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Something that's interesting here is that brain organoids have been known to exhibit spontaneous synchronous firing pattern generation, which may just be a thin
by roughly 2y ago
Something that's interesting here is that brain organoids have been known to exhibit spontaneous synchronous firing pattern generation, which may just be a thing that happens when you collect neurons in large enough numbers. There's two questions here - one, the more prosaic, is technical: how does a bioprocessor handle that kind of spontaneous behavior? The second is more philosophical, which is that we don't actually have a good theory for what consciousness is or at what size or level of complexity it emerges. We know the more we look, the more we find what looks like self-aware behavior in animals and the more we find evidence of social behaviors and what looks an awful lot like "inner life." One can argue whether or not a computer can ever be truly conscious, but a ball of neurons, well, we know the answer to that one.
- seydor 2y ago> may just be a thing that happens when you collect neurons in large enough numbers. Yes, cultures of neurons start having strong syncronized oscillations after a few days. It's an artifact of having a bunch of neurons on a dish. I don't think we should be ascribing anything more to it
- roughly 2y agoAt some point between that and human size, a cluster of neurons starts being conscious, and we don’t know where. All we know is this is the material substrate of consciousness making the motions of consciousness, albeit in a limited form. We’ve got no strong basis for arguing it isn’t conscious except our gut feeling about how large a population of neurons is required and no way to test whether we’re right.