don't just do it for funsies, they do it because it could change the world.

The research could help billions of future people avoid certain brain/mind diseases, and could lead to the sort of breakthroughs that will allow quadrillions of minds to live within the solar system or beyond.

Eating meat is just.... greed.

> killed for sustenance

With the many alternative food sources we have available to meet our needs for sustenance (which are also less wasteful and more climate-friendly) it is hard to argue that these animals die for anything but to keep up our eating habits or simply for the pleasure of eating them.

The big problem with this thinking is the assumption that change can happen overnight. Large complicated systems to not change overnight unless they are burning down and even in the smoking ruin, the incentive structure that lead to the previous outcome might still be there.

As sad as it may be, we don't live in a world where each and every human on earth today can go and eat a serving of tofu. There isn't enough soybean grown and distributed around the world for that to happen. Stop eating meat tomorrow and a huge portion of the world doesn't just eat soybean that doesn't yet exist, they starve, or they eat meat that currently exists and is produced by large systems that individuals are powerless to shape. Overtime we can strive for change, but to expect immediate action and blame selfish pleasure and not the complexity of reorienting the entire worlds food supply is a bit naive.

> unless they are burning down

Given that meat production accounts for >15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, this is literally what is happening.

> There isn't enough soybean grown and distributed around the world for that to happen.

Excuse me, where do you think all the calories we feed livestock comes from? Despite what greenwashing pictures on meat-packets try to tell people, we don't grow 80 Billion pieces of livestock anually by letting them graze peacefully on fresh green pastures in wide open plains.

Instead we waste truly vast areas of land growing maize, soybean and grain, aka. foodstuffs that are completely fit for human consumption, which then get sold as feedstock, to go into one of the most nonsensical wastes of resources in history. Just as an example of how absurd this is: The energy efficiency for beef production is 25:1, meaning you need 25 calories of feedstock, to make 1 calorie worth of beef. And again, these are 25 calories of things humans could eat.

For comparisons sake: The energy differential between LED and incandescant bulbs is merely 1:10. No one argues whether we should use LED or incadescant bulbs any more, but somehow for meat and it's much worse ratio this is still somehow up for discussion?

So yes, we do absolutely produce enough calories from growing plants alone, to feed every single person on this planet. In fact we could feed many more people, and have way less problems, if we didn't waste mountains of maize, soybeans, grain and other valueable foodstuffs, by force-feeding them to animals.

I don't think you'd be happy eating out of a bag of feed corn. they eat a little soybean for balancing the diet but they don't each much soybean as it affects their gut if they have too much. Still, that soybean has a long way to go before its a brick of tofu wrapped in plastic sitting on your grocery store shelf. There is a certain amount of manufacturing capacity that would need to be built out. You might not even want to put it where you have the existing feedlots and meatpacking industries because these are sited with the idea of moving livestock by rail from grazing lands to feed lots near marketplaces in mind.

> I don't think you'd be happy eating out of a bag of feed corn

I am however, more than happy to eat any number of products that contain corn in various other forms. Because, you know, "feed corn" is just, well, corn, and instead of feeding it to animals, we can give it to humans instead.

> Still, that soybean has a long way to go before its a brick of tofu wrapped in plastic sitting on your grocery store shelf.

That cow has a long way to go before its a bag of meat on a grocery shelf as well. And that way wasted ALOT more energy and resources than the way my Tofu block does.

You are not wrong about the energy equation. But the facts are still we have an industrialized food supply that depends in no small part of meat consumption. Replacing that with non meat alternatives is not always possible for certain things but also expensive to retool and reoutfit. Supply chains take a long time to establish.

> that depends in no small part of meat consumption.

No, it really doesn't. It's a conscious decision of society that we produce, and consume, a lot of meat.

As I have repeatedly demonstrated in this thread, a huge amount of the calories we put into the production of meat, come from human consumable foodstuffs. We have the production facilities to turn these grains and beans into flour, bread, tofu, canned beans, whatever. We do it every day, on an industrial scale.

We could do so any time to these feedstocks as well. The technology exists, the facilities exist, the infrastructure exists, the supply chain exists.

It cannot happen overnight, but it could happen in a few years. Already now for each gram of beef for example, you have to grow 8-10 grams of maize or feed corn to raise the animal. (Almost no animals are gras fed.) The same area used to grow that maize could be used to grow plants for humans directly instead of "refining" the plants into meat/beef/dairy as it is sometimes called.

Processes have to be adapted,for sure and that will take time. But that is not, I think, the limiting factor at the moment. The limiting factor is our appetite for animals.

A few years is also a rapid change to replace all the products on the market that are animal derived. They use the entire animal you know, not just the parts in the supermarket. Usually these analysis don't consider that they just consider the caloric benefit. Imagine telling cardiologists they can no longer source pig hearts for open heart surgery.

Study after study has demonstrated that people have issues with vegetarian diets, not just with limited food availability, but health issues and cost. Healthy vegetarian diets are still the domain of the economically and educationally privileged.

You can make an argument that we don't have to eat as many animals as we do, but you simply can't make the argument that we shouldn't eat animals at all.

> Study after study has demonstrated that people have issues with vegetarian diets

And what does "Study after Study" say about the overconsumption of meat so common especially in western societies these days?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26780279/

Feel free to browse through the "similar articles" section under the linked study.

> Healthy vegetarian diets are still the domain of the economically and educationally privileged.

For most people in the world, especially outside of comparatively rich western societies, meat is actually a costly alternative, and plant based foodstuffs are the norm.

> those animals are killed for sustenance

Even if we accepted that this somehow makes the ethical conundrum of killing beings that can feel all the pain, horror, fear, terror and dispair thus inflicted, despite having more than enough alternative food sources available to us, magically disappear...

...different studies indicate that western households waste ~1/5th of the food they buy. So, simplifying of course, this would mean that ~16 Billion creatures, who feel pain just as much as humans do, are killed every year ... just so we can throw their rotten carcasses in the garbage.

> hopefully we at least agree that there's a meaningful difference there

Oh, absolutely, only I guess not in the sense that you think we do.

Because these vat-grown lumps of neurons don't feel. They are not conscious. They don't experience pain. Even simple E.Coli bacteria grown on an Agar-Medium have more resemblance to life than they do, because the bacteria at least are beings fully capable of existing outside of a lab-provided growth medium.

So yes, there is a difference: Probing around in lab grown lumps is research, and killing billions of conscious beings so they can then rot in our garbage bins is morally indefensible.

> Because these vat-grown lumps of neurons don't feel. They are not conscious.

Being conscious is not a prerequisite for them feeling something as far as we know, and you simply don't know that it doesn't feel anything.

I agree that food waste is an issue that requires better education, as does nutrition in general. Then again, nutrition research has been abysmal until only very recently, so people have been getting confusing messages for decades now.

> and you simply don't know that it doesn't feel anything.

Yes, I do know that, because I know that pain reception requires nociceptors [1].

In fact all bodily sensory information requires a periphery of sensory neurons. The central nervous system itself, is simply incapable to collect sensory information on its own.

And our complex emotional lives are the result of a developmental process that involves pathway selection by usage patterns.

None of these things are present in a lump of cells in a growth medium.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociceptor

Note that The Time Machine explores the ethical knot of "humans eat other vertebrates" from one direction, while Animal Farm explores it from the other.

I mean on multiple levels it's basically like "what if one of those started to talk to us"

This is literally it. In fact I'd posit that when we start being able to easily translate animal communication we'll probably stop being able to stomach eating them.

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