On purely practical grounds it also might not work. The brain is part of the system and results may well be misleading anyway. To get back to the philosophy the hubris involved in thinking that they can produce something that will include all the right bits to give them the right answer.
I suspect so too. I also suspect that if confronted by the fact that animal testing *requires* a subject capable of suffering, the people doing it would still not pause to wonder whether a wider ethical lens is needed on this practice than just “does it hurt”
Researchers are using organoids to great advantage. At one institution, the brain cells from a young person who died from glioblastoma have been used to produce brain organoids. With these organoids, medications are being test directly for their efficacy. The testing results are showing not only which approaches may be effective in stopping the tumor formation, they also are showing just how ineffective the mouse and rat brain models. I consider this to be a huge step forward for medicine. There will be much more of this to come. Eventually, maybe, we will be able to grow whole new organs for transplant from the recipient's own cells. Imagine a liver transplant, in which the transplanted liver, is "your own" or new a heart valve that is not mechanical...I could go on, but this makes my point. What would Aquinas and and Aristotle think of this? We cannot know, but my guess is they would be amazed and impressed.
I'm inclined to agree with you, and I wonder if the problem is actually one of attitude. If we do these things carefully, with humility and gratitude, many people can be helped immensely. If we do these things with hubris and arrogance and a Tower of Babel mentality, we get mutilating transgender surgeries and the Covid pandemic.
This comment prompted my realization that I have no particularly strong feelings about the purpose of a brain cell in isolation, and that's already putting a wrench in my extremely rudimentary understanding of the Aristotelian causes. Despite knowing intellectually that the telos of a brain cell (or eidos...? I have a hard time distinguishing the nature of a thing from its ultimate purpose) "should" be to contribute to the function of a single healthy brain, I don't feel any particular way about turning that brain cell toward a completely different end--such as the production of laboratory brain organoids.
I can't strongly identify with the idea of a single cell having a true nature and purpose, unlike with a chicken. My best guess is that this is because the chicken is known to me on an experiential level; the cell is an abstraction. I'm sentimental about the chicken, but not about the cell.
I think cells are generally abstracted until they do something to hurt us, at which point it's easy to feel "ick" about their betrayal of our bodies. But should we consider a carcinoma to be a normal cell with a corrupted nature, which is failing to achieve its correct purpose of ensuring our health? Or is a cancerous cell its own distinct thing, whose purpose is to perpetuate itself at any cost, and which will be existing in accordance with its nature if allowed to do so?
The HeLa cell strain killed the woman that created it, but has since been used to the ends of saving thousands of lives. Was the "purpose" of a HeLa cell to eventually be extinguished along with Henrietta Lacks herself? Did scientific intervention divert HeLa from that purpose by keeping the strain artificially alive? Or did HeLa always secretly have a telos aiming in the direction of immortality, which it was uniquely able to achieve in the circumstances of the 20th century?
Can this line of inquiry be applied on a macro-scale and carried over to humans? Is death always our telos, or do we have a higher purpose which might finally be achievable under modern technological and social circumstances? Now we're nodding back in the direction of transhumanism, which most of Mary's body of work argues against (and does so well, I should say).
These are earnest questions, not attempts to pick apart the philosophical framework. I'm fascinated by the ideas of formal and final cause, but I also don't understand how we can ever know what either of those things are. No wonder modern thinkers stick to the material and efficient causes, which at least seem possible to identify. Left brain go brrrrrr
Why would you guess that they would be amazed and impressed? Because you are? C'mon man, you can just argue that they were wrong. You don't need to try to recruit them for whatever this is while ignoring everything they actually had to say for themselves.
I find your Thomist direction extremely intriguing and fruitful. But still, what about hunting, farming and indeed exploiting nature since forever? The telos of a farm chicken or its wild cousin is probably the same and it’s being consumed by a predator higher in the food chain. Also one can argue from an anthropocentric perspective whatever serves our telos as humans constitutes the telos of the exploited resources.
In Britain, one vector for this argument is fox-hunting. I've long wondered why people who feel disgust at this practice seem fine with (for example) factory farming. My tentative thesis is that hunting implies a continuity between man and animal, whereas technologically ordered practices such as vivisection or battery farming presuppose our absolute distinction from them. I think these are fundamentally different epistemological stances in relation to other living things, one of which holds space for participation in animality (you'll often hear hunters talk about this, often quite reverently) while the other forecloses it of necessity. I realise this is a slightly different point to the one you're making but it's important to grasp that the difference isn't just in the practice but the mentality structuring it.
"the difference isn't just in the practice but the mentality structuring it" That's also true, but at any rate, there's a lot of room to decide what constitutes eidos and telos of a chicken, but the important point that you're making is that the anti-thomist framework won't even allow to think in these terms. Which makes it inherently inconsistent ( "Space is amazing")
As an aside while I have never hunted to hounds, we’ve lost enough hens to the fox for me to consider this an only lightly ritualised aspect of the great circle of life
Yeah, I'm down with pan-consciousness or whatnot, but the idea that *we* know what forms go where, so to speak, is a hubris.
This argument by the OP seems to be along the lines of "what is 'natural' and what isn't?", or "what is 'native' and what isn't?", which are basically arbitrary, right?
We can pick some stuff, and make it less so, but unless you are saying you are God and can speak for Existence... our version of how stuff "should" be is just our own version, as it were. (I suspect we cannot use logic alone to do the kinds of things we want to, but I digress.)
Logic is a tool that one can apply to a postmodernist relativist framework (where indeed no one can tell anything with any certainty) or one can use or at least explore Thomist /Aristotelian framework which could suddenly allow us to confirm our intuitions like sex is real and that the norm exists, and that some things are conducive for human flourishing and som( like relativism) are decidedly not
I mean, it all boils down to set theory— which has some interesting aspects, to put it mildly!
At least if you're talking about "reality".
If you're talking about models we can use, I'm with you— there are tons of great ones!
How great they are seems to depend on context and whatnot (as most things tend to).
But maybe that's the argument, that we've found models that work without context?
Just always true, with no truths that cannot be proven, nor falsities [is that a word?] which cannot be falsified? [Ok, I think I'm doing the inflammable thing now.]
Hopefully you catch my drift! Like, what matters is that you have people that love you, for instance, if we're talking about the sexes of those who raise you.
If we're talking about making babies, it's more complicated when the sexes don't jive, but that's no excuse to try to shame—or worse, pass laws against—what some might call (generally incorrectly contextually) unnatural.
That would be using the incorrect criteria for assigning it to that "set", if you will, from most people’s viewpoints. (Versus somehow objective.)
If we are talking about an environment of hate being detrimental, yeah, that's not great for growth. Like all things, it builds character, but we don't need to force any character-building, heh! That happens—if you'll forgive the repetition—naturally. =]
I wish not to make anyone unmoored. To that point, I find the argument put forth against relativism to amount to the argument that goes something like: "atheists cannot be moral if they do not believe in a God". (Not sure if it's usually singular or not, but that matters little for this reference.)
You can take anything to an extreme to make it silly, and relativism is no different (in fact, it's sort of similar to lots of— I jest! =]).
I love that we can be certain about things. I am fairly certain that there is an element of our own—what we call free will—to our very incorporation. That it's perfectly possible we party like crazy together on some other plane of existence and are like "let's do the thing!" or whatever, and *zoop!* in we pop, becoming a mix both fleeting (as in ethereal) and final (as in forever). But who knows! There's lots of fun possibilities. If we're all some part of God, then we all *do* get to speak for existence (even if that sounds pretty complicated/contradictory mechanistically). We certainly have the option to choose to stop at any point— well, *theoretically* certainly, at least. Not looking to test that one out unless I have to, you know? So perhaps not much of a choice, but still.
Since I like to think "everything happens for a reason" (only that reason is us deciding stuff, versus not having a choice) I generally prefer things as they are. Note that this does not mean unchanging, but more along the lines of Thomas &co., or Socrates/Plato with Forms, or Taoism, etc., so there is some common ground. But I believe our "true shape" or whatnot is between us and the Universe, or us and the Lord, if you prefer, as individuals, versus being up to some subset of us, or a specific philosophy per se. Which amounts to us having to hash a bunch of stuff out amongst ourselves, regardless.
I don't often find much reason to mention Rick and Morty here on Substack, but this reminded me of the episode "That's Amorte", which is a surreal send-up of the cultural consequences of following this logic to its obvious conclusion, including the grotesque imagery of the brainless organ-sack.
Aristotle had extremely primitive ideas about matter: he rejected atomism, he endorsed plenism (the theory that matter fills all of space) and rejected vacuums, and he endorsed the theory of the four elements (earth, water, air and fire). For Aristotle matter was just undifferentiated material all the way down, with none of the molecular, atomic, and subatomic structure and dynamics modern physics has identified.
He compensated for the poverty of his physics with extravagant metaphysics. His ideas should be of historical interest only, except that the Catholic Church won't let go.
The things we do in the name of medicine and having longer lives... A lot of our medical practice is to alleviate pain. But a lot of that pain comes from unnaturally extending our lives.
Our telos is to die. Rather than venturing into new ways of painfully extending our lives, we should deal with how we end our lives. In that line of thought, it would be more sensible to legalize euthanasia rather than Frankenstein our way---with organ sacks---into living more years.
The conclusion here is that pain is more profitable than human nature.
The pursuit of longevity, and even grosser, of preserving youth through cosmetic surgery, is the emblem of our times. No afterlife, no consequences for your actions on this earth, just the lust to preserve your existence as long as possible while continuing to exploit passions ordered to reproduction.
God is not mocked, nor is Nature. Once we have passed our childbearing years the rest is meant to be downhill, hopefully acquiring some wisdom in the process and being able to help out the younger ones. I should feel sorry for people petrified by the prospect of it all ending, but I find their greedy grasping for youth disgusting and puerile.
We have no telos except that which is created by our consciousness, as emergent property of our brain, and the idea that there is some telos that exists outside of us is the lowest form of superstition imaginable.
Here's a passage from Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2004) worth quoting at length. Note Jimmy's inability to articulate the "ick" factor persuasively. Here Crake (super genius scientist/innovator) takes his friend Jimmy on a tour of his company's most recent creations:
"This is the latest," said Crake.
What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.
"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit."
"But there aren't any heads," said Jimmy. He grasped the concept-- he'd grown up with sus multiorganifer, after all-- but this thing was going too far. At least the pigoons of his childhood hadn't lacked heads.
"That's the head in the middle," said the woman. "There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those."
"This is horrible," said Jimmy. The thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein tuber.
"Picture a sea-anemone body plan," said Crake. "That helps."
"But what's it thinking?" said Jimmy.
The woman gave her jocular woodpecker yodel, and explained that they'd removed all the brain functions that had nothing to do with digestion, assimilation, and growth.
"It's sort of like a chicken hookworm," said Crake.
"No need for added growth hormones," said the woman, "the high growth rate's built in. You get chicken breasts in two weeks-- that's a three-week improvement on the most efficient low-light, high-density chicken farming operation so far devised. And the animal-welfare freaks won't be able to say a word, because this thing feels no pain."
Another reductionist approach to ethics, another reduction of our humanity.
In the case of utilitarianism—the good is "just" the pleasure/pain calculus—this is of course old news. It has NEVER escaped the objection that it produces horrors.
Ad 1) Google the work of dr.Michael Levin and have your mind blown away. The potential of his research for doing good and ont the other hand, another level of monstrosities, is mind boggling.
I had to chuckle when I read this sentence: "Any sort of life principle or cosmic imperative reintroduces into science the dreaded t-word: teleology." It's in Paul Davies' book Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life, page 233. After some history of the rejection of teleology by scientists, he goes on to observe "Most theoretical physicists are Platonists in the way they conceptualize the laws of physics as precise mathematical relationships possessing a real, independent existence that nevertheless transcends the physical universe" (page 236). It's a stretch for me to follow all his explanations, though he is careful to present them as intelligibly as possible.
I feel like this is a joke, but... you seriously think that our primitive intuitions have an ethical value and that there is a telos of the body that is somehow prediscursive and cannot be overriden by science? That somehow we should be slaves to the monstrous and abhorrent cruelty of nature, for its own purpose, simply because evolutionary programming about "uncanny valleys" have now totally outlived their useful purpose!?
On what basis would us (objectively) being “sacks of chemicals” render us without ethical value?? I would say that my reverence for the human mind and consciousness, and the glory of the freedom to control one’s own fate and body for one’s own purposes and desires, displays far more elevated ethics than one which assigns people the role of slave to an invented telos.
> I would say that my reverence for the human mind and consciousness, and the glory of the freedom to control one’s own fate and body for one’s own purposes and desires,
What do you mean by "consciousness" or "freedom to control one’s own fate"? These are all concepts you cannot ground in your own metaphysics, inherited from a religious worldview.
What tends to happen is that the "freedom to control one’s own fate" becomes "freedom to control *my* fate without having to worry about those annoying ethical considerations about how it effects others."
That has always been the result of that kind of worldview, be it on a personal scale such as Rousseau dumping his children at the orphanage, Jack Kerouac or Ken Kesey taking joy rides across America while stealing from, cheating, or deflowering everyone he meets along the way, women killing their unborn children, trannies harassing women, or on a national level with the victims of the various totalitarian reigns of terror.
This is off topic a bit, but I just want to thank you, Mary, for helping me grasp a better understanding of the concept of rationality. I have trouble differentiating between rationality, logic, and reason, so I appreciate it when someone can explain it in different words from the dictionary definitions and, even better, give examples. Sometimes I wonder if the whole problem really is just me or if people are using these terms interchangeably and carelessly. I actually jotted down a couple notes from this piece to keep with me!
On purely practical grounds it also might not work. The brain is part of the system and results may well be misleading anyway. To get back to the philosophy the hubris involved in thinking that they can produce something that will include all the right bits to give them the right answer.
I suspect so too. I also suspect that if confronted by the fact that animal testing *requires* a subject capable of suffering, the people doing it would still not pause to wonder whether a wider ethical lens is needed on this practice than just “does it hurt”
Researchers are using organoids to great advantage. At one institution, the brain cells from a young person who died from glioblastoma have been used to produce brain organoids. With these organoids, medications are being test directly for their efficacy. The testing results are showing not only which approaches may be effective in stopping the tumor formation, they also are showing just how ineffective the mouse and rat brain models. I consider this to be a huge step forward for medicine. There will be much more of this to come. Eventually, maybe, we will be able to grow whole new organs for transplant from the recipient's own cells. Imagine a liver transplant, in which the transplanted liver, is "your own" or new a heart valve that is not mechanical...I could go on, but this makes my point. What would Aquinas and and Aristotle think of this? We cannot know, but my guess is they would be amazed and impressed.
I'm inclined to agree with you, and I wonder if the problem is actually one of attitude. If we do these things carefully, with humility and gratitude, many people can be helped immensely. If we do these things with hubris and arrogance and a Tower of Babel mentality, we get mutilating transgender surgeries and the Covid pandemic.
This comment prompted my realization that I have no particularly strong feelings about the purpose of a brain cell in isolation, and that's already putting a wrench in my extremely rudimentary understanding of the Aristotelian causes. Despite knowing intellectually that the telos of a brain cell (or eidos...? I have a hard time distinguishing the nature of a thing from its ultimate purpose) "should" be to contribute to the function of a single healthy brain, I don't feel any particular way about turning that brain cell toward a completely different end--such as the production of laboratory brain organoids.
I can't strongly identify with the idea of a single cell having a true nature and purpose, unlike with a chicken. My best guess is that this is because the chicken is known to me on an experiential level; the cell is an abstraction. I'm sentimental about the chicken, but not about the cell.
I think cells are generally abstracted until they do something to hurt us, at which point it's easy to feel "ick" about their betrayal of our bodies. But should we consider a carcinoma to be a normal cell with a corrupted nature, which is failing to achieve its correct purpose of ensuring our health? Or is a cancerous cell its own distinct thing, whose purpose is to perpetuate itself at any cost, and which will be existing in accordance with its nature if allowed to do so?
The HeLa cell strain killed the woman that created it, but has since been used to the ends of saving thousands of lives. Was the "purpose" of a HeLa cell to eventually be extinguished along with Henrietta Lacks herself? Did scientific intervention divert HeLa from that purpose by keeping the strain artificially alive? Or did HeLa always secretly have a telos aiming in the direction of immortality, which it was uniquely able to achieve in the circumstances of the 20th century?
Can this line of inquiry be applied on a macro-scale and carried over to humans? Is death always our telos, or do we have a higher purpose which might finally be achievable under modern technological and social circumstances? Now we're nodding back in the direction of transhumanism, which most of Mary's body of work argues against (and does so well, I should say).
These are earnest questions, not attempts to pick apart the philosophical framework. I'm fascinated by the ideas of formal and final cause, but I also don't understand how we can ever know what either of those things are. No wonder modern thinkers stick to the material and efficient causes, which at least seem possible to identify. Left brain go brrrrrr
Why would you guess that they would be amazed and impressed? Because you are? C'mon man, you can just argue that they were wrong. You don't need to try to recruit them for whatever this is while ignoring everything they actually had to say for themselves.
I find your Thomist direction extremely intriguing and fruitful. But still, what about hunting, farming and indeed exploiting nature since forever? The telos of a farm chicken or its wild cousin is probably the same and it’s being consumed by a predator higher in the food chain. Also one can argue from an anthropocentric perspective whatever serves our telos as humans constitutes the telos of the exploited resources.
In Britain, one vector for this argument is fox-hunting. I've long wondered why people who feel disgust at this practice seem fine with (for example) factory farming. My tentative thesis is that hunting implies a continuity between man and animal, whereas technologically ordered practices such as vivisection or battery farming presuppose our absolute distinction from them. I think these are fundamentally different epistemological stances in relation to other living things, one of which holds space for participation in animality (you'll often hear hunters talk about this, often quite reverently) while the other forecloses it of necessity. I realise this is a slightly different point to the one you're making but it's important to grasp that the difference isn't just in the practice but the mentality structuring it.
"the difference isn't just in the practice but the mentality structuring it" That's also true, but at any rate, there's a lot of room to decide what constitutes eidos and telos of a chicken, but the important point that you're making is that the anti-thomist framework won't even allow to think in these terms. Which makes it inherently inconsistent ( "Space is amazing")
Growing up on a farm, and hunting nearby for food, there was a stark difference, impressed forcefully on me as a child:
NEVER hurt an animal unnecessarily.
ALWAYS kill quickly, and as painlessly as possible.
Care for creation. We are stewards, and will give account one day soon.
As an aside while I have never hunted to hounds, we’ve lost enough hens to the fox for me to consider this an only lightly ritualised aspect of the great circle of life
Yeah, I'm down with pan-consciousness or whatnot, but the idea that *we* know what forms go where, so to speak, is a hubris.
This argument by the OP seems to be along the lines of "what is 'natural' and what isn't?", or "what is 'native' and what isn't?", which are basically arbitrary, right?
We can pick some stuff, and make it less so, but unless you are saying you are God and can speak for Existence... our version of how stuff "should" be is just our own version, as it were. (I suspect we cannot use logic alone to do the kinds of things we want to, but I digress.)
Logic is a tool that one can apply to a postmodernist relativist framework (where indeed no one can tell anything with any certainty) or one can use or at least explore Thomist /Aristotelian framework which could suddenly allow us to confirm our intuitions like sex is real and that the norm exists, and that some things are conducive for human flourishing and som( like relativism) are decidedly not
I mean, it all boils down to set theory— which has some interesting aspects, to put it mildly!
At least if you're talking about "reality".
If you're talking about models we can use, I'm with you— there are tons of great ones!
How great they are seems to depend on context and whatnot (as most things tend to).
But maybe that's the argument, that we've found models that work without context?
Just always true, with no truths that cannot be proven, nor falsities [is that a word?] which cannot be falsified? [Ok, I think I'm doing the inflammable thing now.]
Hopefully you catch my drift! Like, what matters is that you have people that love you, for instance, if we're talking about the sexes of those who raise you.
If we're talking about making babies, it's more complicated when the sexes don't jive, but that's no excuse to try to shame—or worse, pass laws against—what some might call (generally incorrectly contextually) unnatural.
That would be using the incorrect criteria for assigning it to that "set", if you will, from most people’s viewpoints. (Versus somehow objective.)
If we are talking about an environment of hate being detrimental, yeah, that's not great for growth. Like all things, it builds character, but we don't need to force any character-building, heh! That happens—if you'll forgive the repetition—naturally. =]
I wish not to make anyone unmoored. To that point, I find the argument put forth against relativism to amount to the argument that goes something like: "atheists cannot be moral if they do not believe in a God". (Not sure if it's usually singular or not, but that matters little for this reference.)
You can take anything to an extreme to make it silly, and relativism is no different (in fact, it's sort of similar to lots of— I jest! =]).
I love that we can be certain about things. I am fairly certain that there is an element of our own—what we call free will—to our very incorporation. That it's perfectly possible we party like crazy together on some other plane of existence and are like "let's do the thing!" or whatever, and *zoop!* in we pop, becoming a mix both fleeting (as in ethereal) and final (as in forever). But who knows! There's lots of fun possibilities. If we're all some part of God, then we all *do* get to speak for existence (even if that sounds pretty complicated/contradictory mechanistically). We certainly have the option to choose to stop at any point— well, *theoretically* certainly, at least. Not looking to test that one out unless I have to, you know? So perhaps not much of a choice, but still.
Since I like to think "everything happens for a reason" (only that reason is us deciding stuff, versus not having a choice) I generally prefer things as they are. Note that this does not mean unchanging, but more along the lines of Thomas &co., or Socrates/Plato with Forms, or Taoism, etc., so there is some common ground. But I believe our "true shape" or whatnot is between us and the Universe, or us and the Lord, if you prefer, as individuals, versus being up to some subset of us, or a specific philosophy per se. Which amounts to us having to hash a bunch of stuff out amongst ourselves, regardless.
I don't often find much reason to mention Rick and Morty here on Substack, but this reminded me of the episode "That's Amorte", which is a surreal send-up of the cultural consequences of following this logic to its obvious conclusion, including the grotesque imagery of the brainless organ-sack.
Aristotle had extremely primitive ideas about matter: he rejected atomism, he endorsed plenism (the theory that matter fills all of space) and rejected vacuums, and he endorsed the theory of the four elements (earth, water, air and fire). For Aristotle matter was just undifferentiated material all the way down, with none of the molecular, atomic, and subatomic structure and dynamics modern physics has identified.
He compensated for the poverty of his physics with extravagant metaphysics. His ideas should be of historical interest only, except that the Catholic Church won't let go.
The things we do in the name of medicine and having longer lives... A lot of our medical practice is to alleviate pain. But a lot of that pain comes from unnaturally extending our lives.
Our telos is to die. Rather than venturing into new ways of painfully extending our lives, we should deal with how we end our lives. In that line of thought, it would be more sensible to legalize euthanasia rather than Frankenstein our way---with organ sacks---into living more years.
The conclusion here is that pain is more profitable than human nature.
I wrote about the arrogance of wanting to live forever a while back if you're interested in a read: https://writerbytechnicality.substack.com/p/the-obligation-to-die?r=3anz55
The pursuit of longevity, and even grosser, of preserving youth through cosmetic surgery, is the emblem of our times. No afterlife, no consequences for your actions on this earth, just the lust to preserve your existence as long as possible while continuing to exploit passions ordered to reproduction.
God is not mocked, nor is Nature. Once we have passed our childbearing years the rest is meant to be downhill, hopefully acquiring some wisdom in the process and being able to help out the younger ones. I should feel sorry for people petrified by the prospect of it all ending, but I find their greedy grasping for youth disgusting and puerile.
Memento Mori.
It seems like a sociological pathology.
We have no telos except that which is created by our consciousness, as emergent property of our brain, and the idea that there is some telos that exists outside of us is the lowest form of superstition imaginable.
<laughs in JBS Haldane>
Ockham forever, Thomists never! Empirics forever, Monads never!
Thank you for sharing the truth.
My unanswerable and probably idiot question which would still keep me up at night is:
Regardless of their ability to feel pain, do the living meat sacks have souls?
Here's a passage from Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2004) worth quoting at length. Note Jimmy's inability to articulate the "ick" factor persuasively. Here Crake (super genius scientist/innovator) takes his friend Jimmy on a tour of his company's most recent creations:
"This is the latest," said Crake.
What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.
"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit."
"But there aren't any heads," said Jimmy. He grasped the concept-- he'd grown up with sus multiorganifer, after all-- but this thing was going too far. At least the pigoons of his childhood hadn't lacked heads.
"That's the head in the middle," said the woman. "There's a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don't need those."
"This is horrible," said Jimmy. The thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein tuber.
"Picture a sea-anemone body plan," said Crake. "That helps."
"But what's it thinking?" said Jimmy.
The woman gave her jocular woodpecker yodel, and explained that they'd removed all the brain functions that had nothing to do with digestion, assimilation, and growth.
"It's sort of like a chicken hookworm," said Crake.
"No need for added growth hormones," said the woman, "the high growth rate's built in. You get chicken breasts in two weeks-- that's a three-week improvement on the most efficient low-light, high-density chicken farming operation so far devised. And the animal-welfare freaks won't be able to say a word, because this thing feels no pain."
Another reductionist approach to ethics, another reduction of our humanity.
In the case of utilitarianism—the good is "just" the pleasure/pain calculus—this is of course old news. It has NEVER escaped the objection that it produces horrors.
As usual, your work is research-provoking.
The year, 1983: do you remember where you were when you first saw “Boneless Chicken Ranch”?
Tickled to see it here as the punchline. We needed that.
“doing this violates a living creature’s formal cause - its eidos…”
1.) I wonder if the cells still have an eidos, just one science chooses to manipulate.
2.) How valuable can testing be if the “flesh” is not a whole organism? Even testing on animals is insufficient for human understanding.
3.) It further advances a very empty understanding of health, healing, and medicine.
Ad 1) Google the work of dr.Michael Levin and have your mind blown away. The potential of his research for doing good and ont the other hand, another level of monstrosities, is mind boggling.
very obvious what this will mean for the collapsing birthrate if you squint and tilt your human head
I had to chuckle when I read this sentence: "Any sort of life principle or cosmic imperative reintroduces into science the dreaded t-word: teleology." It's in Paul Davies' book Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life, page 233. After some history of the rejection of teleology by scientists, he goes on to observe "Most theoretical physicists are Platonists in the way they conceptualize the laws of physics as precise mathematical relationships possessing a real, independent existence that nevertheless transcends the physical universe" (page 236). It's a stretch for me to follow all his explanations, though he is careful to present them as intelligibly as possible.
I feel like this is a joke, but... you seriously think that our primitive intuitions have an ethical value and that there is a telos of the body that is somehow prediscursive and cannot be overriden by science? That somehow we should be slaves to the monstrous and abhorrent cruelty of nature, for its own purpose, simply because evolutionary programming about "uncanny valleys" have now totally outlived their useful purpose!?
Well your ethical value system ultimately leads to the conclusion that people are just sacks of chemicals, and thus have no ethical value.
On what basis would us (objectively) being “sacks of chemicals” render us without ethical value?? I would say that my reverence for the human mind and consciousness, and the glory of the freedom to control one’s own fate and body for one’s own purposes and desires, displays far more elevated ethics than one which assigns people the role of slave to an invented telos.
> I would say that my reverence for the human mind and consciousness, and the glory of the freedom to control one’s own fate and body for one’s own purposes and desires,
What do you mean by "consciousness" or "freedom to control one’s own fate"? These are all concepts you cannot ground in your own metaphysics, inherited from a religious worldview.
What tends to happen is that the "freedom to control one’s own fate" becomes "freedom to control *my* fate without having to worry about those annoying ethical considerations about how it effects others."
What are the consequences to others that you believe are at issue here?
That has always been the result of that kind of worldview, be it on a personal scale such as Rousseau dumping his children at the orphanage, Jack Kerouac or Ken Kesey taking joy rides across America while stealing from, cheating, or deflowering everyone he meets along the way, women killing their unborn children, trannies harassing women, or on a national level with the victims of the various totalitarian reigns of terror.
isn’t there an implicit assumption here that the telos of a chicken is to be eaten by humans
No? Though the interdependence of chickens and humans is itself something I think about a lot, in the context of the whole nature/nurture argument
This is off topic a bit, but I just want to thank you, Mary, for helping me grasp a better understanding of the concept of rationality. I have trouble differentiating between rationality, logic, and reason, so I appreciate it when someone can explain it in different words from the dictionary definitions and, even better, give examples. Sometimes I wonder if the whole problem really is just me or if people are using these terms interchangeably and carelessly. I actually jotted down a couple notes from this piece to keep with me!