Lab-grown brain bits open windows to the mind | Hacker News Reader

Lab-grown brain bits open windows to the mind

washingtonpost.com

59 pointsjonbaer18 comments

People are a conundrum. We seem to want a brain-computer interface, or to free ourselves from our bodies and the fear of death, to let our consciousness live on forever, allowing our brains (in artificial bodies) explore the cosmos. We dream about it in books and movies; chat about it in coffee shops and in our spare time at work. When the opportunity to explore the possibility begins to present itself, we balk at the idea. This hasn't even reached any stage where emotions or thought might emerge, anymore than an early abortion could be considered a life to anyone but to the most ardent fundamentalist and already we are cringing at the moral implications.

Yes, I understand that we have to consider them before it is too late and a tragedy has occurred. We also can't stop progress on the notion that there is a "what if" scenario out there, like a boogie man waiting in the wings. Do it under supervision. Keep it transparent. But don't just stop it out of knee jerk fear of the unknown and what may be. How will anything move forward if we, as a global society become scared of everything?

> We seem to want ... live on forever

My humble opinion is that people have not thought that enough. I mean, eternity is a damn long time. I can somehow imagine my brain/consciousness/whatnot to find new and interesting stuff to engage with for a few thousand years, and that is stretching it a lot. Much more likely we are talking about a few hundred years and there is a real possibility that I am completely fed up with this world before I turn 100 years old.

And now let's start stacking those years. So, say a billion years. Meaning a million thousand year periods. I get shivers just thinking I should be hanging around that long. And what comes to eternity, we have not even started yet.

I can't think of eternal life as being anything but worst imaginable hell (regardless whether it would be in heaven or hell).

(Admittably, I would be curious to know how how the story of humanity progresses and most likely ends at some point)

I think people's reasoning is like mathematical induction here. 10 years ago I wanted to live 10 more years. Today I want to live 10 more years. At any age N, I want to live to N+10. Therefore, I want to live forever.

I also think people implicitly assume suicide should be an open option if they ever get bored with eternity.

I woukd be quite happy to be there for my family, the young ones, and their young ones.

Experience is so valuable.

And people are beautiful.

There is a lot to do, experience, live, laugh.

Yeah, will get tired of it, but not in my current lifespan.

I can't even do and build all I want to.

Forever is not realistic. But more? 2x? Yeah, sign me up. Easy.

Why do you even suppose you'd get tired of it? It's like saying you'll get tired of good music someday.

You know I might not. You may very well be right about that. However I really don't know, so I spoke to what I do know.

> This hasn't even reached any stage where emotions or thought might emerge

> we have to consider them before it is too late and a tragedy has occurred

We have to talk about it before we get to the state of emotions and thoughts, because then it's already too late.

> How will anything move forward if we, as a global society become scared of everything?

We're not scared at all. Calling ethical considerations "scared" is a silly thing to say in the face of all the genocides, horrors like Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the other things we did. We were not scared to use nuclear weapons and there are some people who aren't scared to clone humans. It's not about being scared, it's about being ethical.

Being ethical is not necessarily a natural thing for us, we have to keep this in mind constantly so we don't lose what we call humanity.

- - -

I don't want to live forever and I think people who think that eternity or a very long life lead to fulfillment are deceiving themselves.

I'm not a materialist, and yet I believe we must take materialism to all of its logical ends, as uncomfortable as it may get (discomfort being an illusion according to materialism, of course), before any genuinely new truth will reveal itself

Why not become a materialist and get all the discomfort over with all at once forever?

I'm a materialist, but the discomfort is still there. Intellectual philosophy (moral relativism, illusion of self, etc.) is insoluble to the emotions we evolved with. (Take the fear of death.)

Disagree, it is possible to eliminate fear of death (and all emotions) on this path.

Lol! Well, if you have, I envy you. But I doubt it.

I think there's legends of a test for master zen monks to see whether they've cultivated enough control over themselves to not react when they have a finger or hand cut off.

But, if it's even possible to shed your displeasure of pain, death, and all other things and go through your daily life like that until it's over, I think it's inaccessible to most people. (With normal lives, at any rate; if you said you have to do master-level zen meditation or be under heavy sedation for most of the day, I would say that doesn't count. : p)

LOL.

Well, the default position should be materialist.

I just don't feel (ahem) that that addresses what I'm seeing here (literally and figuratively; see "qualia")

As a programmer, I'm pretty rationalist... The worst thing is nondeterministic code! As a former Psych major though, over the years it has been dawning on me slowly but surely that just about all that is valued in this experience we call life (as well as value itself) is entirely irrational. It's actually been difficult to grapple with that, but... I just think something's there. "Joie de vivre", "the spark of creative thriving", "the light in a person's eyes", whatever. And... I don't think we will ever nail most of it down rationally... But we should try!

The passage about implanting human organoids into primates reminded me of this YA scifi novel called Eva that I read as a kid. Girl in a car accident gets her brain transplanted into a chimpanzee. I really loved it. And a great book to develop your kid’s interspecies empathy!

This should be open-sourced so that the probability of creating a dangerous true AI is lower. I fear there may be something very wrong in this but I'd love a DIY grow-your-brain kit with a USB interface to experiment with. This machine would have an awesome "hello, world" program.

I'm not sure what you mean by open sourcing. There are published procedures in open access journals for creating neural organelles from tissue samples.

It is interesting to think about how organelles might develop around a mesh of stimulating wires in a computer interface.

Using cells from non-primate animals (e.g. rats) might alleviate some ethical hurdles. Still, I am somewhat uncomfortable with the thought of the idea of creating boxes of neurons trained via a interfacing mesh to accomplish certain types of computations, etc. The hard problem looms.

Currently neural organelles are being used to study disorders like autism in humans where taking brain samples is unethical, but taking a blood sample and coaxing them into neurons, is not.

> This should be open-sourced so that the probability of creating a dangerous true AI is lower.

Of the things you can worry about and reasons to open source software, this is not a very good one.

> At Day 100, Qian’s minibrains resemble a portion of the prenatal brain in the second trimester of pregnancy.

OMG they are juggling nitroglycerin. I think that it's only ignorance that has kept people from their pitchforks and torches so far.

Not that I'm against this mad science. The first thing, the first thing, I thought of when I first read about these things was: DALEKS! Put these in a roomba with some sensors and a death ray and they're Daleks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com