[mattlondon]

Agreed....but! This opens some interesting thoughts about various things.

Sure this Petri dish is not intelligent and conscious. But it's just a load of neurons right, just like the Petri dish in our head. Are we intelligent and conscious in that case? Or are we just a scaled up Petri dish that reacts to more varied stimuli?

[austinjp]

This leads to a circular problem: if we resist the notion that we're just scaled-up Petri dish brains (perhaps because we "feel conscious") how can we be sure the Petri dish mini-brains are so different from us? In which case, are they conscious after all, to some degree?