Here are the very lucky spectators. 
Those poor gorillas. They look so bored and annoyed.
When I was a kid raised in a fundie church and family, I was always taught that stupid philosophical hypothesis Descartes settled on that animals donât feel pain and have nothing in the way of consciousness. That any display of pain or emotion or reaction is just like a programmed behavior, and that animals just donât have the machinery for experiencing suffering like humans do.
What a load of bullshit. Itâs quite frankly astounding to me that my dad taught me such bald-faced lies when he never believed them himself.
I think it was part of the whole religious empathy rationing. You canât be empathetic towards sinners, you have to feel smugly superior. You donât feel empathetic toward animals, youâre supposed to dominate them.
Anyway, I know better now, and seeing gorillas in the zoo isnât very fun for me. I just canât put it out of my mind that a zoo enclosure must be psychologically horrible for an animal like a gorilla.
They have large ranges, and travel freely. They have varied diets and are intelligent problem solvers. They have complex social structures, theyâre only slightly less related to us than chimps are. I canât see them choosing to live in the kind of confinement a zoo provides, and they just never seem happy or very stimulated at the zoo. They have to make up boring games about intimidating the viewers in order to amuse themselves.
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Maybe they could find jobs as sysapes.
See also:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/one-banana_problem
http://catb.org/jargon/html/O/one-banana-problem.html
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Oh, come now. Iâd bet that weâd be able to wire up an ape brain to do all kinds of awesome stuff besides just being a button-pusher.
Theyâre nearly as smart as we are. I wouldnât put it past them to have interesting thoughts. I mean, we can only really figure out what humans are thinking, and we sort of have take their word for it. What if we could get a stdio for gorilla or chimp or orangutan brains? Orangutans are by far the smartest of the non-human primates. Iâd be pretty interested in what goes on in their squishy little brains.
What if we could uplift them? The ethical implications are endless, but I still think itâd be a good thing when it might eventually happen. If not for the orangutan, then definitely for us, in the sense that weâd gain perspective, and maybe know not to try again if things go badly.
Good betatest of the tech to uplift us.
Or, better, to know what to do different when trying again. Iterate until success, bioethicists and their ilk be damned.
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