[UncleOxidant]

"Hundreds of thousands of human neurons growing in a dish"

It seems doubtful that hundreds of thousands of human neurons would lead to consciousness.

"Although the company calls its system DishBrain, the neurons are a far cry from an actual brain, Kagan says, and show no signs of consciousness."

...then again, would they be able to tell? There's not a lot of I/O in this situation.

[ALittleLight]

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.

[austinjp]

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.

[drdeca]

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)

[austinjp]

Fair. I may have lost track of which problems take which titles :)

[tsol]

You can monitor brain activity. Hard to be conscious if there is no activity in the cells.