Lab-grown ‘mini-brains’ do mimic human brain development
spectrumnews.org
spectrumnews.org
As an aside, this:
"They first froze the mini-brains and cut them into ultra-thin sections, which they mounted onto glass slides. They then labeled the sections with different combinations of colored fluorescent tags that are specific to certain cell types, and imaged the sections using an automated scanner."
Shows just how immature the neurobiology field is. I imagine that slicing, and then manually re connecting the slices in a 3d program, must be a pretty painstaking process. Not to mention you are left with no idea how data traveled round the structure. A code analogy would be having a huge codebase handed to you in little chunks, and you have to connect up the pieces by hand. And at the end of it, not even being able to debug it and see if things even work as expected.
http://www.psypost.org/2015/07/new-vast-tool-gives-neuroscie...
Not only is it a painstaking process, but some slices are lost due to human error while sectioning and the tissue is mechanically distorted when placed onto the slides (squished between the glass and the cover slip).
The solution was simple, albeit much more expensive than sectioning: just MRI scan the organ.
You can also get OCT devices for pretty cheap. They use them in optometrist offices for imaging retinas.
So then, what is your proposal for improvement?
Without a sensorimotor apparatus for the brain to manipulate and receive reward-signals from, and thus train to control, there is very likely no "thought" as we would consider it—nothing coherent, no train of thought, no high-level patterns. It's more like the sort of "thought" a foetus would have before its first moment of conscious awareness.
The article also suggests that what we consider to be an experience of physical pain involves certain basic aspects of consciousness that require more advanced postnatal development based on interactions with other people. If this is necessary for physical pain, then more abstract psychological pain would be even further down the road of development. So it's not as simple as whether something is a "real brain" or not, and growing mini-brains from human cells doesn't mean that sentience automatically happens.
Organisms with far "simpler" brains than ours appear to be capable of suffering. I'm unaware of the extent to which human embryonic brain development follows expected principles of evolutionary developmental biology, but if that holds, a sufficiently developed brain should at least be given equal ethical consideration as an animal. Vertebrates are commonly born with a capacity for suffering, so I question how much external input is required. If the necessary brain structures are there, those same structures should suffice for achieving brain-states equivalent to percepts of suffering.
Looks to me like we're not quite there yet, as these cerebral organoids are pretty darn small and comparatively disorganized, but it's only a matter of time before the ethical questions need be faced.
With a little searching, I found similar views from neuroskeptic. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2013/09/02/th...
Many higher-level vertebrates develop some capacity for "thinking"—that is, for planning/strategizing, puzzle-solving, learning and synthesizing information, forming concepts and abstractions, overriding instincts with beliefs based on evidence, etc. Humans and all other primates do this; as do crows and their relatives; as do dolphins; etc.
But none of these animals start with that ability from birth. "Thinking" has never been observed as behavior available instinctually to any animal. A newborn crow or gorilla, despite being rather self-sufficient with a library of instinctual responses, won't be able to solve the puzzles that we get the adults of those species to solve and which we cite as proof of their intelligence. They grow that ability from months/years of life experience.
In fact, almost by definition, "thinking" is something you have to build: it's a big conceptual hierarchy with sensory data at its base. And—as far as we know—instinct can't pre-bake the needed raw sensory data into brains. (It can bake in higher-level associations, like scent- or pattern-associations for predator avoidance. But it doesn't include these in low-level "raw" terms where a brain can derive any of its own interpretations or abstractions from them.)
Without accumulated experience, a brain is still experiencing the world, and reacting to the world, and experiencing reward signals from the world—like most animals do—but is not yet thinking about the world. Thinking is a matter of updating beliefs about schemas/models/concepts; and those things only exist when derived from sense-data "evidence."
If this tech evolves, I'm really worried about brain harvesting or trafficking, we already have increasingly desperate people turning to organ trafficking, and human smuggling is tied to organ harvesting.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-traff... https://www.decodedscience.org/organ-harvesting-human-traffi...
Also, as other comments have pointed out, these organoids don't really have any neural inputs, so it's unlikely that they're wired in a way that is at all analogous to real human brains.
Another interesting paper demonstrating that neural tissues can be effectively grown around mesh electrodes, providing both a scaffolding function as well a recording and stimulation functions. http://faculty.engr.utexas.edu/xie/xie/publications/ultrafle...
Neuroscience has been rapidly leveling up recently, its increasingly believable that high bandwidth bidirectional neural interfaces (at the cellular level) are on the horizon. DARPA was pitching this a few years ago (NESD) and it was pretty far out, but now see Kernel and Neuralink and the 10 or so companies partnered in to those efforts mostly-successfully developing all kinds of technologies required by this roadmap (disclosure: including my own).
This means getting inside the brain, right ? do you see it happening for regular brain augmentation, and not just serious medical issues?
It would be kind of crazy if we develop full AI by literally using brains in vats. But it makes sense (even if it is horrifying). Meat is cheap, and the brain is like an exa-OPS computer running on 20 Watts of power. If you could solve the interface problem and figure out how to actually use it practically, brain is like 6 or 7 orders of magnitude cheaper than the next-cheapest computing substrate. That's like half a century of Moore's Law (and Moore's Law is basically over now... much slower pace, at least).
(Here's an example using rat neurons: https://singularityhub.com/2010/10/06/videos-of-robot-contro... And this one: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a... )
If I could pick what platform I run on, it'd be hardware (and I hope such hardware eventually comes along).
"Cattle, not pets."
(I do realize the pretty horrific undertones of this discussion.)
There is some research going on in using spintronics for neural network, and I think that both density and power usage would be a fraction of a biological system.
There is probably a long way until we can emulate human brains, but for generic neutral networks, I think electronics or spintronics is the probable route.
EDIT:And technically brains are general computing devices. Just really inefficient ones. Emulating logic in wetware is highly inefficient (and usually requires an external memory device, like pen and paper, though pure wetware memory also works in some especially skilled individuals, although still with severe capacity limitations). Of course, emulating wetware in logic isn't terribly efficient, either.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/02/brain.dish/
[edit] didn't see the UF link below.
Already been done after a fashion 13 years ago. Would be interesting to see what further research has resulted in.