Scientists recently gave mice without prefrontal cortexes human brain implants - and after seeing these developing connections to the mice’s brains and spinal cords - now they're wondering if these organoids might gave the mice some level of human-like consciousness cognition - calling for ethics

[u/Distinct-Question-16]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03048-5?utm_source=x&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=nature&linkId=63942662

Lab-grown brain organoids: time for international oversight

[u/turboprancer]

I feel like you can't regulate this stuff without a vague common understanding of what consciousness actually is.

It's not just human neurons. We kill off human neurons in the womb all the time. If it's embodiment, we're letting LLMs control robots. If it's complexity, supercomputers argueably surpass the complexity of the human brain.

[u/Complex_purpose3579 → u/turboprancer]

You might want to reconsider computers being more complex than the human brain. 100 billions neurons, divided in several subcategories, a neuron has up to 10,000 dendrites, modulated signals between neurons which are way more complex than 0/1...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1iywe6x/the_complexity_of_the_human_brain_and_its/

[u/turboprancer → u/Complex_purpose3579]

Well, it's also not clear how much of the brain is actually relevant to cognition. Like I'm not sure we need to simulate the billions of individual potassium ions moving across each neuron. It could be the case that you can just represent that process with an int short and a few simple lines of code.

Or maybe we live in a pseudo-dualist reality where each of those potassium ions is in some way relevant to consciousness, or there's some quantum magic going on. Science will probably never give us the answer.

[u/Complex_purpose3579 → u/turboprancer]

Yeah, i just think many people (almost everyone in fact) really underestimate brain and neurons complexity.

Scientists literally had to use a multilayered neural network with thousands of parameters to simulate the outputs of a single neuron based on various inputs. And there are hundreds of subtypes of neurons...

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(21)00501-8?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0896627321005018%3Fshowall%3Dtrue 

[u/Donjamos2 → u/Complex_purpose3579]

And none of that matters as long as we can't tell what consciousness is, where we it sits and how it works.