Can lab-grown brains become conscious?

[C C]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02986-y

INTRO: In Alysson Muotri’s laboratory, hundreds of miniature human brains, the size of sesame seeds, float in Petri dishes, sparking with electrical activity. These tiny structures, known as brain organoids, are grown from human stem cells and have become a familiar fixture in many labs that study the properties of the brain. Muotri, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has found some unusual ways to deploy his. He has connected organoids to walking robots, modified their genomes with Neanderthal genes, launched them into orbit aboard the International Space Station, and used them as models to develop more human-like artificial-intelligence systems. Like many scientists, Muotri has temporarily pivoted to studying COVID-19, using brain organoids to test how drugs perform against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

But one experiment has drawn more scrutiny than the others. In August 2019, Muotri’s group published a paper in Cell Stem Cell reporting the creation of human brain organoids that produced coordinated waves of activity, resembling those seen in premature babies. The waves continued for months before the team shut the experiment down.

This type of brain-wide, coordinated electrical activity is one of the properties of a conscious brain. The team’s finding led ethicists and scientists to raise a host of moral and philosophical questions about whether organoids should be allowed to reach this level of advanced development, whether ‘conscious’ organoids might be entitled to special treatment and rights not afforded to other clumps of cells and the possibility that consciousness could be created from scratch.

The idea of bodiless, self-aware brains was already on the minds of many neuroscientists and bioethicists. Just a few months earlier, a team at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, announced that it had at least partially restored life to the brains of pigs that had been killed hours earlier. By removing the brains from the pigs’ skulls and infusing them with a chemical cocktail, the researchers revived the neurons’ cellular functions and their ability to transmit electrical signals. Other experiments, such as efforts to add human neurons to mouse brains, are raising questions, with some scientists and ethicists arguing that these experiments should not be allowed.

The studies have set the stage for a debate between those who want to avoid the creation of consciousness and those who see complex organoids as a means to study devastating human diseases. Muotri and many other neuroscientists think that human brain organoids could be the key to understanding uniquely human conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, which are impossible to study in detail in mouse models. To achieve this goal, Muotri says, he and others might need to deliberately create consciousness.

Researchers are now calling for a set of guidelines, similar to those used in animal research, to guide the humane use of brain organoids and other experiments that could achieve consciousness. In June, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine began a study with the aim of outlining the potential legal and ethical issues associated with brain organoids and human–animal chimaeras.

The concerns over lab-grown brains have also highlighted a blind spot: neuroscientists have no agreed way to define and measure consciousness. Without a working definition, ethicists worry that it will be impossible to stop an experiment before it crosses a line.

The current crop of experiments could force the issue. If scientists become convinced that an organoid has gained consciousness, they might need to hurry up and agree on a theory of how that happened, says Anil Seth, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK. But, he says, if one person’s favoured theory deems the organoid conscious whereas another’s doesn’t, any confidence that consciousness has been attained vanishes. “Confidence largely depends on what theory we believe in. It’s a circularity.”

Creating a conscious system might be a whole lot easier than defining it. Researchers and clinicians define consciousness in many different ways for various purposes, but it is hard to synthesize them into one neat operational definition that could be used to decide on the status of a lab-grown brain.... (MORE)

[Yazata]

Good post, CC. I thought that it was stimulating.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02986-y

INTRO: In Alysson Muotri’s laboratory, hundreds of miniature human brains, the size of sesame seeds, float in Petri dishes, sparking with electrical activity. These tiny structures, known as brain organoids, are grown from human stem cells and have become a familiar fixture in many labs that study the properties of the brain.

I'm inclined to think that consciousness is functional, not a question of whether human cells are involved or not. So the question would seem to be whether these brain organoids host sufficient functionality to behave consciously. How does what is happening in them compare to what is happening not only in human brains, but in animal brains as well?

So one of the results of directing attention to the problem of consciousness in brain organoids might be greater attention at the question of animal consciousness. What does consciousness look like at the low end, in simpler nervous systems?

Muotri, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has found some unusual ways to deploy his. He has connected organoids to walking robots, modified their genomes with Neanderthal genes, launched them into orbit aboard the International Space Station, and used them as models to develop more human-like artificial-intelligence systems.

I personally suspect (I can't know) that this will be the direction that engineering increasingly takes in the future. We might increasingly see engineered biological organisms taking the place of 19th and 20th century style machines. Computers might start to be replaced by engineered artificial nervous systems. They can be grown much more easily than electronics can be manufactured. While the electronic computer is exceedingly stupid, it's also exceedingly fast which covers for a lot of its limitations. Biological nervous systems are slower but with far more potential upside, illustrated by ourselves. The limiting factor with them might be ethical scruples.

But one experiment has drawn more scrutiny than the others. In August 2019, Muotri’s group published a paper in Cell Stem Cell reporting the creation of human brain organoids that produced coordinated waves of activity, resembling those seen in premature babies. The waves continued for months before the team shut the experiment down.

I expect that consciousness involves lots more than coordinated waves of activity. My guess is that these waves are more involved with brain development and that their presence in the brain organoids is associated with the organoids growing synapses and neural network. The organoids might be starting to self-organize, something else that old-style machinery can't do.

This type of brain-wide, coordinated electrical activity is one of the properties of a conscious brain. The team’s finding led ethicists and scientists to raise a host of moral and philosophical questions about whether organoids should be allowed to reach this level of advanced development, whether ‘conscious’ organoids might be entitled to special treatment and rights not afforded to other clumps of cells

If these kind of scruples are raised by what's happening in the organoids resembling what happens in human fetuses, then that has all kinds of perhaps unwelcome implications for the abortion debate. 

and the possibility that consciousness could be created from scratch.

Yes, I suspect that it's possible. But to say anything more, we will have to arrive at a suitable definition of the word 'consciousness'. That's where so much of the philosophy of mind falls apart.

The idea of bodiless, self-aware brains was already on the minds of many neuroscientists and bioethicists. Just a few months earlier, a team at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, announced that it had at least partially restored life to the brains of pigs that had been killed hours earlier. By removing the brains from the pigs’ skulls and infusing them with a chemical cocktail, the researchers revived the neurons’ cellular functions and their ability to transmit electrical signals.

That's more troubling to me. Pigs are rather sentient and their brains are far more complex than these brain organoids. So the question here would seem to be how much activity did they revive in these pig's brains. Just a tiny amount? Or activity in the whole brain?

Other experiments, such as efforts to add human neurons to mouse brains, are raising questions, with some scientists and ethicists arguing that these experiments should not be allowed.

I doubt very much whether human neurons have any special properties.

The studies have set the stage for a debate between those who want to avoid the creation of consciousness and those who see complex organoids as a means to study devastating human diseases. Muotri and many other neuroscientists think that human brain organoids could be the key to understanding uniquely human conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, which are impossible to study in detail in mouse models. To achieve this goal, Muotri says, he and others might need to deliberately create consciousness.

The problem there seems to be that autism and schizophrenia are disorders of the higher functioning of the brain. In order to use the organoids to research these problems, one would have to grow organoids that mimic human brain function to a sufficient degree. That's going to raise ethical questions by its nature. Growing a living human brain in some kind of culture vat, then somehow getting it operating (without a body!) in such a way that it can model psychiatric illness seems badly conceived to me.

The concerns over lab-grown brains have also highlighted a blind spot: neuroscientists have no agreed way to define and measure consciousness. Without a working definition, ethicists worry that it will be impossible to stop an experiment before it crosses a line.

Yes, that's the fundamental difficulty, not only in these experiments but in the philosophy of mind generally. What is consciousness? How do we define it? How do we determine when it is and isn't present? How does it arise? In what kind of circumstances might we expect it to arise? What are its lower bounds in simpler systems?

The current crop of experiments could force the issue. If scientists become convinced that an organoid has gained consciousness, they might need to hurry up and agree on a theory of how that happened, says Anil Seth, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK. But, he says, if one person’s favoured theory deems the organoid conscious whereas another’s doesn’t, any confidence that consciousness has been attained vanishes. “Confidence largely depends on what theory we believe in. It’s a circularity.”

Creating a conscious system might be a whole lot easier than defining it. Researchers and clinicians define consciousness in many different ways for various purposes, but it is hard to synthesize them into one neat operational definition that could be used to decide on the status of a lab-grown brain....

Yes, that seems to be where we are at right now. It's fascinating and difficult. And as this post suggests, it's probably going to be more important in the future.

[confused2]

The sea slug's central nervous system is relatively simple, with only 10,000 neurons, compared with the approximately 100 billion found in humans,
...
Learning in Aplysia [the sea slug] takes the form of what scientists call sensitization. When researchers poke the animal or give it an electric shock, the sea slug will pull in its siphons, which are funnel-like appendages. An untrained slug will retract its siphons for only a few seconds, but as the animal learns that its environment is dangerous, it will hold in its appendages for longer times.

from https://www.livescience.com/17683-sea-slug-memory.html

The slug can communicate 'I don't like being poked.' by withdrawing its siphons - even better you can really frighten them and they try to protect themselves by keeping their siphons withdrawn for longer.

Fortunately for science (though not sea slugs) you can poke sea slugs, electrocute them or boil them alive with no moral issues whatsoever.

These little brains - unless they learn to scream and the public gets to hear them screaming - the future doesn't look particularly bright.

---

To model mental illness these brains are going to need to get quite big - maybe need lab grown eyes, lab grown ears, a voice and so on.

[C C]

[...] These little brains - unless they learn to scream and the public gets to hear them screaming - the future doesn't look particularly bright.

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To model mental illness these brains are going to need to get quite big - maybe need lab grown eyes, lab grown ears, a voice and so on.

- - - - -

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02986-y [...]

This type of brain-wide, coordinated electrical activity is one of the properties of a conscious brain. The team’s finding led ethicists and scientists to raise a host of moral and philosophical questions about whether organoids should be allowed to reach this level of advanced development, whether ‘conscious’ organoids might be entitled to special treatment and rights not afforded to other clumps of cells

If these kind of scruples are raised by what's happening in the organoids resembling what happens in human fetuses, then that has all kinds of perhaps unwelcome implications for the abortion debate. 

I expect that organoid controversy rubbing up against Reproductive Rights territory (i.e., abortion issues) will alone either limit or modify in eccentric ways how far the definition of consciousness can develop in the moral development considerations of these scientists and philosophers. Those who try to carry on or refine it fully (possibly to a degree that some find ludicrous) will probably find themselves in the same spot as TERFS -- treated as academic pariahs. Or each political orientation will embrace different conceptions of consciousness suitable for their own cause -- ensuring that a "consensus" is never arrived at.

Due to fear of losing votes that affiliated groups provide, progressives don't have the stomach to intervene and settle much when two or more inner factions on the left have conflicting self-interests. They just leave it up to call-out and cancel culture to police and bully either the minority view or whichever one threatens to decrease another one's existing range of "freedom" and special entitlements.

Consciousness ethnics development playing out in AI and robotics could also impinge upon Reproductive Rights eventually. However, because artificial sentient beings offer a whole new crusader front for the oppressed/oppressor theme that para-Marxist movements parasitize on, then that could be a difference maker (especially since they may be starved and desperate for one by that time -- what with only items like incest, necrophilia, zoophilia, mitigated pedophilia, etc remaining as frontier causes).

A new Social Justice Warrior genre that is large enough to not be intimidated by the veteran (left) feminist faction, might in turn embolden the timid, political conformist scientists and philosophers to pursue moral clarification and standards for consciousness further, as they originally intended to before the abortion controversy roadblocks.

[confused2]

As a species we are natural born killers.
We kill billions of pigs, sheep, cows, goats and other animals every year.
(Source - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/c...each-year/ )

The rules of war which most sides agree to are about killing.

Any debate about whether or not we are killers can have only one outcome.

The grey ground that remains is whether or not we should (as a species) allow torture (of anything or anyone) for recreation and/or profit.

I'd say it is ok to poke a sea slug a few times. Not permisable to start up using electricity on sea slugs. With some misgivings it is ok to kill a sea slug. If there is any doubt that what you are doing might be causing 'great and prolonged suffering' then you should either stop doing it or be given the opportunity to live in a secure space allocated to humans who would otherwise willfully cause suffering to another entity.

In my view the little brains in OP fall into the category of potentially suffering simply by virtue of existence.

[Zinjanthropos]

As a species we are natural born killers.
We kill billions of pigs, sheep, cows, goats and other animals every year.
(Source - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/c...each-year/ )

The rules of war which most sides agree to are about killing.

Any debate about whether or not we are killers can have only one outcome.

The grey ground that remains is whether or not we should (as a species) allow torture (of anything or anyone) for recreation and/or profit.

I'd say it is ok to poke a sea slug a few times. Not permisable to start up using electricity on sea slugs. With some misgivings it is ok to kill a sea slug. If there is any doubt that what you are doing might be causing 'great and prolonged suffering' then you should either stop doing it or be given the opportunity to live in a secure space allocated to humans who would otherwise willfully cause suffering to another entity.

In my view the little brains in OP fall into the category of potentially suffering simply by virtue of existence.

Is it torture when an adult orca brings home a live seal for baby to practice on? 

Consciousness in sesame seed sized brain hors d’oeuvres means you better stop those habits like alcohol consumption that damages (torture?) the ends of brain neurons. Wouldn’t want to be labelled a hypocrite.

If there is a country out there that doesn’t let ethics or morals get in the way of science, are they more apt to eventually gain an advantage over countries that do? 

The people of Stalingrad survived a three year siege in WWII but their cats, dogs, other pets and even some delicious local citizens did not, if you know what I mean. Consciousness doesn’t matter much when one’s starving. 

A top predator that frets over killing its food. Got to be a first.  Pass the sea slug please.....how many ways can one cook sea slug?