Nov 8, 2024 06:07 PM
(This post was last modified: Nov 9, 2024 01:18 AM by C C.)
Parody Corner: Given the related, staunch apathy toward far more developed brains in abortion practices, this appears to be contradictory. And consequently a ludicrous worry (in that context). A consensus view [in science and the secular community] -- that embryo brains are either not conscious or lack personhood status in the womb -- need merely be applied to brain organoids, too. This is ignoring the most fundamental attribute of reasoning: consistency. In this case, a formal mindset globally maintaining its judgements, values, and concerns coherently across the board.
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When the brain cells in the petri dish stare back
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/w...r-AA1tHanz
https://www.wsj.com/science/when-the-bra..._permalink
INTRO: The proto-eyes are what really disturbed me.
For the past decade, medical researchers have been growing living, miniature replicas of parts of the human brain from stem cells. Such brain “organoids,” as they’re called, have always raised ethical questions. But when I learned that some of them had spontaneously developed optic vesicles—that is, precursors to eyes—I realized that the closer these experiments get to a real brain, the closer we get to creating sentient beings.
he first organoid of any kind, mimicking part of an intestine, was grown 15 years ago in a Dutch lab. Some of today’s brain organoids look like little blobs on a petri dish, designed to mimic specific brain regions. Others are spread out thinly across electrode arrays that provide an interface with a computer, giving the system the capacity to control avatars in a very simple virtual world.
The goal of these efforts is to recreate learning, memory and other cognitive functions—intelligence in a dish.
Two years ago, researchers in Melbourne gave one of these systems—called Dishbrain—control over the paddle in the videogame Pong. And it learned: Twenty minutes of gameplay produced a measurable improvement in its performance. Now, there are “bio-processors” that link together up to 16 of these tiny brain-like systems, treating them like living versions of digital chips.
These breakthroughs could revolutionize the way we model human neurological conditions, allowing researchers to study fetal alcohol syndrome, Alzheimer’s or the Zika virus using human brain tissue rather than the brains of rodents or other animals, which can be weak proxies.
But these biological imitators of brains, like their AI counterparts, also raise the question of where consciousness begins and whether we’ll know when we have crossed that line. Unlike AI, this debate is about potentially sentient life. In attempts to cure neurological conditions, we might unintentionally create disembodied minds enduring those same conditions. How can we be sure we’re not doing that?
Our understanding of the brain mechanisms involved in these experiments is not nearly mature enough to allow any secure answer. And history offers us some warnings.
Until the 1980s, surgeons routinely operated on newborn babies without anesthesia, assuming they felt no pain, until this was shown to be causing massive stress responses, doing lasting damage. For years, patients who were outwardly unresponsive after brain injuries were written off as “vegetative” and regarded as incapable of pain, though it’s now clear that some do have continuing awareness. Easy certainty about the absence of sentience is common—and dangerous.
Some researchers are trying to figure out how to identify signs of consciousness in neural organoids... (MORE - details)
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When the brain cells in the petri dish stare back
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/w...r-AA1tHanz
https://www.wsj.com/science/when-the-bra..._permalink
INTRO: The proto-eyes are what really disturbed me.
For the past decade, medical researchers have been growing living, miniature replicas of parts of the human brain from stem cells. Such brain “organoids,” as they’re called, have always raised ethical questions. But when I learned that some of them had spontaneously developed optic vesicles—that is, precursors to eyes—I realized that the closer these experiments get to a real brain, the closer we get to creating sentient beings.
he first organoid of any kind, mimicking part of an intestine, was grown 15 years ago in a Dutch lab. Some of today’s brain organoids look like little blobs on a petri dish, designed to mimic specific brain regions. Others are spread out thinly across electrode arrays that provide an interface with a computer, giving the system the capacity to control avatars in a very simple virtual world.
The goal of these efforts is to recreate learning, memory and other cognitive functions—intelligence in a dish.
Two years ago, researchers in Melbourne gave one of these systems—called Dishbrain—control over the paddle in the videogame Pong. And it learned: Twenty minutes of gameplay produced a measurable improvement in its performance. Now, there are “bio-processors” that link together up to 16 of these tiny brain-like systems, treating them like living versions of digital chips.
These breakthroughs could revolutionize the way we model human neurological conditions, allowing researchers to study fetal alcohol syndrome, Alzheimer’s or the Zika virus using human brain tissue rather than the brains of rodents or other animals, which can be weak proxies.
But these biological imitators of brains, like their AI counterparts, also raise the question of where consciousness begins and whether we’ll know when we have crossed that line. Unlike AI, this debate is about potentially sentient life. In attempts to cure neurological conditions, we might unintentionally create disembodied minds enduring those same conditions. How can we be sure we’re not doing that?
Our understanding of the brain mechanisms involved in these experiments is not nearly mature enough to allow any secure answer. And history offers us some warnings.
Until the 1980s, surgeons routinely operated on newborn babies without anesthesia, assuming they felt no pain, until this was shown to be causing massive stress responses, doing lasting damage. For years, patients who were outwardly unresponsive after brain injuries were written off as “vegetative” and regarded as incapable of pain, though it’s now clear that some do have continuing awareness. Easy certainty about the absence of sentience is common—and dangerous.
Some researchers are trying to figure out how to identify signs of consciousness in neural organoids... (MORE - details)