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Impressive, certainly. But I'm not quite comfortable with it. Growing a human brain seems uncommonly close to creating a crippled human being, intentionally. I

Impressive, certainly. But I'm not quite comfortable with it. Growing a human brain seems uncommonly close to creating a crippled human being, intentionally. I don't know where the line is, but it doesn't seem good to me for society to be walking this close to it.

adventured 11y ago
If we can prevent consciousness from ever forming (referring 30-50 or more years out on all of this), while growing full-size brain replacements meant to be harvested for repair purposes for injured or diseased people, what would your thoughts on that be?
malandrew 11y ago
Without senses (sound, touch, taste, sight, smell), I would imagine that the human brain would create it's own little world. It's not like you're depriving it of senses it once had. It's not going to have knowledge of what being crippled is. It won't be aware that any of those 5 senses exist. It's almost as if a human missing most of their senses spent their entire life in a float tank. I don't think it would be humane or inhumane, merely different. Without tons of advances we wouldn't be able to relate to it, or it to us. It wouldn't even be aware we existed. In a way, its possible that the first intelligent alien life we make contact with will be one we create. As a specie, we've spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to make contact with intelligent life that might exist beyond our planet. Learning to make contact with artificial brains that we can hook up to different senses (artificial and mechanical or artificial and biological) is going to be awesome. It's even possible that the brain in it's own isolation from us even does something humans do naturally; it tries to explain and understand its world and may even form the notion of a god or creator that brought it into existence. Hopefully one day it will get to meet its creator that brought it into existence. It likely won't damn us or condemn us because it won't know any better that it was crippled, just as the religious among us don't damn their gods for not bestowing us with talents and abilities like omniscience and omnipotency.
- flipp 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair
  - malandrew 11y ago
    "With the pit of despair, he placed monkeys between three months and three years old in the chamber alone, after they had bonded with their mothers, for up to ten weeks" "after they had bonded with their mothers"? That's pretty cruel and totally an apples to oranges comparison. That researcher relied on the curse of knowledge and self aware to deprive the monkeys of a pleasurable stimulus.
    - Houshalter 11y ago
      Where do you get the idea that the monkeys would be even better if they never got to see their mothers at all? You are saying that suffering is ok as long as you aren't aware that not-suffering is even possible. Somewhat reminds me of Genie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) or Danielle http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2008/reports/danielle/ http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2008/reports/danielle/
      - stingraycharles 11y ago
        That was the whole point that was being made, that you don't know what you're missing if you never had it. The study doesn't counter that assertion, since these monkeys obviously do know what they're missing.
      - hueving 11y ago
        It's not suffering if you don't have any pain and don't know/desire for anything different. A brain by itself cannot even know there is a such thing as 'better'.
      - malandrew 11y ago
        To investigate the debate, Dr. Harlow created inanimate surrogate mothers for the rhesus infants from wire and wood.[10] Each infant became attached to its particular mother, recognizing its unique face and preferring it above all others. Harlow next chose to investigate if the infants had a preference for bare wire mothers or cloth covered mothers. For this experiment he presented the infants with a clothed mother and a wired mother under two conditions. In one situation, the wire mother held a bottle with food and the cloth mother held no food. In the other situation, the cloth mother held the bottle and the wire mother had nothing.[10] Overwhelmingly, the infant macaques preferred spending their time clinging to the cloth mother.[10] Even when only the wire mother could provide nourishment, the monkeys visited her only to feed. Harlow concluded that there was much more to the mother/infant relationship than milk and that this "contact comfort" was essential to the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children. It was this research that gave strong, empirical support to Bowlby's assertions on the importance of love and mother/child interaction. Another experiment by Harry Harlow. The interesting things to observe here is that the money felt attachment to something that provided it with contact comfort. The brain in question wouldn't even know what "contact" is because it lacks a sense of touch. With that in mind (no pun intended), what we're left to speculate is where that complex mass of neurons will venture. Will it "hallucinate and invent" something that provides the equivalent of a mother figure? Alternatively, (and I think this is more probably), it's possible that the brains we invent for a long time are merely equivalent to evolutionary stages of brain development from millions of years in the past. That begs the question, would the precursors of the modern human brain be considered to be an inhumane condition to the brain we have today? It clearly had a lesser capacity in all sorts of ways. The ancient human brain cannot comprehend, yet alone fathom what the modern human brain is capable of. By the time we grow these brains to the neuronal mass capable of human levels of thought, we will probably lack the ability and knowledge still on how to make it think like us because the technology for growing it bigger is going to far outstrip our capacity to coax it to grow a certain way (assuming we even know what that way we should grow it to achieve the consciousness of the modern human).
venomsnake 11y ago
There is no line. We are just animals. If we can do it to other species, it is no big deal to do it to ours. Also by definition science is immoral :)
- _0ffh 11y ago
  Did you mean amoral?
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    No immoral. Because morality is just justification for the status quo. And science is the most efficient way to breaking it.
    - _0ffh 11y ago
      Because morality is not applicable to anything beyond human experience. Science is not actively trying to subvert morality (that would be immoral), it just doesn't care.
Brakenshire 11y ago
But these are tiny brains, aren't they? 1cm x 1cm or something on that scale. That is far smaller than most of the animals that we hunt, kill, experiment on etc. It's definitely uneasy though, because it prods away at the fundamental moral distinction between human and animal.
witty_username 11y ago
The mini brain is probably composed of way less cells and connections and is closer to the brain of E. elegans.

adventured 11y ago

If we can prevent consciousness from ever forming (referring 30-50 or more years out on all of this), while growing full-size brain replacements meant to be harvested for repair purposes for injured or diseased people, what would your thoughts on that be?

malandrew 11y ago

Without senses (sound, touch, taste, sight, smell), I would imagine that the human brain would create it's own little world. It's not like you're depriving it of senses it once had. It's not going to have knowledge of what being crippled is. It won't be aware that any of those 5 senses exist. It's almost as if a human missing most of their senses spent their entire life in a float tank. I don't think it would be humane or inhumane, merely different. Without tons of advances we wouldn't be able to relate to it, or it to us. It wouldn't even be aware we existed. In a way, its possible that the first intelligent alien life we make contact with will be one we create. As a specie, we've spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to make contact with intelligent life that might exist beyond our planet. Learning to make contact with artificial brains that we can hook up to different senses (artificial and mechanical or artificial and biological) is going to be awesome. It's even possible that the brain in it's own isolation from us even does something humans do naturally; it tries to explain and understand its world and may even form the notion of a god or creator that brought it into existence. Hopefully one day it will get to meet its creator that brought it into existence. It likely won't damn us or condemn us because it won't know any better that it was crippled, just as the religious among us don't damn their gods for not bestowing us with talents and abilities like omniscience and omnipotency.

flipp 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair
- malandrew 11y ago
  "With the pit of despair, he placed monkeys between three months and three years old in the chamber alone, after they had bonded with their mothers, for up to ten weeks" "after they had bonded with their mothers"? That's pretty cruel and totally an apples to oranges comparison. That researcher relied on the curse of knowledge and self aware to deprive the monkeys of a pleasurable stimulus.
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    Where do you get the idea that the monkeys would be even better if they never got to see their mothers at all? You are saying that suffering is ok as long as you aren't aware that not-suffering is even possible. Somewhat reminds me of Genie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) or Danielle http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2008/reports/danielle/ http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2008/reports/danielle/
    - stingraycharles 11y ago
      That was the whole point that was being made, that you don't know what you're missing if you never had it. The study doesn't counter that assertion, since these monkeys obviously do know what they're missing.
    - hueving 11y ago
      It's not suffering if you don't have any pain and don't know/desire for anything different. A brain by itself cannot even know there is a such thing as 'better'.
    - malandrew 11y ago
      To investigate the debate, Dr. Harlow created inanimate surrogate mothers for the rhesus infants from wire and wood.[10] Each infant became attached to its particular mother, recognizing its unique face and preferring it above all others. Harlow next chose to investigate if the infants had a preference for bare wire mothers or cloth covered mothers. For this experiment he presented the infants with a clothed mother and a wired mother under two conditions. In one situation, the wire mother held a bottle with food and the cloth mother held no food. In the other situation, the cloth mother held the bottle and the wire mother had nothing.[10] Overwhelmingly, the infant macaques preferred spending their time clinging to the cloth mother.[10] Even when only the wire mother could provide nourishment, the monkeys visited her only to feed. Harlow concluded that there was much more to the mother/infant relationship than milk and that this "contact comfort" was essential to the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children. It was this research that gave strong, empirical support to Bowlby's assertions on the importance of love and mother/child interaction. Another experiment by Harry Harlow. The interesting things to observe here is that the money felt attachment to something that provided it with contact comfort. The brain in question wouldn't even know what "contact" is because it lacks a sense of touch. With that in mind (no pun intended), what we're left to speculate is where that complex mass of neurons will venture. Will it "hallucinate and invent" something that provides the equivalent of a mother figure? Alternatively, (and I think this is more probably), it's possible that the brains we invent for a long time are merely equivalent to evolutionary stages of brain development from millions of years in the past. That begs the question, would the precursors of the modern human brain be considered to be an inhumane condition to the brain we have today? It clearly had a lesser capacity in all sorts of ways. The ancient human brain cannot comprehend, yet alone fathom what the modern human brain is capable of. By the time we grow these brains to the neuronal mass capable of human levels of thought, we will probably lack the ability and knowledge still on how to make it think like us because the technology for growing it bigger is going to far outstrip our capacity to coax it to grow a certain way (assuming we even know what that way we should grow it to achieve the consciousness of the modern human).

venomsnake 11y ago

There is no line. We are just animals. If we can do it to other species, it is no big deal to do it to ours. Also by definition science is immoral :)

_0ffh 11y ago
Did you mean amoral?
- venomsnake 11y ago
  No immoral. Because morality is just justification for the status quo. And science is the most efficient way to breaking it.
  - _0ffh 11y ago
    Because morality is not applicable to anything beyond human experience. Science is not actively trying to subvert morality (that would be immoral), it just doesn't care.

Brakenshire 11y ago

But these are tiny brains, aren't they? 1cm x 1cm or something on that scale. That is far smaller than most of the animals that we hunt, kill, experiment on etc. It's definitely uneasy though, because it prods away at the fundamental moral distinction between human and animal.

witty_username 11y ago

The mini brain is probably composed of way less cells and connections and is closer to the brain of E. elegans.