7 ms·

While I like this at a conceptual level, I'm struggling with it on a personal, perhaps moral level. A real brain, trapped, prisoner in a vat... if it's a real b

While I like this at a conceptual level, I'm struggling with it on a personal, perhaps moral level. A real brain, trapped, prisoner in a vat... if it's a real brain, it's going to have some level of sentience, just like the rest of us. Yet it is a slave. This is somewhat horrific to me. AI never really bothered me right up until I read this...

hacker_9 9y ago
Sounds like something out of Doctor Who.
QuantumGravy 9y ago
Unseen suffering is non-existent suffering. With no capacity for understanding what, if anything, another brain is experiencing, it's easy to rationalize and dismiss. That goes for fully formed humans as much as lab experiments.
- balabaster 9y ago
  "It's a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark" - Nelson
  - QuantumGravy 9y ago
    Every few years, there are incidents of miners trapped underground, with herculean efforts to free the survivors. Each time, I ponder whether there have been similar tragedies, in some corrupt society, where the mine is bulldozed over, any survivors left to die alone in the darkness, none ever knowing of their suffering.
LeeHwang 9y ago
Yea. I have the same concerns. If this tech evolves, I'm really worried about brain harvesting or trafficking, we already have increasingly desperate people turning to organ trafficking, and human smuggling is tied to organ harvesting. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-trafficking-idUSKBN17S1V8 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-traff... https://www.decodedscience.org/organ-harvesting-human-trafficking-black-market/56966 https://www.decodedscience.org/organ-harvesting-human-traffi...
derefr 9y ago
> if it's a real brain, it's going to have some level of sentience Without a sensorimotor apparatus for the brain to manipulate and receive reward-signals from, and thus train to control, there is very likely no "thought" as we would consider it—nothing coherent, no train of thought, no high-level patterns. It's more like the sort of "thought" a foetus would have before its first moment of conscious awareness.
- QuantumGravy 9y ago
  I'm inclined to agree that such a mini-brain at this stage is most-likely non-conscious and incapable of suffering, but how would we know? Organisms with far "simpler" brains than ours appear to be capable of suffering. I'm unaware of the extent to which human embryonic brain development follows expected principles of evolutionary developmental biology, but if that holds, a sufficiently developed brain should at least be given equal ethical consideration as an animal. Vertebrates are commonly born with a capacity for suffering, so I question how much external input is required. If the necessary brain structures are there, those same structures should suffice for achieving brain-states equivalent to percepts of suffering. Looks to me like we're not quite there yet, as these cerebral organoids are pretty darn small and comparatively disorganized, but it's only a matter of time before the ethical questions need be faced. With a little searching, I found similar views from neuroskeptic. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2013/09/02/the-case-of-the-tiny-human-brains/#.WQOYINLyup0 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2013/09/02/th...
  - derefr 9y ago
    Maybe I used a very bad and distracting (and political) example. "Suffering" wasn't really something I was trying to talk about, here. (To be clear, pain is a matter of instinct, which is to say, a predefined brain structure that "works" from birth—and maybe before-hand—whenever it shows up.) Rather, I was specifically talking about this thing we call "thinking." The thing that humans do when they're awake and lucid, and don't do when they're asleep/unconscious/in a dissociative fugue. The thing that the courts care about as mens rea. Many higher-level vertebrates develop some capacity for "thinking"—that is, for planning/strategizing, puzzle-solving, learning and synthesizing information, forming concepts and abstractions, overriding instincts with beliefs based on evidence, etc. Humans and all other primates do this; as do crows and their relatives; as do dolphins; etc. But none of these animals start with that ability from birth. "Thinking" has never been observed as behavior available instinctually to any animal. A newborn crow or gorilla, despite being rather self-sufficient with a library of instinctual responses, won't be able to solve the puzzles that we get the adults of those species to solve and which we cite as proof of their intelligence. They grow that ability from months/years of life experience. In fact, almost by definition, "thinking" is something you have to build: it's a big conceptual hierarchy with sensory data at its base. And—as far as we know—instinct can't pre-bake the needed raw sensory data into brains. (It can bake in higher-level associations, like scent- or pattern-associations for predator avoidance. But it doesn't include these in low-level "raw" terms where a brain can derive any of its own interpretations or abstractions from them.) Without accumulated experience, a brain is still experiencing the world, and reacting to the world, and experiencing reward signals from the world—like most animals do—but is not yet thinking about the world. Thinking is a matter of updating beliefs about schemas/models/concepts; and those things only exist when derived from sense-data "evidence."
rflrob 9y ago
These brains are a lot smaller than a human brain---only about 2-5 mm across. While it's almost certainly a mistake to conflate size with complexity naively (songbirds are capable of pretty complex behaviors), I think it's much safer to assume that if human brains were capable of being much smaller while still allowing complex behaviors, they would be. Otherwise, we would probably gestate longer---compared to lots of other primates, humans are born "premature" in terms of developmental completeness. Also, as other comments have pointed out, these organoids don't really have any neural inputs, so it's unlikely that they're wired in a way that is at all analogous to real human brains.
namlem 9y ago
I mean, this is nothing compared to factory farmed chickens.

hacker_9 9y ago

Sounds like something out of Doctor Who.

QuantumGravy 9y ago

Unseen suffering is non-existent suffering. With no capacity for understanding what, if anything, another brain is experiencing, it's easy to rationalize and dismiss. That goes for fully formed humans as much as lab experiments.

balabaster 9y ago
"It's a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark" - Nelson
- QuantumGravy 9y ago
  Every few years, there are incidents of miners trapped underground, with herculean efforts to free the survivors. Each time, I ponder whether there have been similar tragedies, in some corrupt society, where the mine is bulldozed over, any survivors left to die alone in the darkness, none ever knowing of their suffering.

LeeHwang 9y ago

Yea. I have the same concerns. If this tech evolves, I'm really worried about brain harvesting or trafficking, we already have increasingly desperate people turning to organ trafficking, and human smuggling is tied to organ harvesting. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-trafficking-idUSKBN17S1V8 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-traff... https://www.decodedscience.org/organ-harvesting-human-trafficking-black-market/56966 https://www.decodedscience.org/organ-harvesting-human-traffi...

derefr 9y ago

> if it's a real brain, it's going to have some level of sentience Without a sensorimotor apparatus for the brain to manipulate and receive reward-signals from, and thus train to control, there is very likely no "thought" as we would consider it—nothing coherent, no train of thought, no high-level patterns. It's more like the sort of "thought" a foetus would have before its first moment of conscious awareness.

QuantumGravy 9y ago
I'm inclined to agree that such a mini-brain at this stage is most-likely non-conscious and incapable of suffering, but how would we know? Organisms with far "simpler" brains than ours appear to be capable of suffering. I'm unaware of the extent to which human embryonic brain development follows expected principles of evolutionary developmental biology, but if that holds, a sufficiently developed brain should at least be given equal ethical consideration as an animal. Vertebrates are commonly born with a capacity for suffering, so I question how much external input is required. If the necessary brain structures are there, those same structures should suffice for achieving brain-states equivalent to percepts of suffering. Looks to me like we're not quite there yet, as these cerebral organoids are pretty darn small and comparatively disorganized, but it's only a matter of time before the ethical questions need be faced. With a little searching, I found similar views from neuroskeptic. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2013/09/02/the-case-of-the-tiny-human-brains/#.WQOYINLyup0 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2013/09/02/th...
- derefr 9y ago
  Maybe I used a very bad and distracting (and political) example. "Suffering" wasn't really something I was trying to talk about, here. (To be clear, pain is a matter of instinct, which is to say, a predefined brain structure that "works" from birth—and maybe before-hand—whenever it shows up.) Rather, I was specifically talking about this thing we call "thinking." The thing that humans do when they're awake and lucid, and don't do when they're asleep/unconscious/in a dissociative fugue. The thing that the courts care about as mens rea. Many higher-level vertebrates develop some capacity for "thinking"—that is, for planning/strategizing, puzzle-solving, learning and synthesizing information, forming concepts and abstractions, overriding instincts with beliefs based on evidence, etc. Humans and all other primates do this; as do crows and their relatives; as do dolphins; etc. But none of these animals start with that ability from birth. "Thinking" has never been observed as behavior available instinctually to any animal. A newborn crow or gorilla, despite being rather self-sufficient with a library of instinctual responses, won't be able to solve the puzzles that we get the adults of those species to solve and which we cite as proof of their intelligence. They grow that ability from months/years of life experience. In fact, almost by definition, "thinking" is something you have to build: it's a big conceptual hierarchy with sensory data at its base. And—as far as we know—instinct can't pre-bake the needed raw sensory data into brains. (It can bake in higher-level associations, like scent- or pattern-associations for predator avoidance. But it doesn't include these in low-level "raw" terms where a brain can derive any of its own interpretations or abstractions from them.) Without accumulated experience, a brain is still experiencing the world, and reacting to the world, and experiencing reward signals from the world—like most animals do—but is not yet thinking about the world. Thinking is a matter of updating beliefs about schemas/models/concepts; and those things only exist when derived from sense-data "evidence."

rflrob 9y ago

These brains are a lot smaller than a human brain---only about 2-5 mm across. While it's almost certainly a mistake to conflate size with complexity naively (songbirds are capable of pretty complex behaviors), I think it's much safer to assume that if human brains were capable of being much smaller while still allowing complex behaviors, they would be. Otherwise, we would probably gestate longer---compared to lots of other primates, humans are born "premature" in terms of developmental completeness. Also, as other comments have pointed out, these organoids don't really have any neural inputs, so it's unlikely that they're wired in a way that is at all analogous to real human brains.

namlem 9y ago

I mean, this is nothing compared to factory farmed chickens.