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Here are the details on the grisly deaths of Elon Musk’s Neuralink monkeys
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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There’s not much to debate or understand. Anyone can look at a primate suffering and see the wrongness there. People need years of education and training to the contrary in order to reach the opposite conclusion.
I find it illuminating that you opened up with “oh gee, what purity test” and ended with “if you eat meat you have no standing to care about animal rights”.
Instead of convoluting the discussion, why not come right out and say what you want to clearly and plainly?
Come on ... you know what I said is more nuanced that! You've got standing ... I'm talking to you about it!
And yea, I'm totally with one seeing "wrongness" in much of how humanity interacts with animals, whether they could personally do better or not.
Where we differ and maybe start talking past each other is that I think an article or incident like Neural link is a good opportunity to not just get sucked into some main stream media click baity outrage and instead think about the broader system and culture involved, where, as I've said, there's a real enough chance Musk and his company isn't especially evil but rather representative of a multiple industries.
The point about whether someone is regularly eating meat is that the meat industry is comparatively huge and something which forms a central and direct part of everyone's lives ... it's where the majority of our relationship with animal welfare begins and ends and it's the one that we can clearly think about, that we have personal stakes in and can easily investigate and do something about. Which means if you care about animal welfare, and don't want to only engage in click baity online outrage, it's the obvious place to start and have a conversation. Which, of course, isn't to take away from what may have transpired in Neuralink.
Other than all of that ... yea look, if you want to get upset about the monkeys but not even talk about the meat industry, then yea, you can have a point about the monkeys, but it'll be, IMO, a relatively easy one and it will run the risk of actually ignoring the medical/scientific progress that might maybe depending on your ethics justify at least the idea of the experiment.
I'm not rejecting it though, or the validity of your stance on it ... just trying to push for a better conversation.
It’s not engaging in online click baity outrage to recognize that the company developing the brain sepsis device in order to send ads into our dreams and monetize our ids is especially evil.
People are not seeing the usual animal cruelty victims in the primates described, but the environmental storytelling beats of every day after tomorrow video game, the foreshadowing of what will haunt the protagonist in a William Gibson novel and the inevitable end to every post apocalyptic television shows exploration of the question “did science go too far”.
The person enraged with a company developing the Bash Your Head Against the Floor implant is rarely provoked to ire because of their love of the animal subject of testing but because they are forced to ask the question “why?”
Even if people can’t explain it they know full well that this technology is intended to be used as mass media, radio, television and the internet before it.
We do not see ourselves in the monkey because we believe the monkey has the same rights as us, but because we know the monkey is only holding our seat until the train is ready to leave the station.
It’s evil. We don’t need nuanced discussion about it. No one is getting click baited into a rage. Rage and revulsion are the natural response to evil.