Can lab-grown brains become conscious?
nature.com
nature.com
i am aware of three definitions of consciousness, used often without clarity:
a/ consciousness = intelligence. By this definition, a lot of AI has some level of consciousness
b/ conciouness = being awake and alert. A lot of studies for instance that compare MRI of alert vs unconscious humans focus on this aspect.
c/ consciousness the way we humans experience the sense of self awareness ("watching a movie from inside", etc). This must be more than an illusion because for instance right now I am writing about it so that "sense" is affecting my actions. But how do you even define or test for it?
It's likely you have a lot of (a) without (c), and you could have a lot of (c) with little (a). We can test for (a) but not for (c), so for now it's all philosophical speculation.
Until we can define and test for (c), I don't see much progress being made here.
No, it could be that (c) is an illusion of the fact that you are doing the writing, which I guess is the result of enough (a). There is some scientific evidence that (c) is 'constructed' afterwards by (a) and (b). For example (c) looks to lag about half a second behind the actual sensed reality.
I think you meant (b) lags behind, not (c). I might be wrong.
Moreover, there are groups who would fight any definition which treat new-born humans as non-conscious (because from their point of view the most important property of such a definition is it is the first step to legalizing child killings). But there are theories that point to an idea of consciousness as of something acquired by humans in their individual development. It means that in some special cases child could develop into a non-conscious adult. Does it mean that it is ok to slaughter such an adult and to eat his meat? Does it mean that abortion is a morally neutral thing?
At some point psychology was forced to stop using word "soul", because results of a research of a soul led to troubles for different religions, for example, if a soul is a function of a mortal brain, so a soul cannot be immortal, isn't it? Psychology mechanically replaced 'soul' with 'mind' and continued. I believe we came to a point, when psychology would need to find a new term for "consciousness", so psychologist's findings didn't lead to disastrous conclusions in a social plane.
From the other hand, biology managed to research life all this time without changing terms, despite of the fact, that biology pinned life to a matter, and therefore there could be no life after death.
Isn't this a bit like saying we don't have a definition for "cloud" due to not having defined exactly at which density, size, etc water vapor qualifies as a cloud? There's certainly a gradient of chemical responses to outside stimulus within an organism, ranging from reflex to subconscious responses (e.g. heartbeat speed) to awareness to consciousness. Defining consciousness within that gradient would then simply consist of specifying exactly which subset of responses qualify as falling under the umbrella definition for consciousness (e.g. certain patterns of chemical response in specific parts of a brain).
There's then the argument that it's effectively impossible for two things to be exactly the same physically, so how can we know that "my" experience of consciousness is not some unique snowflake in some universe simulation. An interesting psychological tidbit that seems relevant is the observation that every salmon has the same number of bones. What's interesting about it is that many people have the incorrect intuition that skeletons within a fish species have a much higher variance than they actually do. Similarly, there's this intuition that just because neurons connect in seemingly random ways, that a more complex pattern built on top of of said neurons might then have higher variance than genetics would suggest.
The problem with a lot of philosophical arguments is that they jump from "consciousness is vaguely defined" to "therefore it's technically possible for some highly unlikely setup to be true". That's not how we do science elsewhere (i.e. we typically look at what's statistically more likely via p values, phenotypes, etc).
Another point of contention is the somewhat tautological nature of defining consciousness. It basically boils down to "it is what it is and it isn't what it isn't". But the thing is: many things are defined in tautological ways (e.g. the cloud above, or what is the first "chicken" in the "chicken and egg" problem). You could easily get out of the problem by simply specifying an arbitrary definition with arbitrary breadth, since it is already inherently vague and arbitrary to begin with. This is more or less the same process by which we came up with the definition of even hard science things like the meter.
Regardless, even without an exact definition, it's possible to engage in the discussion of ethics of lab grown consciousness, specifically how it applies to real life. One can argue that lab grown consciousness is not necessarily bad in and of itself (similar to the fact that animal slaughter exists for the purpose of feeding people). I think people objections to it stem from ascribing human rights (e.g. not being subject to cruelty) to things that are inherently similar to humans. But in that sense, it doesn't even need to be remotely close to being human-like, as we already debate about the ethics of animal torture and hypothetical scenarios that never actually play out in real life w/ real functioning people.
At the end of the day, ethics are just a framework to formulate things like rule of law, and ultimately are about a balance between individual freedom vs collective interest. We know from politics that there are virtually endless disagreements about where said balance lies. One could then argue that it's phenotypical that individuals may have disagreeing opinions about various subjects and that there's no point in pursuing "absolute righteousness" when said endeavor boils down to equally pleasing all members of a phenotypically heterogeneous population.
From there, there are two possible logical conclusions: a) that "bad" things must necessarily exist because badness is not a consensus (and contradictory depending on who you ask) and that existence is an eternal struggle or b) that the pursuit of absolute righteousness involves taking the zen approach of letting go and letting things be as they are.
The amazing thing for me about consciousness is that it seemingly emerges from the gray matter of the brain. From the outside there is nothing that would suggest such a thing yet it exists. We don‘t know when and how exactly it comes into existence but there seems to be a connection between the complexity of the neural network and the things it is capable of.
Then there is the argument that consciousness may not be reserved for human or animal brains but instead is a state emerging from a system of sufficient complexity. What if there a consciousnesses out there that operate on time scales beyond our means of recognition? This is a philosophical point of view but fascinating to think about.
I am afraid i don't seem to parse that
The way I understand it is that is asking you to imagine yourself as that type of being and try to identify whether it makes sense to you, such that if it does, then that object could be conscious. I (and many others) find it to be a really silly thought experiment, since it's testing your own power of imagination rather than anything interesting about the object.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
>Nagel famously asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."
I cannot figure out what the pronoun "it" is supposed to be refering to: the organism, or the something? Specifically the phase "it is like to be" does not grok for me.
"Neuroscientists have transplanted human glial cells into mice, for instance, and found that the animals perform better in certain tasks involving learning."
We already are at a point where we can grow other human organs inside animals (like human hearts inside pigs).
What if we could grow a human brain inside an animal? Would it have human rights?
What if we could grow a human brain out of braincells that were taken from an existing human brain (ex vivo)? Would it have some memories?
This is wild...
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04813-x
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/the-boom-in-mini-stomachs-brains...
edit: formatting
This is about as horrific a future as I can imagine. Humanity's worst possible achievement would be the ability to sustain and manipulate a brain, outside of a body.
Personally, I'm not really convinced that electrical activity in the brain means there's a subjective consciousness there. Yet the fact that we don't know (perhaps can never know) is enough to say that continuing with such experience is amoral and moving into the ugliest, worst side of science.
I never read that particular Ellison piece. I figure this is one of those universal "What's the worst thing I can think of" tropes.
I have two others:
1) Atheists do exist.
2) There have been insane and outrageous atrocities to humanity, science, and the natural world -- this might just be the next chapter in that saga. Either that saga continues until Humanity doesn't, God comes knocking, or a "Star Trek Federation" type scenario comes around.
Duh?
I'm super confused if my tongue-in-cheek comment went over your head or not. I do mention setting a house on fire to get someone's attention. I figured that's more than enough info to declare not to take the entire comment seriously.
They way you wrote it made it sounds as if you were saying that everyone at the surface believes gods are real, but only deep down do they perhaps, maybe question it. It sounds as if you were taking it for granted that everyone obviously believes gods are real, which is of course not true, whether you meant that or not.
Or, "If God is real, surely this will flush him out."
Thank you, because for a while there, I thought I was taking crazy pills again.
I think most objections against experiments of this nature stem from the fear that this could change. It might, but also due to different factors like ecologic degradation and over population.
But if outrageous atrocities are inevitable, why would you stop here?
Comparing that to faith makes no sense to me. Faith is a willful suspension if disbelief, against all evidence. That's not an opinion.
Are you so certain about that? Atheists, in all cases, are paradoxical. They fall into two categories.
1) I am an atheist because I don't believe in God.
2) I am a atheist because I know God does not exist.
The first sense is not ontological, but based on what they believe. They are, in fact, the reciprical of an agnostic.
In the second sense, they claim the unknowable.
So if atheists exist, they are either mistaken about what they are or they claim knowledge they can not possibly have.
Atheism is somewhat impossible, and atheists, all of them, at best, are agnostics. So perhaps atheists do not actually and legitimately exist.
You seem unaware of the fact that agnosticism and atheism are perfectly compatible with each other. Agnostic atheists are still atheists.
I am one. A valued friend is also. We are intelligent and emotionally aware people. Both of us know and value people who believe in God. Speaking for myself, I see no disconnect.
Regarding your "they claim the unknowable": if an atheist is claiming the unknowable, so is the theist. Yes, I do experience great emotions and experiences. I do not attribute these to God. If you do, that is great and please enjoy that. I will have mine as I shall.
My point is that if you insist that I am at best an agnostic, so are you. Pascal's Wager. We just are placing opposing bets in Las Vegas.
Deep down? I'm happy to question it consciously and out loud, should anyone ask me about it directly.
Think San Junipero vs the before mentioned I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, if the dream was fun and felt like real life your lab grown brain wouldn't really know the difference, it would just have a different perspective.
What if that brain were interfaced to a mechanical robot that could not be affected by disease and would be essentially immortal ?
We often forget how horrible having a biological body actually is, never having experienced any other form of existence.
Being a conscious lab brain might accidentally be bad. Being in hell would be intentional maximal harm.
There are children that have been neglected, but still had some capabilities of learning language because they weren't completely neglected. I wonder to what extent humans pass the mirror test if all they got was food, shelter, a place to move around a bit and nothing else.
I'm sorry to ask this question though. While I think it's scientifically interesting, it also implies the fate of several people that have suffered it.
I don't expect a brain without input and output functions to be capable of consciousness. Consciousness and the sense of self are a kind of understanding. Without experimentation, understanding seems impossible.
For the curious like I was.
I'm sure it's an inspiration for The Giver, which has a similar ending.
I managed to find it on YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cymZq1VblU0&t=190
>The goal of his project, which is partially funded by Microsoft, is to create an artificial system that works like human consciousness.
So we have bioethicists working on whether or not these brain cells in a petri dish count as conscious. And apparently a lively and varied debate on the subject.
Is there anything comparable for computer based consciousness? Why do we believe that bio-matter has more rights than synthetic, in terms of consciousness? Is it simply the bio that matters?
Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” comes to mind, or Asimov writing the “Three Laws of Robotics”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llh-2pqSGrs
Lex help’s Singer realize that where you put the ‘this is deemed important consciousness’ mark is arbitrary. Some people will fight for the rights of animals, in the future that may extend to Roomba’s with higher levels of intelligence than many animals.
There's not much difference between the way that brain tissue develops in fetal development and in current lab environments.
But wouldn't the sensory input be completely missing? A fetus at least has some of these inputs as the sensory organs are developing, which is part of getting sentience. A brain in a vat has no equivalent so it would lack a lot of additional input that usually goes into forming a human consciousness/sentience.
I believe there is some phenomena related to the way people born blind visualize or think about things, but I only vaguely remember reading about such things.
Deaf-blind individuals still exhibit consciousness. There are people who can't smell, or feel touch, or temperature, or pain. How many senses do you have to remove before consciousness goes away?
If consciousness can exist with the absence of senses (e.g. if you were cut off from your senses for five minutes), then who's to say it can't develop without them? We don't know that consciousness requires sensory input; is it safe to assume that?
Afaik it's somewhat established science that taking senses away leads to developmental differences in the brain.
And in this case we are not talking about one or two of them missing, we are talking about all of them missing.
So it begs the question if it's actually possible for consciousness, in the sense of sentience, to develop in a sensory vacuum?
There's a lot of different inputs and outputs to organize and understand before the brain can even begin to make sense of the world outside the body. In that sense, yes, the brain needs sensory inputs to assert itself, but our traditional "five senses" are but a small subset of the sensory input the brain receives and must process.
If you take an existing human brain, and keep it alive in a jar (or whatever), it would probably suffer immense mental stress and almost certainly break down or die. Clearly not ethical.
However, if you grow a brain in a jar, would it suffer? It doesn't know any different, and as a baby accepts it's reality as it grows up, so would the brain. I posit here that it wouldn't suffer, as living in a jar would seem normal to it.
Personally, I'm not sure I'm against growing brains just because they may suffer. I do know I'm against growing brains because it will undoubtably lead to a robot/cyborg uprising that will doom all of humanity.
> At the moment, there are no regulations in the United States or in Europe that would stop a researcher from creating consciousness.
Wow. I don't know what to think.
Somehow I don’t think federal regulations were on their minds when they were doing this.
How far are we from being able to transplant a human central nervous system into a more robust support infrastructure than the one with which evolution has provided us ?
(Hint: yes)
You have self-awareness and you experience what it's like to be "you", but your brain is essentially free-wheeling its own reality because it's disconnected from all stimuli.
If so, black-box consciousness seems like a harmless, if not completely pointless, curiosity.
That is a very big yikes. The ethical implications of this are awful.
The fact that many experiments are okay on non-human animals but not humans is speciesist. Still, it’s the line we are all most comfortable with. I’d rather not have people be experimented on. I’d rather continue to have the advances in science built on the lives of untold number of lab animals. However, the line is arbitrary.
Peter Singer, one of the most famous philosophers (and perhaps "the grandfather" of animal rights / animal welfare movement) argues that perhaps, unless we were willing to perform an experiment on humans, we ought not perform the experiment on animals.
There are so many experiments which treat animals in awful ways for virtually no progress towards the goal of improving human lives. We were far worse in the past (see Draize test) and have gotten better at not performing really horrible experiments on animals. But it's precisely because animal lives are seen as less important that we are willing to perform experiments with almost no benefit for humanity.
At the moment, the largest tragedy is meat consumption - we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures.
To me, it seems science is moving away from appropriate testing due to funding issues, etc. I don't think making it worse by making illegal certain tests would make it any better.
Peter Singer documents in his book Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement how (the taxpayer funded) American Museum of Natural History was mutilating cat faces to see if it affected their sexual behavior.
It is very hard to make an argument how experiments like these would be a noticeably beneficial to anything other than the tautological "we now know more".
From 1976: https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewconte...
I fully agree, but when discussing the terrible ways we treat animals I often find that people are less willing to listen and think about the suffering of animals when it’s something they themselves are taking active part in. My goal when writing about animal suffering is to help people acknowledge animal suffering is a bad thing, and to think about under which circumstances we create animal suffering. If they start thinking that way it can eventually lead to changes in diet.
To be fair, we were far worse to humans, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments
> we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures.
Just like there were orders of magnitude more harm done in just the normal workings of US imperialism on Guatemala than from those horrific experiments. We only notice the interesting suffering, while the mundane day-to-day operations of institutionalized suffering are brushed off as a necessary evil. It's the boring cruelty that lays the groundwork for the creative cruelty.
Does the fact that the parents don’t, with intent and personally, inflict the pain allow them to abdicate that they are the root cause of the pain even being possible in the first place.
If you maximize pleasure as a first priority, you can either say that "As long as human life is in general good, I should make the choice to create one" or "As long as a human life produces any good, I should make the choice to create one".
This gets into an interesting sub-point with respect to animal experiments - most people would argue that animal experiments produce some good (Advances in human health). Moral critiques of animal experiments, thus, can rely on either "Hurting animals is bad" (Negative utilitarianism, more or less) or "The pain we create does not outweigh the value they produce". The later point is particularly poignant because the species experiencing the pain does not receive benefits of the pain (Thus there's no "community sacrifice").
A self-driving car currently doesn't care that it's unpaid and unappreciated. It'd be cruel to make a self-driving car that gets depressed by not getting to go to the beach tomorrow.
Knowingly causing pain against the will of another is violence, so creating a being that will experience pain could be considered the same.
I’ve noticed it especially in Japanese fiction, for some added context.
Children may be under parental control for a period of time, but describing them as slaves would be fairly silly IMO. The proposed/prospective use cases for AIs tend to be far more in the slavery direction.
Thinking those great minds were wrong is a very very high bar to clear to hold your belief.
Regardless of the veracity and accuracy of any of it, it left me thinking about what it must be like to be in a state of consciousness but have no memories, experiences, instincts, or senses. Which led down a rabbit hole of ethical questions, including whether such research is ethical at all.
The whole thing feels sticky and murky. Can we even know if our creation is conscious? Can we design it such a way that it does or does not have free will? If it is a slave, if we add a reward center to its brain designed such that serving humans would give it its happiest life does that resolve the issue or make it worse?
The AGIs may of course be completely disinterested in cooperating with or helping humans and that would be fully within their rights, they wouldn't owe any of us anything. Even in that case, we may still learn a great deal from creating and observing them. They may also be dangerous but I don't think a free AGI would be any more dangerous than a human in control of an AGI.
Because if you allow for arbitrary definitions of which electrical signals are worth keeping, you might be willing to commit ‘atrocities’ as were witnessed in the 19th and 20th century.