artifexFive-Year-Old Mini Brains Can Now Mimic a Kindergartener’s Neural Wiring. It’s Time to Talk Ethics.
Among pressing ethical concerns are whether brain organoids can feel pain or become conscious—and how would we know?
MonkderVierteand how would we know?
Reasoning.
Does a ALU detect pain? Yes. Does it feel pain? No.
Just because it’s organic circuits doesn’t mean they suddenly develop consciousness. That requires secific circuitry and data processing facilities.
So glad someone already said it. I’m a neuroscience PhD student who works with brain organoids and the article is absolutely ridiculous.
It links to an article about brain organoids with blood vessels:
Mini-Brains Just Grew Their Own Blood Vessels—Here's Why That's Great News
Yup, that’s right: scientists are making living blobs of brain-like organs floating in a dish. Now, for the first time, a team from UC Davis managed to insert a homegrown blood vessel network into maturing brain balls—giving them the chance to mature further into the complex computational organ found in our heads.
Ok it sounds like they got functioning vessels after xengrafting into mice (which has its own issues) and it mentioned connecting to micro fluidic chambers in the future for full ex vivo, but they don’t have a functioning model for that yet. It’s a very interesting and promising area of research but with practical lab work nowadays it’s just not feasible. I hope they’re able to get a full ex vivo model working soon though, that would be really exciting!
Also, note that article’s 8 years old and way out of date.
Let’s not pretend we understand the mechanics of consciousness. If you can prove what is required for consciousness, there’s at least a Nobel prize in it for you.
Now now. I don’t understand it completely. But good enough to exclude the neurogical equivalent to a microcontroller from having feelings.