Did you actually read the Cambridge Declaration? It actually doesn’t say anything I have not already myself said. Perhaps you have been misled by its esoteric vocabulary, but no one is debating whether there are many animals that “experience affective states.” That just means they feel emotions. None of our debate here is about whether many animals feel emotions. Personal consciousness is not just “feelings.” Those two kinds of consciousness must not be conflated.

And if you have read the debate you are here commenting on, you should already know I am most definitely arguing against laws like Oregon’s Prop. 13. But if you mean to ask instead whether I think it nevertheless could become law, even if it’s unjustified, my answer is also no. It has so little popular support as to be certain never to be law. They couldn’t even get the 112,000 signatures needed to put it to a vote. In a state of over 4 million people, that’s as nailed as a coffin can get.

Meanwhile the entire EAT-Lancet report is TL;DR. Too many subjects and claims to vet; and there is no easy way to even read the full report without giving them personal information (I distrust anyone who won’t just publish this kind of report openly). So you will have to be more specific.

But if you have read it, then you might want to read my article, as I linked to in this debate you are commenting on, Meat Not Bad (and possibly also Is Society Going to Collapse in 20 Years?), in case that report simply repeats the false science I debunk there (I don’t know that it does, but this exercise, if you carry it out, should clue you in on how you might vet the EAT-Lancet report on your own, by applying the same critical approach; and it might also help you narrow down to a more specific question to ask me).

I want to know what do you think about The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness:

https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf

do you think that animal rights activists will achieve by this declaration giving animals the same rights as we humans have?

What do you think about Oregon’s IP 13 and IP 3:

https://congressionalsportsmen.org/the-media-room/news/proponents-of-oregons-initiative-petition-13-abandon-efforts

Will this ever go through and become a law in Oregon?

What do you think about EAT-Lancet?

https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/eat-lancet-commission-summary-report/

Broadly agreed. I would only say that perhaps there is a distinction between the kind of alt that we do now that is motivated by expediency, corporate needs, cost-cutting, etc. rather than animal welfare, and that perhaps if we put some amount of money (i.e. not moon-landing money but maybe some billions) into it we might find that there are alternatives. But it does make sense to me that, while animal welfare per se may not be a high priority for planners, that has never meant that we are at all happy with having to do messy, controversial, weird animal studies in the first place, and that the same tech that you can use to circumvent animal studies could be used to circumvent human studies, which do engage with stakeholders with real power and are messy, complicated and weird. The meat industry in particular has definitely put in work on animal substitutes and it’s a not-insignificant business, and they’re still nowhere near done even when it comes to making a vegan burger that has the taste and texture and culinary properties of a burger.

More importantly, this is a pathway for reform, not revolutionary change. A combination of better procedures, better review and better tech would help, but wouldn’t change the underlying dilemma. And we have to be realistic, always, about the capacity for enforcement anyways. After all, it is a huge priority that science be high-quality, and yet we have plenty of institutional problems going the other way! In fact, there is an argument to be made that doing things like fixing publication bias, improving peer review, promoting more replication tests and making success in that honored in the academy, etc. etc. would improve animal welfare more than even alt investment, as we would be spending less time having to ferret out crap AE results!

Actually, most pregnancies fail.

But that’s not relevant to the point.

A fetus is a hypothetical person in the same way a blueprint or a construction company is a hypothetical house: something does physically exist (a blueprint; tractors and managers); but it isn’t the thing in itself. Neither a construction company nor a blueprint is a house. Likewise a fetus is not a person (not even partially). Until (at least possibly) the third trimester, when enough machinery exists to start building a person, so (for all we know) that’s underway then. By a certain point, an incomplete person experiencing consciousness is still a person in the same way that by a certain point, an incomplete house you can shelter in is.

You have no obligations to hypothetical people (until they are not longer hypothetical). Those people don’t exist yet, so they have no interests (unless they are effectively certain to exist, but that then depends on some actual, not hypothetical, person’s decision to build them).

For the purposes of moral consideration there is no meaningful or relevant difference between a fetus and a sperm or egg. You have no obligation to the hypothetical children you “could” have—no matter whether there’s just a cell or an unfinished body sans cerebral cortex—until such time as you actually commit to having them (and thus, you have obligations to the future people others have committed to having, e.g. to leave the world in a better shape for them). Otherwise, until some actual person decides to proceed, a fetus and a cell are both just blueprints and construction companies; neither contains a person or even the ability to be generating one.

This is an ontological fact. So there is a real difference between a “hypothetical” cognitive future, and an actual cognitive future. Only actual cognitive machines can “have” the latter (as in, actually possess it: there is at least a partial, actual, existing person then, consciously present, who possesses a thing, a future). Hypothetical things cannot “have” futures (other than purely hypothetical ones). Because things that don’t exist can’t possess things.

Thus, when all you have is a blueprint or construction company, the decision whether to actually start and continue building has yet to be made, and there is no “person” existent who can make that decision—except the one whose womb is being used for the project. Once you have at least a person-in-progress (an actual cognitive machine with partial personal characteristics and active consciousness), then it exists, and thus it has interests (actual ones; not hypothetical ones). So it is then no longer the case that only one person is around to have an interest in what then happens.

Specifically concerning this statement:

“Therefore, before the third trimester, the cognitive future of a fetus is purely hypothetical, not actual. ”

Response: Given the very high success rate of most most pregnancies (including fetal development), I would have to take issue with the statement that the “future of a fetus is purely hypothetical”. I know what you are saying, that we can’t know for certain that any given fetus will reach full term, but the probability of that happening is so high that is can’t be discounted and assessed like it some some kind of crap shoot with some unknown or unpredictable odds of success.

So based on what we know about the rate of successful pregnancies, we can safely say that MOST abortions (of an otherwise healthy fetus) are in fact impacting the cognitive future of a fetus.

On a somewhat related note, I’m curious what you thing about how we as a society handle situations differently when a person or animal is in non-stop suffering, and the situation will not get better and possibly worse.

I don’t observe “us” (progressives like me) doing anything differently here. Progressive morality entails support for voluntary euthanasia. The only reason we don’t extend the “voluntary” part to animals is that they are incapable of it, so we have to make the call for them. Just as we do for people (e.g. the brain-dead) who likewise can’t make that call for themselves (and thus their legal guardians decide when and whether to terminate life support). But as soon as that capability exists, it takes priority.

Maybe you meant to ask why there are people who still oppose progressive morality. Since these are usually the same people who think being gay or smoking pot or being nonmonogamous is immoral, for example. Their morality is simply bogus. The rest of us have left them behind, moving on to rational, evidence-based moralities. If you want a historical-causal account of how bogus moralities historically developed, and what still politically empowers them, that would be off topic here. The present task is to determine what is morally true; not the historiography of human error.

“The Alt track is going to just make animal experimentation more useful, more humane and less frequent.” — I wouldn’t bank anything on the “less frequent,” as that has too many other inputs (e.g. research itself is increasing); at most it will improve quality (i.e. reduce the number of unfruitful or disastrous studies), which reduces harms.

“I do think there is a case to be made that at least some alt-pathways could be being researched more quickly if we made it a higher priority.” — I’m skeptical. It’s been thirty years with little progress despite enormous investment. Everyone thinks a moonshot will solve any problem. History does not bear that out. Getting to the moon was actually a lot simpler a project than people think (we knew everything we needed to do it, before we even started; the rest was just getting it done), compared to, say, reliably replicating an entire physiological and cognitive system.

All other Alt is inherently limited in what it can assist (at some point, you still always have to test things on an actual physiology), or else actually increases rather than reduces harm (e.g. kamikaze human experimentation is not an improvement over animal experimentation but far worse; Paul and I disagree on this because he thinks all animal harm is equal to human, and I do not—not even close).

I don’t object to capitalists who want to invest more in this. But IMO, we have far more pressing priorities in the relative scale of harms to blow our wad on (e.g. if we are going to moonshot something, I’d rather it be climate management; which, needless to say, would even benefit animals vastly more than physiology sims).

“And artificial organs or cell lines or what not are likely some distance away. But better computer models?” — We are actually far more advanced on the former than the latter. Artificial biology is showing substantive progress (not entire physiologies, but building single organs for transplant, for example, should arrive within a decade or two). By comparison, physiology sims are primitive at best. We are nowhere near what we need on that. We don’t even know what we are supposed to be replicating. That’s why we still have to do live studies.

I don’t see us being able to sim that reliably enough to eliminate live trials (and as long as we need human trials, we will need animal trials as a quality amplifier on the former) for at least fifty if not a hundred years, given the pace and rate of development seen so far. Indeed, we are more likely to achieve general AI much sooner than physiology sims; because true AI is at least achievable on general principles, or on pared down minima (the bare minimum machinery needed to realize it, e.g. when emulating brains, we won’t need to emulate literally “everything” in a brain, much less all the way down to selective DNA methylation in every single neuron), whereas replicating an entire animal or human physiological and cognitive system is vastly more challenging and complex (indeed, likely the most difficult thing the human race will ever do).

“Working on better observational approaches? Telemetric devices? Some innovative human studies? I think these could see greater use.” — These have too limited a use to ever replace live trials, though. The purpose of live trials is to catch things we didn’t think of. Therefore, by definition, tests that require already having thought of something, won’t help much. I’m all for using them when they do help. But to be honest, I haven’t seen any evidence presented here that we are substantially “neglecting” any of these things (much less, so much that we could radically alter the way we are doing science); but insofar as we are, that falls under the “reform” column of advocacy, not the “abolition” column.

“I think the most plausible scenario for alt will be to make sure that our animal experiments have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio which will reduce AE only by virtue of preventing redundant or failed experiments.” — I agree. Insofar as we can do that, we should do that. I just wouldn’t be too optimistic as to how much we actually can. Tons of people have been trying for decades, yet progress remains slow. I doubt more investment will help much. It’s not like corporations and institutions don’t already have ample incentive to master this tech (anything able to sim an entire physiology reliably would have countless other applications of immense value).

Just look to the alt meat industry for an analogy. Tons expended. Decades of work. Lots of hype. No sign of being anywhere near success. If we can’t even make a usable fake hamburger, we won’t be making a useful physiosim anytime soon. I doubt we will see one in our lifetime.

Since we will just double the number of things we study after we halve the number of animals needed per study, Alt will not likely reduce the number of animals experimented on. I think it’s worthwhile anyway (improved efficiency both reduces net harm and better leverages our material resources). But one should have a realistic idea of the outcome.

That I “put stake in the value of one’s cognitive future” is correct. The entire thing that is of value, is the valuing engine, the thing that creates value and its comprehension. That is the only thing that can have value in itself; everything else only has value by virtue of a valuing engine valuing it.

A fetus does not have one of those. Until the third trimester, when indeed my position is that elective abortion should then be illegal (the very same position taken by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade; non-elective abortion at that point, however, is self-defense and therefore appropriate, which is also the position of the Supreme Court, with whose analysis I fully concur).

A potential house is not a house. But a house under construction, is. A body is not a cognitive instrument. But a brain, is. And before the third trimester of pregnancy, a fetus has the cognitive construct of an animal, not a human (and in the first trimester, hardly even that). It therefore has the same status.

Therefore, before the third trimester, the cognitive future of a fetus is purely hypothetical, not actual. That future therefore only has value to the mother carrying it (or not), and thus it is up to her whether to pursue it. Because the fetus itself cannot at that time have values, or value anything. Whereas by the third trimester, it possibly could (it has the machinery to construct cognitive desires and begin building itself into a person, rather than just a body without one). Then it’s a house under construction—not just the construction company standing by to build it (which is all a body by itself is).

“Yet babies already have a cognition exceeding “animals,” and have a substantially greater cognitive future besides.”

-and-

“Of course such people (adult disabled or handicapped adults in vegetative states) have cognitive futures worth accounting.”

Based on these comments Dr. Carrier you seem seem to put stake in the value of one’s cognitive future.

Having said that couldn’t an anti-abortionist take your position as a strong argument for why we should value life at conception, given that such forms of life undeniably have a “cognitive future worth accounting”?

As I said before, I think the irony of the conversation is that the alt track is going to just make animal experimentation more useful, more humane and less frequent.

I do think there is a case to be made that at least some alt-pathways could be being researched more quickly if we made it a higher priority. Obviously if we had some kind of space program-esque investment to make into technology we would pick tech to solve climate change and sustainability concerns, which are a matter of human and animal welfare. And artificial organs or cell lines or what not are likely some distance away. But better computer models? Working on better observational approaches? Telemetric devices? Some innovative human studies? I think these could see greater use.

But your citations make a very strong case that confirms what I suspected would be the case: There are strong a priori reasons to suspect that AE will only be replaced with far greater tech than we currently have. Even if we imagine an incredibly good evolutionary algorithm, it can only put out the answers we feed it to start. Deep variable analysis will help because programs are getting to the point that they can identify possible connections humans never will, but even then you have to check. Again, the irony is that this will likely lead to people going to IRBs saying “My evo algorithm gave me multiple plausible and competing results based off of factors that are apparently chaotic and I can’t figure out which is why if I can’t have actual subjects, and it’d be unethical to subject humans to a fishing expedition”. In other words, I think the most plausible scenario for alt will be to make sure that our animal experiments have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio which will reduce AE only by virtue of preventing redundant or failed experiments. And the fact that you can use one group of mice for test subjects across their lifespan, in a way you can’t for humans, means that even if your utilitarian calculus counts animals as identical to humans, the ease of working with animals means you are experimenting on a net-smaller group of organisms for better data.

I’ll be curious if Dr. Bali has any good citations that suggest that a broad set of innovative approaches are sufficient.