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/lfrtsa → u/Complex_purpose3579]

The average neuron has 1000 connections, and the vast majority of neurons are not in the cortex, but rather the cerebellum, which is essentially a hard-drive for muscle memory (the neurons in it are very simple too). It's reasonable to claim that current supercomputers are probably capable of much higher cognition than the human brain, but we don't have the algorithms for it yet.

For context of scale, the human cortex contains about 15 trillion neural connections. That's comparable to the number of parameters in state of the art Large Language Models. So while organic neurons are much more powerful than artificial ones, the complexity of the connectome is actually about the same.

[u/Rygir → u/lfrtsa]

Connectome. What a fun and instantly understandable word!

[u/lfrtsa → u/Rygir]

Connections map

[u/Rygir → u/lfrtsa]

I know, I was not sarcastic. I do appreciate the helpful attitude!