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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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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.
You don't need to know the underlying mechanics, but you do need to know what flight is.
You're saying we don't even know what consciousness is.
No one is arguing that. I am saying that if you claim to have a problem, you have to be more specific about what your problem is and what might convince you that it is not a problem.
"Prove to me something I don't know what" is not a useful attitude.
Not in the least. I know what consciousness is because I am a consciousness. The need for a theory of consciousness is necessary to tie the concept to the material world, so that you can make statements like "a rock cannot be conscious, in principle".
What might convince me is a satisfactory theory of consciousness. Do I have to provide a full specification of what would be "satisfactory" just to recognize an ethical problem? If so there is hardly anything about which I could raise an ethical concern, since I'd perpetually be working on epistemic aesthetics until all necessary puzzles are solved. This is just in fact not how anyone operates. We proceed with vague concepts, heuristic criteria for satisfactoriness, incomplete theories, etc. To say that this should be disallowed unless you can unfold your theory's logical substructure in a kind of Principia Ethica is waaay more useless than interpreting ideas through partial theories.
Not "full", but some, yes. Otherwise anyone can squint at anything and say "I think there is an ethical problem here. I can't quite put my finger on it, but my gut feeling ("visceral level") is that there is" -- and there is no adequate response to that.