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eternal_neophyte comments on [Link] First almost fully-formed human [foetus] brain grown in lab, researchers claim - Less Wrong
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That's pure hand-waving.
Look: "I think this rock here is suffering. I can't prove it, but if you don't feel it at a visceral level then no experimental contrivance will clarify it for you"
I'm not claiming that rocks or artificially grown foetal brains are suffering. The people involved in this research claim they aren't - if the meaning of that claim is unclear the onus is on them to clarify it. Until such a time we are all at liberty to filter that claim through our own intuitively constructed concepts.
We are, of course, at liberty. However it seems to me you don't want them to satisfy their own definition -- that would be too easy -- you want them to satisfy your definition, but for that you should have an idea of what you want clarified and what criteria do you expect to be met. Demanding that they clarify something to the satisfaction of your "visceral level" is still hand-waving.
How could I say either way when they don't offer any definition to begin with? My original complaint was precisely that consciousness is not sufficiently well understood to allow anyone to be cavalier about these things in either direction.
The only one who has demanded that a concept be defined to his satisfaction here is you, when you explicitly requested a definition of suffering in terms of literal significance.
If you already have some idea of what the word "consciousness" means, you want to be reassured that the brain tissue in question is not conscious according to your idea.
I doubt you will let "them" define consciousness any way they wish. For example, I can say "X suffers iff X can communicate to me that it wants the current condition to stop". Will you be happy with that? Probably not.
More importantly, I want there to be a serious recognition of the ethical boundaries that are being pushed against by this kind of research due to the fact that neither I nor anyone else can yet offer any satisfactory theory of consciousness. That's the whole motivation behind my original comment, rather than the desire to advance a philosophical dogma, which seems to be what you want to impute to me.
You can't talk about ethical boundaries being pushed unless you place that ethical boundary somewhere first. Otherwise we're back to hand-waving: Can I say that because no one "can yet offer any satisfactory theory of consciousness', chewing on a salad is ethically problematic?
Basically, you can't be both worried and unhappy, and completely unspecific :-/
Is there any particular reason to believe that a salads might be capable of consciousness? No.
Is there any particular reason to believe that brains might be capable of consciousness? Yes - namely the fact that most brains insist on describing themselves as such. Does this imply brains are conscious if and only if they insist on describing themselves as such? No. No more than than a bird is only capable of flight when it's actually literally soaring in the air.
How can you tell without "any satisfactory theory of consciousness"?
The same way I don't need to understand aerodynamics to know that I have no reason to believe that turtles might be capable of flight. I've never seen a turtle do anything that sits in the neighbourhood of the notion of "flight" in the network of concepts in my head. This type of argument doesn't work against the putative consciousness of foetal brains, since we have good reason to believe that at least brains at a certain stage of development are in fact conscious. To argue that this means we can only have an ethical problem with running dubious experiments on brains at that stage of development is rather like arguing that since you've only ever seen white swans fly, the supposition that black swans might fly too is not justified as such.