[Veserv]

Do you believe that killing a pig for bad or sloppy neuroscience research that provides no useful data is worth it?

To use an extreme example, say I have a theory that the brain is an unnecessary organ. Can I go around removing pig brains in the name of “neuroscience research” and get a free pass?

Okay, now suppose I want to test if my new brain implant that I intend to attach with known acutely neurotoxic binding agent is safe for long term use. I then observe that the acutely neurotoxic binding agent causes acute brain damage like it said it would and thus my implant is unsafe for long term use. Do I get a free pass for that even though I killed an animal to learn something the manual already told me?

Okay, now suppose I want to test if implant A is safe for long term use. But when I go to do the surgery I insert implant B because I took the wrong implants out of the storehouse because I did not follow standard practice and go through my checklist as any competent doctor should. I then repeat this say 24 more times before realizing that I have inserted the wrong implants into around half of the test subjects. I then kill the animals when I realize my mistake because no useful data can be drawn due to my mistake. Do I get a free pass for “experiments” that even I acknowledge are worthless because I made a mistake because I ignored standard practice that has practices explicitly designed to cheaply and easily avoid the class of mistake I made?

Killing a pig for high-quality neuroscience research can be worth more than eating it. However, there are plenty of forms of “neuroscience research” that are objectively useless that confer less benefit than eating it or are even actively harmful and thus confer only harm. These forms of “neuroscience research” can still be unethical even if we, as a society, continue to eat meat.

[robotresearcher]

> Say I have a theory that the brain is an unnecessary organ. Can I go around removing pig brains in the name of “neuroscience research” and get a free pass?

Of course there are proposal review processes for research involving animals, that considers the potential benefits versus the harm done.

> However, there are plenty of forms of “neuroscience research” [involving animals] that are objectively useless

Says who?

You may disagree with the standards and decisions of review processes, but they are ubiquitous today.

[yreg]

> Do you believe that killing a pig for bad or sloppy neuroscience research that provides no useful data is worth it?

No, but Neuralink has proven results and proven useful applications. If you believe that they should publish more data or that there has been a specific misconduct then that is a different argument.

[Veserv]

Great, so you agree that there exist classes of neuroscience research and experiments that are “worse” than eating animals, so the fact that animals are eaten in bulk does not give a free pass to all classes of “neuroscience research”?

We actually need to evaluate the “neuroscience research” and processes to determine if it constitutes one of these classes?

If no, please explain how my first example is clearly morally superior to eating an animal.

If yes, then please answer the other two concrete hypotheticals I proposed and evaluate their practical and moral content.

I contend that such practices would be unethical and practically worthless, with the benefits being either practically zero or actively negative from engaging in such research practices. So, eating an animal would be morally superior to such bad research practices. Such practices would, furthermore, be strongly dominated by well-known, standard practices which are more ethical, practically useful, and cheaper; thus harm minimization and utility maximization both support the use of standard, known practices in preference.

I also contend that such deviation from standard practices would only be morally justified if you were intentionally attempting to evaluate the standard practices themselves, but that would require both a specific nuanced argument and would preclude such experiments from testing new innovations to avoid disqualifying confounding variables. As such, the proposed hypotheticals do not fit this criteria as they are attempts to “research” some other non-process factor. So you can only argue this point if you wish to argue that intentionally confounding process and research variables is good science.

[martinsnow]

Neuralink is being proven and it's on its way to market. There are so many people out there who will benefit from the technology.

Animal testing has existed for centuries and will continue to do so until we can fully sinulate a human being.