Yeah this makes me really uncomfortable. We have no idea really what causes consciousness to arise, but "enough actual animal/human neurons to perform complex tasks" doesn't seem like an unlikely way to do it to me.
"Unimaginable suffering in a petri dish" is not something I want even a tiny chance of creating.
To evaluate these chances, one has to understand what “suffering” is. It may (or may not) be purely evolutional thing which cannot be easily reproduced in a dish. Perhaps the whole thing is a plague that only emerges in/for natural-life conditions. While the configuration space is likely(?) almost infinite, the natural selector is only one.
Well.... no. It's only necessary to know whether suffering exists (it does). After that it's sufficient to consider whether there's a greater than zero chance of creating it (there seems to be).
That's enough to say "let's not do this until we have better data".
If it turns out the second step is unknowable, that's enough to say "let's never do this".
These are subjective decisions, and some may suggest that there are gains that outweigh the potential suffering. I am currently unconvinced.
But it's always unknowable. The only consciousness/suffering one truly knows is one's own. We just use heuristics like "this human/animal behaves like I do when suffering". Where we draw the line is completely arbitrary.
The unique data-point here is that we are creating these "mini brains". I'm not invoking a knee-jerk "sCiEnTiSTs pLaY g0d OMG!" reaction, but I will invoke Goldblum's Objection: "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should".
Like several others in this thread, I'm bemused that this passed bio-ethics. Drawing the line isn't entirely arbitrary, ethics panels do it every day. We already have the tools, but it seems that in this case we don't know whether to apply them, or which to apply.
> After that it's sufficient to consider whether there's a greater than zero chance of creating it (there seems to be).
That is a Kantian, deontological approach, an ethical framework not shared by all. The utilitarian would ask how much suffering would be caused as compared to how much good it would produce.
Erm no. I'm not advocating morality driven by "duty". I'm pointing out the pragmatic issue that we don't know where we're heading, so perhaps we should pause and have a good hard think about the possibilities :)
Utilitarianism also comes with its own issues, of course. Exploitation of minorities and the disempowered, for example (including manufactured brains-in-vats, it seems).
Given that they took skin cells, cultured them to pluripotent stem cells, then convinced the stem cells to grow neurons, I don't think they grew an interoceptive cortex, basal ganglia, or other brain areas necessary for emotional experience as we know it. "Exhibit sentience" is... well, let's call it a wordplay.
This seems like a research area so horrific it could exist only in a comic book. This type of thing should not be funded or researched. I'm surprised it needs to be said but we shouldn't grow human brains to experiment on them. Maybe if we could understand and quantify consciousness and be sure we weren't subjecting something to hell - but certainly not while we can't do that.
What makes you think that experiments on living rodents aren’t hell already? What is the crucial ethical difference between these species, apart from two facts, first that a full human has a legal status, second that most people will relate to an empty human brain more than to a non-empty non-human one (regardless of packaging).
I understand legal/relatable parts, but is there more to it?
One scientist studies tumors by causing tumors in rats. Another scientist studies tumors by causing them in humans. If you said to the second scientist "Hey, that's wrong, stop!" And he said "What's the crucial difference between rats and humans?" Would you be convinced by that line of argument?
This hypothetical situation implies something I wouldn’t fail to ask first. Are these humans persons or are they “empty”? I don’t see a difference between a {person,experience}-less human and a rat (in this setting, legal and parental implications aside), but maybe you do. Both are able to experience pain and negative emotions. One of them being of a [non-]familiar kind changes nothing to me.
Iow, put yourself into the shoes of that rat or that empty brain and tell:
- which one would you choose to be (if given no other option),
Well, is that not basically the vegan argument against suffering, in any form, for any type of animal or sentient being? The vegan would probably posit that they are equal.
Just as possible that allowing this consciousness to do exactly what it was designed to do and achieve such a sublime state of flow that it would be a crime to NOT let it experience Pong.
I agree that low numbers of neurons are unlikely to lead to human-level consciousness. I have zero faith that researchers in this area won't continue to push the limits - perhaps even if they don't publish on doing so.
I see this research as a red flag "hey, we are approaching something very bad" and while the flag itself may not be a problem we should heed the warning and change direction.
All this said, my understanding is that this research is in part inspired by or associated with the phenomenon of people with encephalopathy who have greatly diminished brain volumes but are still conscious. This says to me we can't reliably predict how many neurons are necessary before creating consciousness.
Indeed. Although the lab couldn't check for signs of consciousness. If they'd been able to do so, they'd have cracked the "hard problem" of consciousness, which would be far bigger news. So this is blather at best, and ethics-washing at worst.
I think "being able to describe exhaustively the conditions under which something is conscious" is sometimes called the "pretty hard problem of consciousness", as opposed to the hard problem? (Also considered unsolved though)
> How can you be sure that anyone other than you is conscious?
That doesn't seem like a more or less difficult question than asking how I can be sure that human neurons are the substrate responsible for producing consciousness. If it turns out that the other humans I observe only seem like they're conscious, then it could also turn out that my neurons only seem to be the substrate producing my consciousness. Of course, this is just terrible epistemology.
Yeah, and I really don't see how that substrate should be much different from that in other animals such as, say, chimpanzees. It seems silly to criticize this research just based on the fact that the neurons were cultured from humans in my opinion.
"Unimaginable suffering in a petri dish" is not something I want even a tiny chance of creating.