uh yeah, quick question, what the fuck?
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
143 points (98.6% liked)
science
20874 readers
121 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Please report for your mandatory brain transplant next Thursday.
That moment when your doctor runs sudo apt upgrade on your brain directly.
I've been really intrigued by the ethics of this as theres a lot of organoid conspiracies online and from what i gathered be it 40 days of several months this type of "brain" doesnt actually develop to anything that could resemble conciousness and is widely considered to be ethical.
However this is purely based on emergent concisouness theory and if you're not entirely sold on that then we might be making human lab rats trapped in their endless mind forever to be experimented on which is pretty scary, maybe?
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic scifi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
Don't worry! So long as they don't give it a mouth, they can't hear it scream.
I'm pretty uneducated on the matter. Are there serious alternatives to emergent consciousness theory that aren't religious, mystical, or new-age "it's the quantum maaaan"?
There are a lot of philosophy theories like panspychism (says that the base layer of reality is conciusoness not mater) but due to nature of the problem its hard to get scientific answers.
These organoids might actually be useful here for exactly this but materialism is so strong in academia and so incredibly practical (i.e. animals can die "safely" or be experimented on) that I think emergent concisouness is here to stay for a long time.
I don't see how emergent consciousness is incompatible with some intelligent animals theoretically having a conscience. Nor how having a conscience is a sufficient and necessary condition to having rights. After all a human baby's brain is not performing better than an adult dog's and we have no proof (that I know of) that newborns are conscious, yet we frown upon their murder more than a dog's. So clearly proof-of-consciousness is not the key factor.
This entire discussion about rights and welfare seems completely orthogonal to the question "what is consciousness and how does it arise". I think it is extremely naive to think that the lack of definitive proof that chimpanzees are conscious beings has significant bearing on our approach to medical experimentation.
Especially if and when consciousness turns out not to be an on-off switch but another biological spectrum, emergent or not. Fuck, we don't even have a non-fuzzy definition for what counts as alive, and we're out here pretending that there would be a clear one for what counts as conscious?
I disagree and I think you underestimate cognitive dissonance at play in our society. Other being being "less concious" is huge in justifying many of our actions especially if you take a look at countries like China or Japan
what is a brain without any sensory input, that cannot form concepts because it has no experiences? I cannot classify this as an conciousness, and i would have no qualms running experiments on an "empty" brain.
In Texas this makes the scientists the tiny brain's mother.
I honestly don't even think this is a joke
Taking it off life support constitutes an abortion in Texas.
Actually, no. Texas doesn't care about brains. If it had a heartbeat, though, then they'd be in trouble.
Oh, the article is from Popular Mechanics? So we can just ignore it entirely then.
I don’t know when it happened, but Popular Mechanics seems like it’s just, “Bullshit to make you open our article” now.
It links to the journal paper and other sources as well
That magazine has had people BSing since the 1920's I'm sure.
How long before they put it in a robot?
Wow! I wonder how long until people want to use something like this inside a computer
Want to, or going to?
That's been in sci-fi since before it was called sci-fi and before computers were a thing. So... probably centuries, if not millennia ago.
MRBO + AI = Skynet 🤯
So, it likes boobs?
Sure sure sure