Johns Hopkins University researchers have created the world’s first whole-brain organoid that integrates tissues from all major brain regions, complete with rudimentary blood vessels and neural activity that mimics a 40-day-old human fetal brain. Published in Advanced Science, the breakthrough could transform how scientists study neuropsychiatric disorders and test new treatments.
The multi-region brain organoid (MRBO) represents a major advance over existing brain organoids, which typically replicate only single brain regions like the cortex or midbrain. “We’ve made the next generation of brain organoids,” said lead researcher Annie Kathuria, an assistant professor in Johns Hopkins’ Department of Biomedical Engineering. “Most brain organoids that you see in papers are one brain region, like the cortex or the hindbrain or midbrain. We’ve grown a rudimentary whole-brain organoid.”
I’ve been really intrigued by the ethics of this as theres a lot of organoid conspiracies online and from what i gathered be it 40 days of several months this type of “brain” doesnt actually develop to anything that could resemble conciousness and is widely considered to be ethical.
However this is purely based on emergent concisouness theory and if you’re not entirely sold on that then we might be making human lab rats trapped in their endless mind forever to be experimented on which is pretty scary, maybe?
I’m pretty uneducated on the matter. Are there serious alternatives to emergent consciousness theory that aren’t religious, mystical, or new-age “it’s the quantum maaaan”?
There are a lot of philosophy theories like panspychism (says that the base layer of reality is conciusoness not mater) but due to nature of the problem its hard to get scientific answers.
These organoids might actually be useful here for exactly this but materialism is so strong in academia and so incredibly practical (i.e. animals can die “safely” or be experimented on) that I think emergent concisouness is here to stay for a long time.
I don’t see how emergent consciousness is incompatible with some intelligent animals theoretically having a conscience. Nor how having a conscience is a sufficient and necessary condition to having rights. After all a human baby’s brain is not performing better than an adult dog’s and we have no proof (that I know of) that newborns are conscious, yet we frown upon their murder more than a dog’s. So clearly proof-of-consciousness is not the key factor.
This entire discussion about rights and welfare seems completely orthogonal to the question “what is consciousness and how does it arise”. I think it is extremely naive to think that the lack of definitive proof that chimpanzees are conscious beings has significant bearing on our approach to medical experimentation.
Especially if and when consciousness turns out not to be an on-off switch but another biological spectrum, emergent or not. Fuck, we don’t even have a non-fuzzy definition for what counts as alive, and we’re out here pretending that there would be a clear one for what counts as conscious?
I disagree and I think you underestimate cognitive dissonance at play in our society. Other being being “less concious” is huge in justifying many of our actions especially if you take a look at countries like China or Japan
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic scifi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.
Don’t worry! So long as they don’t give it a mouth, they can’t hear it scream.