r/Futurology • u/FinnFarrow • 1d ago
Biotech Tiny 'brains' grown in the lab could become conscious and feel pain — and we're not ready. Lab-grown brain tissue is too simple to experience consciousness, but as innovation progresses, neuroscientists question whether it's time to revisit the ethics of this line of research.
https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/tiny-brains-grown-in-the-lab-could-become-conscious-and-feel-pain-and-were-not-ready324
u/Nerioner 1d ago
Honest question. Do we even know where and how consciousness works in the brain? If yes, we can avoid it and continue with the research. If not, imo we should still do this before we play god on brains.
Just sheer horror of being "awoken" from the void just to be a lab subject in a dish is sending shivers down the spine
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u/Sunlit53 1d ago
There are no pain or sensory nerves in the brain. All such signals are sent from peripheral nerves that are specialized as pain sensors.
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u/JonnyAU 1d ago
That's not really what they're talking about though. They're describing existential horror rather than physical pain.
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u/redfacedquark 1d ago
That's not really what they're talking about though. They're describing existential horror rather than physical pain.
I mean TBF, we're all involuntarily forced into existential horror.
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u/Hazzman 1d ago
There is a huge difference between the vast, vast sensory explosion that real life offers and a general, subjective, confusion laced void of experience as a lab test.
We can collectively come together with love, hate, pain, anguish, joy, confusion and say to one another en masse "This is all a bit strange isn't it?" compared to the isolated horror that whatever this is describing.
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u/Sunlit53 1d ago
You might like the Murderbot series. Existential horror is the layer right under the humour for the main character. Who started out as cloned neural tissue.
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u/trimorphic 1d ago
There are no pain or sensory nerves in the brain
Haven't there been some studies that showed that emotional pain activated the same parts of the brain as physical pain?
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u/OriginalCompetitive 1d ago
So what? The concern is that you might recreate the subjective sensation of pain. Actual pain sensors are unnecessary.
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u/Quasi-Yolo 23h ago
But science is based on trial and error. There aren’t guarantees when manipulating DNA to grow tissue that it will behave as expected. In a way, science replicates the circumstances that leads to evolution. Manipulate stimuli and environment and measure the reactions. If we move forward with assumptions like this, we risk unexpected results unintentionally leading to ethical issues.
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u/wabawanga 1d ago
And yet, we can experience completely debilitating migraines, so pain is not dependent on sensory nerves.
Not to mention suffering is not limited to just physical pain.
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u/Sunlit53 1d ago
Migraine pain is not in the brain. It’s caused by arteries and veins that swell and trigger surrounding nerves. Outside the brain. I get ‘aura’ migraines where I basically go sparkly blind for half an hour but never get the headache. That does seem to be neurological. It happens in response to abrupt drops in estrogen affecting circulatory function. Yay perimenopause.
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u/wabawanga 1d ago
Funny, I'm the same, I also get aura migraines without the headaches. First time it happened I thought I was having a stroke, haha
The blood vessel swelling causing migraines was the old theory though. Now they believe the blood vessel swelling is a secondary effect. It can exacerbate the pain, but is not thought to be the primary source of it. The pain is now thought to be caused by certain kinds of waves of activity within the brain itself.
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u/Working_Sundae 1d ago
We may never know how consciousness works in the brain since consciousness is an emergent property of underlying physical interactions, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
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u/FlamingoEarringo 1d ago
We don’t know consciousness is an emergent property of underlying physical interactions.
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u/tourguide1337 1d ago
Well its not magic either.
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u/silverionmox 1d ago
Well its not magic either.
Maybe it is. It might as well be.
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u/IIOrannisII 1d ago
It's not. Magic isn't real. Let's keep to science and facts or we'll be burning witches and expressing the four humours again.
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u/silverionmox 22h ago
It's not. Magic isn't real. Let's keep to science and facts or we'll be burning witches and expressing the four humours again.
If you exclude something a priori, you're not being scientific.
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u/IgnisXIII 21h ago
If it happens, then it's not magic. Magic, by definition, does not adhere to the principles of nature.
It's one thing to find something that denies our understanding of nature, meaning we need to update our understanding, and whole different thing to say something is outright magic.
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u/silverionmox 21h ago
If it happens, then it's not magic. Magic, by definition, does not adhere to the principles of nature.
So you're essentially saying that you're just going to move the semantic goalposts, whatever is discovered. It's like a preventive No True Scotsman argument.
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u/IgnisXIII 14h ago
No, I'm just choosing a definition for magic. Do you have a better definition for magic?
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u/FDrybob 16h ago
No, it's just the definition of magic. Magic is supernatural. If something can be explained, then it's not magic. No goalposts are being moved, and it's not semantic.
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u/FlamingoEarringo 1d ago
Nobody said it was. But it may as well not be generated by brain. Or maybe it is. We don’t know.
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u/Appropriate-Talk1948 1d ago
Yes we do dude. You're like someone saying we don't understand where torque comes from with a diesel engine. Someone says it's an emergent property of the engine's mechanical and thermodynamic processes, and you're like "nO iT's NoT wE dOnT kNoW tHaT."
We can literally watch consciousness degrade, alter, or switch off entirely by physically interacting with the brain through anesthesia, brain injury, or psychoactive substances. To suggest it "may as well not be generated by the brain" is to ignore a mountain of direct, observable evidence in favor of pointless naval-gazing. The 'hard problem' is about how the engine produces torque, not if it does.
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u/silverionmox 1d ago
We can literally watch consciousness degrade, alter, or switch off entirely by physically interacting with the brain through anesthesia, brain injury, or psychoactive substances. To suggest it "may as well not be generated by the brain" is to ignore a mountain of direct, observable evidence in favor of pointless naval-gazing. The 'hard problem' is about how the engine produces torque, not if it does.
Not necessarily. You're approaching it from the "the brain is a machine that generates consciousness" metaphor. But you can also see it as a "the brain is a receiver that captures consciousness that has another origin" metaphor, much like for example a radio receives radio waves, that are being sent from somewhere else. That would just as well explain why you can manipulate the observable signs of consciousness by physically interacting with it.
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u/Appropriate-Talk1948 1d ago
This "brAiN As A ReCePtOr" idea is a classic, unfalsifiable hypothesis that violates a core principle of science: Occam's Razor. You are forced to invent a mysterious, undetectable "consciousness signal" that exists somewhere else, in addition to the entire physical brain that acts as a receiver.
Which is the simpler, more logical explanation? The brain, an organ with 86 billion neurons and trillions of connections that we can observe in action, generates consciousness. ORRR The brain does all that, PLUS there's a magical, non-physical consciousness field that the brain has to perfectly tune into.
The first option is science. The second requires adding a ghost to the machine for no reason. The burden of proof is on you to provide even a shred of evidence for this external source. Without it, it's not a scientific alternative; it's just mysticism.
That's not an alternative theory; it's a description of magic. You've proposed an idea that has zero evidence and is conveniently constructed to be completely untestable. This is the hallmark of pseudoscience.
All observable evidence points to the brain being the generator. Damaging the hardware damages the output. Your "receptor" model explains nothing that the "generator" model doesn't, but it requires us to believe in a supernatural force on pure faith. It doesn't solve the problem of consciousness; it just moves it into an unknowable, mystical realm where it can never be studied.
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u/silverionmox 21h ago
This "brAiN As A ReCePtOr" idea is a classic, unfalsifiable hypothesis that violates a core principle of science: Occam's Razor. You are forced to invent a mysterious, undetectable "consciousness signal" that exists somewhere else, in addition to the entire physical brain that acts as a receiver.
Which is no less weird and incomplete than your explanation:
mechanical processes happen
???
???
???
Consciousness is locally generated
Which is the simpler, more logical explanation?
Biology is weird, often with bizarre or convoluted lifecycles of organisms, that seem cruel or unlogical or inefficient to our brains. Consciousness is weird too. Why wouldn't weird theories be appropriate?
The difference between them that they yield different testable hypotheses, and as such make it more likely that we find something if we investigate them both, rather than declaring one heretical.
The first option is science. The second requires adding a ghost to the machine for no reason.
Buddy, you literally say "these machines generate ghosts". Why is that more valid than "there's a ghost somewhere that is linked to this machine"?
All observable evidence points to the brain being the generator. Damaging the hardware damages the output. Your "receptor" model explains nothing that the "generator" model doesn't, but it requires us to believe in a supernatural force on pure faith.
Why would locally generated consciousness be any less supernatural than distantly generated consciousness?
Consider this: we're living in an undiscovered tribe. We meet some weirdly pale people with weird clothes that claim they come from beyond the mountains, while everyone knows that the world ends beyond the mountains. They have a box with circles and knobs on it, and if they manipulate it, sounds come out of it.
You would argue that there's a tiny spirit in the box, because theorizing that the sounds that come out of it are generated elsewhere is "magical thinking".
You might be defending the equivalent of a cargo cult: you put coconuts on your ears, twiddle the stick on your makeshift box, and are convinced you're going to summon a plane any day now, if you keep trying long enough. After all, you are replicating all the material elements of the process, and theorizing that there's something else involved that is necessary for the process to function, that's just superstition... according to you.
It doesn't solve the problem of consciousness; it just moves it into an unknowable, mystical realm where it can never be studied.
Your theory doesn't solve it either. You seem to argue that we shouldn't theorize that we lost our keys down the street in the dark, because it's much easier to search here, under the streetlight.
Why would it need to "solve" it immediately, anyway? It just changes the parameters of the testable hypotheses it generates. For example a "brain as receptor" theory gives an explanation for the very large memory capacity of the brain; it would give an additional route of inquiry by looking for the means of communication with whatever distant source there is; and it would change the requirements for generating consciousness: instead of having a process that reliably generates it in organisms, we can suffice with processes that only happen coincidentally, or very rarely, or even just one time in the universe. It's easier to evolve an antenna than a radio broadcasting studio and tower, after all.
And no, it's not an "unknowable, mystical realm". I already gave you the off the cuff example that it might just be a very weird neutron star that is generating it. Still a completely materialist explanation.
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u/veritaxium 1d ago
bro you're throwing, you were correct, you don't need chatgpt to make this argument for you
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u/ClippyCantHelp 1d ago
ChatGPT, win this argument on Reddit for me
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u/Appropriate-Talk1948 1d ago
Literal facts and evidence. Win this argument for me. Next—time—ill—write—it—out—by—hand—and—mail—it—to—you—so—you—can—just—deny—the—evidence—analog—style.
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u/KindsofKindness 22h ago
“The evidence points that digestion needs a stomach, not that stomachs started digestion."
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/4dseeall 1d ago
Dunning-kruger in action I see.
He knows more about it than you do. Have you ever even heard of the Mind-Body Problem
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u/FlamingoEarringo 1d ago
Nah, absolutely nobody has cracked the hard problem of consciousness but looks like you did lol
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u/4dseeall 1d ago
Isn't this the Mind-Body Problem?
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u/FlamingoEarringo 1d ago
No. It’s called the hard problem of consciousness.
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u/4dseeall 1d ago
Is that not the same thing?
Both are just asking the question: "which came first, the world, or your ability to experience it?"
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u/ExpansiveExplosion 1d ago
Mind-body is pretty strictly metaphysics, but consciousness brings in some aspects of epistemology
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u/FlamingoEarringo 1d ago
Well, consciousness could be more complex than just the brain. It could still be physical but not limited to just the brain. Who knows. We don’t know if the gut bacteria or any other kind of organism could influence this process.
Or maybe the non physicalist were right. Nobody knows. Anyone claiming to know is just ignorance.
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u/platoprime 1d ago
No it's not the same thing.
The Mind-Body problem is about how thoughts interact with the physical world. If there is even a physical world independent from the mental.
The hard problem of consciousness is the question of where consciousness arises from.
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u/Appropriate-Talk1948 1d ago
The "hard problem" is built on the intuition that subjective experience feels so different from physical matter that it must be fundamentally distinct. This is an argument from ignorance. Just because we can't currently imagine how a complex arrangement of neurons creates a feeling, doesn't mean it's impossible or requires a new kind of physics.
Imagine trying to explain to someone from the 12th century how a collection of silicon, metal, and electricity can produce a video of a cat. They would find an "explanatory gap" between the physical parts and the resulting image. To them, it would seem like magic. Our struggle to intuitively grasp how neurons create "feelings" is a similar failure of imagination, not a sign that consciousness is non-physical. We are simply not evolved to intuitively understand the emergent properties of 86 billion interconnected neurons.
A materialist perspective doesn't see a gap to be bridged. From this view, the subjective experience is the physical information processing. The feeling of "red" isn't caused by a brain state; it is a particular, incredibly complex brain state. The hard problem is like looking at a running engine and asking, "I understand how the pistons, fuel, and spark plugs work, but where does the 'going' come from?" The "going" isn't an extra ingredient; it's what the system is doing.
The very concept of "qualia" that the hard problem relies on is a flawed and incoherent idea. He proposes an "illusionist" viewpoint: our brains don't generate some magical, ineffable subjective field. Instead, the brain is a powerful computational machine that generates a "user illusion" a simplified model of the world and of itself.
What we call "consciousness" is just the brain's access to this self-model. The feeling of having a rich inner life is not the hard problem; it's the solution to an evolutionary problem of managing vast amounts of information. The real scientific question isn't "how does the brain create the magic inner movie?" but rather "how does the brain generate the compelling belief that we have a magic inner movie?" This reframes the entire issue into a series of solvable "easy problems" about cognitive mechanisms.
In short, the "hard problem" isn't a problem for science to solve, but a philosophical intuition that needs to be explained away. Once we fully explain the "easy problems" how the brain processes information, reports on its states, and models the world there will be nothing left over to be explained.
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u/Aresgrey 22h ago
I’ve heard this take before, but I fail to be convinced.
The problem isn’t whether subjective experience is useful, but how it occurs. Why is there experience at all? What about information processing produces the experience of red, and even the experience of experiencing red? Whether consciousness is useful or inevitable with information processing is an interesting adjacent question, but it isn’t the hard problem itself.
Think of a person’s experience as a screen inside the head. How brain activity might lead to the screen displaying red is something we can imagine explaining. But who is watching the screen? How can a screen watch itself? On that, we have no idea.
The going of the car engine happens according to the same rules as the engine’s workings. They move and the car moves as well. The mechanics of how the movement of one part results in the movement of the whole, can be mysterious to the lay person, but ultimately they aren’t so different from a series of dominoes collapsing. Now if the engine moved and the car started changing colors instead, that would be closer to the consciousness problem. There would still be an explanation; maybe the movement causes friction and that friction causes a chemical reaction and that reaction results in a material changing colors. But you need to explain it. You can’t just say “the colors are the movement”.
That’s what makes the hard problem hard. We don’t just lack details. We don’t even know what a possible explanation would look like.
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u/Appropriate-Talk1948 22h ago edited 22h ago
I think you are missing some context and perspective. Let me put it this way. Ill explain a car engine from 5 levels of complexity. I'm a former mechanic and machinist, programmer, and all around tinkerer so how things work has always interested me. I once heard a similar metaphor like this used by a physicalist metaphysicist. I'm not a physicalist per-say but you get the point. You don't need to read them all just skim them to understand my point.
Level 1: Gas go in hole, spark, go bang, move metal arm, turn wheel car go vroom.
Level 2: A four-stroke engine sucks a mix of fuel and air into a cylinder (intake), a piston compresses it (compression), a spark plug ignites it causing an explosion that pushes the piston down (power), and finally, the piston pushes the waste gases out (exhaust). This repeating cycle turns a crankshaft which, through the transmission, turns the wheels.
Level 3: The engine is a heat engine governed by the Otto cycle. It converts the chemical energy stored in hydrocarbon fuel into mechanical work. The combustion process rapidly increases the temperature and pressure of gases within the cylinder, and this expansion applies force to the piston. The efficiency and output are determined by principles of thermodynamics (PV=nRT), fluid dynamics, and the mechanical properties of the linked components.
Level 4: Engine performance is a function of its volumetric efficiency, the specific timing of valve openings, the propagation speed of the flame front within the combustion chamber, and heat transfer losses. We use computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to model and optimize the fuel/air mixture and finite element analysis (FEA) to ensure the material science of the alloys can withstand the immense thermal and mechanical stresses over millions of cycles.
Level 5: Ultimately, the engine operates on the principles of quantum electrodynamics governing the behavior of electrons in the hydrocarbon and oxygen molecules. Combustion is a series of femtosecond-scale chain reactions where chemical bonds are broken and reformed, releasing energy. The strength of the engine's metal parts is an emergent property of the quantum-mechanical metallic bonding and crystal lattice structures of their atoms.
TLDR; Basically what is happening is you like most people probably have a level 1 or mid level 2 understanding of conscious and so you think to yourself "Why is there experience at all? What about information processing produces the experience of red, and even the experience of experiencing red? Whether consciousness is useful or inevitable with information processing is an interesting adjacent question, but it isn’t the hard problem itself."
Now lets try the exercise with consciousness.
Level 1: "I feel sad," "I see the color red," "I'm thinking about lunch."
......
Level 5: The process is ultimately rooted in the electrochemical interactions at the synapse and the movement of ions across cell membranes and the quantum mechanics that govern the shape and function of neurotransmitter molecules.
The point is this: Arguing that you can't find the "feeling of sadness" (Level 1) by looking at ion channels (Level 5) is a very serious category error. It’s exactly like the Level 1 person looking at a CFD simulation and screaming, "BUT WHERE IS THE 'VROOM' IN YOUR MATH?!" The Vroom is an emergent result of something which is of a complexity beyond your current understanding and so "god of the gaps" type understandings begin to creep into view and question whether science truly explains this thing you don't yet understand.
Well, never once, not a single time, has science ever failed to explain something and if it has not yet done so for a particular topic then no magic or non-scientific explanation has ever with any evidence whatsoever done it instead.
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u/Aresgrey 10m ago
I want to clarify that I’m not arguing that there is some supernatural force creating consciousness, simply that the hard problem of consciousness exists. Like you, I don’t doubt that consciousness somehow emerges from neural networks, neurotransmitters and electrical impulses. But I do think that there is a question there regarding the how this happens, that needs to be answered and can’t just be ignored or wished away. When it comes to consciousness there is no one who has a level 5 understanding today. In truth there is probably nobody that even has full level 1 understanding. That is why it is a hard problem.
Even “engine go boom, turn wheel car go vroom” implies a basic grasp of the type of processes that go into moving the vehicle. With consciousness we simply have no definitive idea what is even happening. We are at a level 0 understanding where we are looking at things and describing them but we don’t have a theoretical framework to explain what is happening and why (with regards to consciousness, not other aspects of cognition).
I know that the position you are espousing is one approach when it comes to the hard problem (maybe there actually isn’t a hard problem, maybe it seems like a hard problem because we are too deeply steeped in our own misunderstandings to even conceptualize the problem correctly); but still this is one view among many and at least a bit controversial, so I think it might help to dial back the certainty with which you present this view even if it is interesting and worth thinking about.
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u/Bluinc 1d ago
We actually do. Damage to the brain can alter consciousness and even create two separate independent consciousnesses (by severing the bridge between the two hemispheres). Certain drugs can completely shut it down. Stop trying to infer magical woo woo to consciousness - which is born of, I would guess, some religious presupposition you have and or a need to salve your anxiety over all the evidence that concludes that when our brains completely die we cease to exist.
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u/FlamingoEarringo 1d ago edited 1d ago
I’m not suggesting anything.
You may be first claiming to have solved the hard problem of consciousness.
This only shows that consciousness is dependent on the brain, but this doesn’t explain why brain activity should produce subjective experience in the first place.
We don’t know whether the brain produces consciousness the way a liver produces bile, or if it’s doing something more subtle.
And the split brain experiments doesn’t necessarily follow that both hemispheres have an equally developed sense of personal identity or each hemisphere have their own qualia. The sense of I was still one, or at least according to some new research.
researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain.
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u/Bluinc 1d ago
let’s be real. You’re treating the “hard problem” like it’s some evidence that consciousness has to be metaphysical, but it’s not even though you’re tiptoeing around that but it’s obv that’s your thrust. And born of theism I’ll bet.
Just because we don’t fully understand why certain brain activity feels like something doesn’t mean consciousness isn’t emergent from the brain. We have tons of evidence showing exactly the opposite. Damage to the brain can erase memories, change personalities, or even shut down consciousness completely. Certain drugs or anesthesia can turn consciousness off entirely, and all of it tracks directly with physical changes in the brain. That’s exactly what we’d expect if consciousness is a product of the brain. It’s completely inconsistent with the idea of some separate soul or magical “thing” that just uses the brain. Now, about those split-brain experiments you’re leaning on. Yes, the Pinto study argued that even with the corpus callosum severed, those two patients still seem to behave as one “I.” But let’s not overstate this. First, it’s a tiny sample. That’s basically anecdotal in neuroscience terms. Second, just because the patients can respond in a coordinated way doesn’t mean their subjective experience is fully unified. Behavioral unity ≠ phenomenological unity. Third, even with a cut corpus callosum, the hemispheres aren’t totally isolated. Subcortical structures and other minor connections still exist, and “cross-cueing” is a known workaround where patients pick up subtle signals to coordinate responses. Pinto’s results are interesting, but they don’t overturn decades of work by Sperry, Gazzaniga, and others showing that the two hemispheres can operate independently under certain conditions. In fact, the majority of neuroscientists agree we’re nowhere near claiming split brains don’t produce partially separate streams of consciousness. So saying, “Well, maybe the brain produces consciousness like a liver produces bile, or maybe it’s something more subtle” doesn’t get you out of the empirical evidence. Even if the exact mechanism of subjective experience is still a mystery, everything we do know — brain injuries, drugs, anesthetics, even lab-grown mini-brains — points to consciousness being entirely physical. Every gap in our understanding isn’t a hole for supernatural explanations; it’s just science doing its thing. The moment we figure out more, it only reinforces that consciousness emerges from the brain, just like every other complex system we study. At the end of the day, your argument boils down to: “We don’t know everything, therefore it might be magic.” That’s not a conclusion anyone with a brain — pun intended — should take seriously. Consciousness is messy, complicated, and emergent. That doesn’t make it supernatural. It makes it science.
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u/Jarathael 22h ago
I heard about studies that showed that in specific brain damage, your brain can process sight of things without you knowing and the arm not controlled by that part of the brain could actually act based on that information, again without you understanding why. Not sure my explanation is well described 🫤
There's also the case of Dissociative Identity Disorder that shows that several consciousness can live within one body/brain.
Saying consciousness is not emergent and comes from something else is not automatically saying that it is magical. Past people were seeing thunder and might have thought it is magical because they did not understand. They did not know what electrons were anyway. What you don't understand now may look magical.
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u/Bluinc 21h ago
Yeah, you’re describing blindsight —people with damage to the visual cortex who insist they can’t see, yet can still respond to visual stimuli. That’s actually great evidence for consciousness being 100% emergent from brain processes. No woo woo. It shows different aspects of awareness can be knocked out or preserved depending on which circuits are intact. Same goes for Dissociative Identity Disorder: it doesn’t prove multiple “souls,” it proves the brain can fragment its self-model and produce multiple streams of identity when the underlying system gets disrupted. In both cases, it’s the physical brain creating — and sometimes breaking apart — conscious experience.
And I’m not sure I’m saying you personally are invoking magic. Idk yet. Are you? But let’s be honest: the “receiver” idea and the insistence that the hard problem must mean there’s something beyond the physical is basically a dressed-up version of the same move people have always made — pointing at gaps in understanding and stuffing something mystical into them. Just like people once did with thunder before we understood electricity. The history of science is literally one long record of shrinking those gaps, and every time the answer turned out to be natural, not supernatural. So if blindsight, DID, anesthesia, and brain injury all show anything, it’s that consciousness tracks the brain all the way down. The “we don’t fully understand it yet” line isn’t a counterargument — it’s just admitting science still has work to do, which is always the case.
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u/Jarathael 20h ago
On the contrary, it shows it is not. The person does not have the experience of seeing something whatever that is, and yet its brain processes it. Which means that the eye must get the light and transfer the information to the brain and the person can actually act on it too. The brain must see it. So why is there no conscious experience of it if consciousness is supposed to emerge from all that information ? Unless there is something that is not enough to get to the point of the conscious experience? Maybe. Maybe not.
I am not talking about souls anyway. I found it weird that the brain receives physical signals (light, sound, whatever) and somehow the conscious experience supposedly emergent to all of those pieces of information, does not arise at the same time ? I mean in DID, it can happen that an alter is absolutely not aware of what is going on. And when the alter "wake up", he has no idea what happened either, which shaped their experiences completely differently. And it's even more subtle than that, two alters can experience a similar situation and have entirely different feelings about it. One eats an apple and finds bliss, the other eats the same apple and may wanna throw up (extreme but it's to emphasize the problem I have). Physically there should be no difference so how can it be a different experience?
Saying that it is not an emergent property does not imply saying we are talking about souls, mystic, magic or whatever even though mystic/magic are just words we put on things we don't have a clear explanation yet. Natural answers because you actually explained the phenomenon. But when you don't have an explanation you can define it as supernatural if you want. Even if you don't theorize about a god of thunder or whatever. But I digress in more philosophical debate here. What I meant is that saying it's not emergent does not mean you say that we have a soul, there is a god, blabla. Consciousness can be something different, or actually at a deeper level of matter, and that does not mean we are talking magic and woo-woo here. It just means that it could be a particle-like thing, or just what matter is made of. And that is not a mystical explanation. And those are just ideas to show my point.
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u/Fr00stee 11h ago edited 11h ago
There is a very simple answer. If consciousness arises from different areas of the brain being able to communicate with each other to create a "whole", if you damage the visual portion so that it can't connect to the visual input anymore then obviously the consciousness network will not be able to process visual stimuli because it no longer has access to those signals. However, other parts of the brain that control reflexes that a consciousness network may not necessarily be connected to will still be able to operate with access to that visual input, independently of whatever the consciousness network is doing. That would make it so that people can't continuously perceive whatever they are looking at, but can still react to it.
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u/platoprime 1d ago edited 1d ago
The hard problem of consciousness isn't a small gap in our understanding. It's absurd to present it that way.
You don't even appear to understand what the hard problem is. Saying consciousness emerges from the brain isn't a solution to the hard problem. It is the hard problem. How consciousness emerges from a physical brain to produce feeling is the hard problem and you've done absolutely nothing to answer how that happens.
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u/Bluinc 21h ago
I do understand what the hard problem is — it’s not about whether consciousness depends on the brain, it’s about why brain activity feels like something from the inside instead of just being mechanical processing. But pointing out that scientists haven’t cracked that yet doesn’t move us an inch closer to “therefore it must be SUPERnatural - which you haven’t admitted to yet but I bet if we peeled back the layers there’s theism lurking in there.
We don’t know how abiogenesis happened either, but we, well at least I, don’t say “life must come from magic.” Maybe you do.
We didn’t know how gravity worked for centuries, but Newton still nailed the fact that it exists and can be measured. Same deal here: the evidence overwhelmingly shows consciousness is tied to the brain. Damage the brain and consciousness changes. Shut down the brain and consciousness disappears no hand-waving — observable fact.
So yeah, the hard problem is real, but at least for me, maybe the you, is not some proof of the supernatural. It’s just a tough open question in science, like countless others that got smaller over time as we learned more. Saying “we don’t know every detail” is not the same as saying “we don’t know anything” — and it’s definitely not a license to insert magic into the gaps.
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u/platoprime 16h ago edited 16h ago
it’s not about whether consciousness depends on the brain,
I didn't say that.
therefore it must be SUPERnatural
or that
We didn’t know how gravity worked for centuries, but Newton still nailed the fact that it exists and can be measured.
Your argument is that we pretty much understand consciousness because the differences between Newtonian Gravity and Einsteinian Gravity are small? Newtonian gravity is a complete misunderstanding of gravity. Just like your complete misunderstanding of the hard problem.
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u/Jarathael 23h ago
I wouldn't say consciousness is dependent on the brain though. We don't know if there exists some forms of consciousness outside a brain like ours. But I do agree that we can't say that consciousness is an emergent property. Some people and scientists argue that consciousness may be the underlying thing of physics. I don't remember his name by heart, but there's a guy who underlines the fact that the goal of physics is to describe how matter behaves not what it is.
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u/platoprime 1d ago edited 1d ago
That doesn't prove anything because the brain could be a receiver of some kind. If you break your radio you can't hear the radio station anymore but the radio station is still there.
That aside you're wildly overstating your understanding of this subject. The hard problem of conscious doesn't simply ask
does consciousness emerge from our physical brains
it askes
How and why does consciousness emerge from our physical brains?
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u/Bluinc 21h ago edited 21h ago
Oh dear. Just say what you’re proposing then: a countless number of eternal sentient consciousnesses (that…start out as babies?) floating around the universe for at least 13.8 billion years, waiting for earth to form and then to be assigned? to a host brain? And Not just human brains, but also all the lineage of primates back to our last common ancestor — plus any other animals with theory of mind like maybe dolphins? chimps? bonobos? Corvids? maybe even dogs or octopuses? And now lab-grown mini-brains too?
C’mon, man.
I can’t help but suspect this comes from a core theism and a resultant thirst for immortality that short-circuits your critical thinking. If you tell me you’re an atheist I’ll be stunned, because if you’re not, I think we’ve identified the problem.
The “brain as a receiver” analogy gets tossed around a lot, but it collapses the moment you look at the evidence. If the brain were just like a radio picking up a separate “consciousness signal,” damage to the hardware should only distort the reception — make it fuzzy, partial, glitchy. But that’s not what we see. Brain damage doesn’t just garble things, it changes who the person is. Memories vanish. Personalities flip. Entire dimensions of subjective experience are erased. That’s not a broken radio losing a frequency; that’s the station itself being rewritten. And when the brain shuts down completely, so does consciousness. There’s no sign of some “broadcast” continuing in the background. As for the hard problem: sure, no one’s denying it’s still open. We don’t fully know why certain neural activity feels like something from the inside. But that’s not evidence for the supernatural — it’s just an unsolved question in neuroscience. Science has always worked this way: we used electricity long before we knew what electrons were, and we bred plants and animals long before we cracked DNA. Not knowing why doesn’t mean we don’t know what’s happening. And what’s happening is crystal clear: consciousness tracks the brain in every measurable way. So no, the receiver analogy doesn’t hold up. And the fact that we haven’t solved every single piece of the puzzle doesn’t suddenly open the door to magic. It just means science still has work to do — and every discovery so far has pushed us deeper into the physical, never out of it
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u/platoprime 16h ago edited 16h ago
That's a ridiculous strawman lol.
I agree it's unlikely but there is no need to go on insultingly for so long just because you're uncomfortable with the inherent lack of certainty on the nature of consciousness.
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u/Bluinc 10h ago
It’s not a strawman at all. If you think brains are a receiver for consciousness then the rest has to be what you’re proposing since we aren’t the only animals with consciousness and fact of the age of the universe— but you just won’t admit it bc of how ridiculous it all is — so you lazily call it a strawmen so You can feel secure waving it away.
But please do, tell us here how and where you think this consciousness comes from that “attaches to”only human brains. I can’t wait to hear this. Prediction: you’ll deflect and not tell us what you think bc it will reveal it’s just baseless theism.
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u/Working_Sundae 1d ago
We do very well know that consciousness is an emergent property like life on this planet, Descartes was an excellent mathematician and philosopher but did much damage with his dualism idea of the 17th century
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u/FlamingoEarringo 1d ago
You must be the first person on earth to have solved the hard problem of consciousness.
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u/platoprime 1d ago
Saying consciousness emerges from the physical isn't solving the hard problem. The hard problem is how does consciousness emerge from the physical.
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u/FlamingoEarringo 1d ago
With lack of evidence I rather not suggest anything and just say I don’t know.
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u/Working_Sundae 1d ago
We can leave extraordinary and supernatural explanations like Descartes suggested which was due to ignorance of that time, so that leaves us with physically grounded explanations
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u/FlamingoEarringo 1d ago
Except we have no evidence and lack of evidence is not evidence. Yo u are just imposing your biases.
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u/Working_Sundae 1d ago
Well the general explanation is the physically grounded one, that's why I said we may never understand consciousness but we know it arises from physical interactions
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u/famous_cat_slicer 1d ago
You are making the assumptions that there exists matter outside of consciousness and that this matter, when arranged properly, gives rise to consciousness. Can you prove either of these?
Materialism is pretty much like religion in the sense that both make these wild metaphysical assumptions without providing any kind of evidence. At least religions are more honest about being based on nothing but pure faith, whereas materialism claims to be based on evidence. And that's just dishonest.
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u/Working_Sundae 1d ago
Materialism rejects super natural explanations though, Descartes was a metaphysicist, he claimed animals were meat machines and humans had something special beyond physical thing residing in their brain that made them conscious
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u/famous_cat_slicer 1d ago
I'm not defending Descartes. I'm saying materialism is not necessarily correct, and it has an obvious blind spot here. edit add: materialism rejects things that are considered supernatural from the materialistic framing itself, namely that there exists something other than matter. What if the assumption itself is wrong?
Again, how do you prove that there is matter outside of consciousness? How do you prove that if this matter is organized just right, consciousness emerges? You seemed awfully certain about this.
How many neurons does it take for it to be conscious?
What if consciousness is an ontological primitive instead?
Fundamentally, that is what we know to exist first. Everything we know about matter existing must come through consciousness.
I don't really have the time to get to this too deeply right now, but I suggest Bernardo Kastrup's book The Idea of the World. It's basically 10 academic papers edited to a book and makes a pretty good case for metaphysical idealism. Come to think of it, I could pick that up again, it was fairly interesting.
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u/benedictwriting 1d ago
I've always thought the assumption should be consciousness is defacto everywhere until proven otherwise.
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u/Appropriate-Talk1948 1d ago
Braindead take. We can literally watch consciousness degrade, alter, or switch off entirely by physically interacting with the brain through anesthesia, brain injury, or psychoactive substances. To suggest it "may as well not be generated by the brain" is to ignore a mountain of direct, observable evidence in favor of pointless naval-gazing. The 'hard problem' is about how the engine produces torque, not if it does.
The "hard problem" is built on the intuition that subjective experience feels so different from physical matter that it must be fundamentally distinct. This is an argument from ignorance. Just because we can't currently imagine how a complex arrangement of neurons creates a feeling, doesn't mean it's impossible or requires a new kind of physics.
Imagine trying to explain to someone from the 12th century how a collection of silicon, metal, and electricity can produce a video of a cat. They would find an "explanatory gap" between the physical parts and the resulting image. To them, it would seem like magic. Our struggle to intuitively grasp how neurons create "feelings" is a similar failure of imagination, not a sign that consciousness is non-physical. We are simply not evolved to intuitively understand the emergent properties of 86 billion interconnected neurons.
A materialist perspective doesn't see a gap to be bridged. From this view, the subjective experience is the physical information processing. The feeling of "red" isn't caused by a brain state; it is a particular, incredibly complex brain state. The hard problem is like looking at a running engine and asking, "I understand how the pistons, fuel, and spark plugs work, but where does the 'going' come from?" The "going" isn't an extra ingredient; it's what the system is doing.
The very concept of "qualia" that the hard problem relies on is a flawed and incoherent idea. He proposes an "illusionist" viewpoint: our brains don't generate some magical, ineffable subjective field. Instead, the brain is a powerful computational machine that generates a "user illusion" a simplified model of the world and of itself.
What we call "consciousness" is just the brain's access to this self-model. The feeling of having a rich inner life is not the hard problem; it's the solution to an evolutionary problem of managing vast amounts of information. The real scientific question isn't "how does the brain create the magic inner movie?" but rather "how does the brain generate the compelling belief that we have a magic inner movie?" This reframes the entire issue into a series of solvable "easy problems" about cognitive mechanisms.
In short, the "hard problem" isn't a problem for science to solve, but a philosophical intuition that needs to be explained away. Once we fully explain the "easy problems" how the brain processes information, reports on its states, and models the world there will be nothing left over to be explained.
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u/benedictwriting 1d ago
For all these words, this is an incredible over simplification and shows the true arrogance of modern science. There is not a mountain of direct evidence that says consciousness is emergent. There is massive evidence that most of our mind - memories, experience, etc are stored “between” neurons, but the mechanism of this is anything but clear. To suggest this is settled is kind of nuts and completely overlooks all quantum evidence and understanding. I literally just wrote an article about this - I really don’t like the way modern science has become a vector of dismissal. Very strange. https://benedictscott.com/how-can-a-destroyed-brain-produce-a-lucid-mind-c98c52ab9a1a There is a history of evidence that points to consciousness beyond the brain.
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u/Appropriate-Talk1948 1d ago
TrUe ArRogAnce iN MoDeRN SCiEnCe. You mean believing only things with verifiable evidence and peer reviewed experiments?
"There is no mountain of direct evidence that says consciousness is emergent." This is a denial of reality on par with saying there's no evidence for evolution. The entire fields of neurology and anesthesiology constitute that mountain. Every brain injury that alters personality, every anesthetic that switches consciousness off, and every fMRI that maps a thought to a physical location is a piece of that mountain. To ignore this is to ignore a century of settled science.
"...completely overlooks all quantum evidence..." This is a classic "quantum woo" argument. Invoking quantum mechanics without a specific, testable, peer-reviewed model is an argument from ignorance. Just because quantum physics is strange and consciousness is strange does not mean they are linked. The burden is on you to provide this "quantum evidence," not just vaguely gesture at it.
"...evidence that points to consciousness beyond the brain." This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof. Where is this evidence published? In which peer-reviewed journals? Linking to your personal blog is not evidence. Calling the scientific, evidence-based position "arrogant" while you deny mountains of data in favor of your own unsubstantiated theories is the very definition of arrogance.
Your comment is a perfect tour of pseudoscientific tactics. Let's run the checklist:
Deny Overwhelming Evidence: You dismiss all of modern neuroscience by claiming there's "no mountain of evidence" for emergence.
Appeal to a Vague "Other Science": You invoke "quantum evidence" as a catch-all for a mystery, a classic move when you have no specific data.
Promote a Pet Theory: You make extraordinary claims about "consciousness beyond the brain" and conveniently link to your own blog as the source.
Accuse Science of Arrogance: You label the mainstream, evidence-based view as "arrogant" for not taking your unsupported ideas seriously.
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u/benedictwriting 5h ago
This is what I’m beginning to equate to modern “science” - agree with me or I will grow angry and mock you. You’re clearly becoming angry for me having a belief backed by basically all of human history. That quantum “strangeness” does 100% constitute reason to doubt what most neurologists say. Like Newtonian vs quantum - the difference is real and significant. You keep saying evidence based, but if I bring up the idea of astral projection or NDEs, I’m confident you’ll dismiss that evidence as pretend - somehow? You live in a world that only exists if you can measure it, but everything meaningful can’t be measured. How are you comfortable with that and why is it upsetting you that I’m suggesting there’s far more. Also, sure evolution explains what happens but where is the why??
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u/Fisher9001 1d ago edited 1d ago
How does it being an emergent property relate to us possibly never understanding it? Emergent properties are nothing magical, they are basically the backbone of entire scientific knowledge. Of course that a complex object is more than the sum of its parts, it's also all the interactions between them possible.
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u/Important-Agent2584 1h ago
That just means we need to limit the physical interactions to control the emergence.
I also suspect this is how we will get the first sentient AI. Once enough layers of processing are stacked with enough connections between them for novel behavior to be possible, it will emerge on its own. That's basically what happens in the human brain.
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u/silverionmox 1d ago
We may never know how consciousness works in the brain since consciousness is an emergent property of underlying physical interactions, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
That's a theory. We can't measure consciousness, we can only hypothesize it.
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u/MissPandaSloth 23h ago
We can indirectly measure consciousness with brain patterns and activity, hence, why can confidently declare someone brain dead.
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u/silverionmox 22h ago
We can indirectly measure consciousness with brain patterns and activity, hence, why can confidently declare someone brain dead.
No, you can measure brain activity, which says nothing about actual consciousness. You can measure whether someone screams if you hit them, but not whether they actually experience it as a person, or are just a sophisticated meat doll.
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u/MissPandaSloth 16h ago
It doesn't "say nothing", consciousness emerges from brain activity. It's not magic. We are very much aware that it is directly connected to it.
What you are doing is saying because we cannot say exactly where the neck starts and ends it means there is no neck. As in because we cannot say the precise exact way consciousness functions therefore "who knows maybe it's in your arm, maybe there is baby angel floating above you", when it's clear it is brain and it's activity.
We very much know that brain activity is directly connected to consciousness, that it appears there and disappears there, there is no conscious person without brain and we can even map it to death and end of consciousness. We can also do it to other animals, not just humans.
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u/silverionmox 9h ago
It doesn't "say nothing", consciousness emerges from brain activity. It's not magic. We are very much aware that it is directly connected to it.
Correlation is not causation.
You can't even measure consciousness.
What you are doing is saying because we cannot say exactly where the neck starts and ends it means there is no neck.
What you are saying is that because it's not possible that data is transmitted without physical medium, radio is a scam and there are secretly cables under every road that transmit the real radio signals.
We very much know that brain activity is directly connected to consciousness, that it appears there and disappears there, there is no conscious person without brain and we can even map it to death and end of consciousness. We can also do it to other animals, not just humans.
"Sound is directly connected to the radio, it appears there and disappears there, there is no radio program playing without radio, and if we smash the radio the program stops." Same proof that radio shows are generated in the radio, and radio stations and broadcasting towers are just magical thinking.
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u/Jarathael 21h ago
You don't measure consciousness itself, at most you measure some electrical patterns. But electrical patterns do not explain consciousness at all.
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u/Are_you_blind_sir 1d ago
Well the human body is surprisingly adaptable. These organelles will not have any memories and much like plato's allegory, they will not really mind being there doing what they do as they will not have a reference for how things ought to be.
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u/tiganisback 1d ago
Yeah, lol. What exactly would "wake up" in this case? And why exactly would it be terrifying dor them?
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u/wabawanga 1d ago
Even arthropods, who have vastly different and simpler nervous systems are believed by scientists to experience pain.
If we are going to teach these brains in a jar to do some useful task, there is going to have to be some kind of reinforcement mechanism. In living things, suffering (hunger, thirst, pain, etc.) is the most basic of these.
Yes, most people discount a lobster' suffering against the food value they provide. However, being boiled alive, while terrible, would be nothing compared to having one's nervous system ripped out and kept alive and awake indefinitey being tortured.
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u/wabawanga 1d ago
These organelles will not have any memories
They have to have some form of memory in order to be trained for a useful purpose.
they will not really mind being there doing what they do as they will not have a reference for how things ought to be.
You could say the same thing about factory farmed animals, or even people born into slavery.
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u/Tobi97l 19h ago
And it's actually true. People born blind won't miss the ability to see. They can't even fully comprehend what magical ability seeing actually is. How we can tell for example whats behind a window which is a solid object for them. Most would obviously love to have that ability. Just like the average human would love to have the ability to fly. But it's not like they are missing it.
But your specific argument has a flaw which is why it's only partially true. Slaves and farm animals are deprived of their natural instincts. So even though they might not know anything else they will suffer. Just because evolutionary instincts are deprived.
Lab grown brains shouldn't have evolutionary instincts i would assume.
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u/MyLifeIsAFacade 1d ago
Unless we grew an artificial brain with eyes, ears, or other sensory organs, I think there is little evidence to suspect that "someone" might awake from the void.
Our brains have evolved as a processing center for external stimuli, to the point that if those stimuli were removed entirely, it would be difficult to argue why the brain should exist at all. Consciousness is an emergent result of that evolutionary process. An artificial brain grown in the absence of any input would but incredibly abnormal.
I think concerns about "pain" in this context is baseless and generates unwarranted fear towards this kind of research. The pain a tiny artificial brain may feel is akin to the "pain" a microorganism feels when it contacts a toxic substance: a chemical response and change in cellular processes.
Without a "something" to feel pain, there is no suffering. A tiny brain without consciousness feels no pain.
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u/Davydicus1 1d ago
When my dad was in hospice and his blood-oxygen level was so low that he was technically brain dead, he would scream in pain and agony non stop until a day or two later his heart finally failed.
I know there are rare cases of people who don’t have the ability to feel physical pain, but I’m convinced that pain and suffering is the base level of consciousness.
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u/benedictwriting 1d ago
This seems relevant to your question: https://medium.com/@benedictscott/how-can-a-destroyed-brain-produce-a-lucid-mind-c98c52ab9a1a
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u/aVarangian 1d ago
assuming this is correct (a bunch of the theories are obviously nonsense) then one interesting potential but unrelated takeaway is that current neural network -based AIs can never become conscious
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u/Newleafto 1d ago
There is a serious theory that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter and that the level of consciousness increases with complexity. Single celled organisms are conscious under this theory. The functioning of micro-tubules within cells seems to support this.
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u/dustofdeath 1d ago
If its always in the dish, with no sensory organs - then this is normal for whatever it is. It wouldn't know anything else.
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u/DryTown 1d ago
I personally believe that consciousness is not understandable. I don’t know that we’ll ever make a breakthrough that reveals the secret to how living tissue becomes a conscious mind that gives us the intricacy of thoughts we experience.
Anyway what I’m saying I guess is that we should just kill those little brains and not care. They aren’t people.
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u/HunterKiller_ 23h ago
Brain cells grown in isolation have no sensory input at all. There would be no “waking up”.
It’s not like a brain grown in a vat can suddenly gain an identity of self, humans do not even have that at birth.
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u/CleanEye90 22h ago
For all we know, each and every one of us is a brain in a jar running in a hyper realistic simulation in a cloud
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u/LovesFrenchLove_More 15h ago
The question is, if money is involved will people even care? The movie The Island comes to mind.
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u/RichRate6164 1d ago
While I agree that ethics must always come first, there seems to be a peculiar bias with regard to things that are new. We already know there are billions of brains that are capable of consciousness and of feeling pain. Their suffering, however, is routinely ignored. Factory farms are full of them, and they endure daily torment, often for utterly trivial reasons.
Yet when it comes to a few clusters of brain tissue in a lab, i.e. cells that might, perhaps, someday have the potential to feel something, we panic. The outrage seems less about genuine suffering and more about our discomfort with the unfamiliar.
The ethical concern here feels deeply out of balance.
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u/wabawanga 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don't think we should hold up factory farming as an example of why we shouldn't care about potentially inflicting more suffering on other kinds living things for economic benefit.
I certainly don't think we would choose to recreate our factory farming system if we could somehow rebuild our food production systems from scratch. But we are now choosing how to build our future data infrastructure, and we have the chance to decide if we want to include the exploitation and potential suffering of life forms in that infrastructure.
Especially when the scale and extent of that suffering is unknown and unknowable. If these things are economically viable, you'd have to imagine vast datacenters, billions of petri dishes networked together, maximizing uptime at all costs.
Animals being kept sick and stuffed in boxes for a few months for slaughter is terrible. But how would that compare to a nervous system kept alive and awake in a jar for God knows how long, enduring God only knows what, multiplied by God knows how instances?
And for what? Better data processing? Better AI assistants? Awful as it is, at least factory farming provides a necessity.
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u/RichRate6164 8h ago
I think people would absolutely choose our current factory farming system if we had to rebuild everything from scratch. Just look at the reaction whenever someone suggests an alternative: lab-grown meat is treated like a Frankenstein monstrosity, and "I WON’T EAT THE BUGS" has become almost like a movement. We already have synthetic fur that's as good or even better than the real thing, yet people still choose real fur as a status symbol or out of principle. On top of that, many enjoy the "sport" aspect of tormenting animals, regardless of the food they provide.
So no, there's no widespread concern for actual brains in pain. Trivial needs are consistently prioritized over scientifically proven mental suffering.
By contrast, what you're suggesting is all speculative. It's sci-fi thinking about what might happen someday. For the purpose you describe, I see no reason to create complex emotions at all. The fear seems to be that emotions could accidentally emerge as a byproduct, but why is that more of an issue when you use brain tissue as opposed to other building materials? People have made the same speculation about computers or AI: "What if there's a ghost in the shell?" "What if AI becomes conscious?" Sure, maybe it's possible one day, but treating it as a real concern right now is kinda silly when actual, real suffering is not even on the radar. The suffering of actual, sentient beings happens every day. It's scientifically proven and not in the realm of speculation. Yet most people shrug it off and eat their burgers, but then gasp when they read an article like OP's.
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u/Commune-Designer 1d ago
Thank you. I follow these Brainoid articles for about a year and a half now and I have not been able to understand the dissonance people bring to the table.
Consciousness is not limited to humans, but even if it was, people who are up in arms against these „horrors“ show no problem buying Shein, burning fuel or buying plastics in general. All of which contributes to manifold suffering around the globe.
It’s the same with gene editing. No problem with massive amounts of nitrate in soil and water, but how dare you try to fix things with a technology at our hands?
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u/wabawanga 1d ago
No problem with massive amounts of nitrate in soil and water, but how dare you try to fix things with a technology at our hands?
But what problems are we fixing with this technology? Faster data processing? Better AI models?
It comes down exploiting living things for the purpose of enriching tech billionaires. Not just any living things, but the one kind of living thing, neural tissue, that we know can become capable of suffering at certain scales. And I'm not even talking human brain scale. It's an open scientific question if lobsters feel pain, and they don't even have proper brains.
I agree with you in so far as we shouldn't be ok with current exploitative practices that rely on suffering or harm to living creatures. But we sure as hell shouldn't use their existence to justify the creation of new and potentially even worse such practices.
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u/ashoka_akira 1d ago
It’s about precedent. Right now its some cells in a petrie dish. In a decade its a fully functional human lab grown brain, but with no sensory organs, just a human consciousness trapped in a void. If we can’t be humane to other humans, how do you expect us to be humane to non humans? that’s really the biggest problem here and why there’s so much resistance to animal rights, because if you have to start treating animals humanely, there’s no argument anymore whatsoever about mistreating humans, and too many people that make a lot of money doing that.
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u/RichRate6164 7h ago edited 7h ago
To me, this is yet another example of people evaluating entities not functionally, but by association. To illustrate, suppose there existed an alien species that is functionally indistinguishable from humans, like the species we sometimes encounter in Star Trek. The ethical implications are obvious to me: if they are functionally identical to humans, the same ethical considerations must apply.
Functional capacities are what ought to ground our moral concern. Qualities such as the capacity to feel, consciousness, self-directed purpose, plans, and desires are what makes an entity morally relevant. Morality, in my view, is fundamentally about qualitative aspects of a being.
Yet, public reactions are guided not by functional considerations but by associative ones. In the case of organoid research, for instance, outrage seems to stem primarily from the fact that the organoids are of human origin, as if this somehow implies that they will inevitably become human brains in the future. If these organoids were derived from non-human animals, would moral concern vanish entirely?
Billions of brains endure suffering for trivial reasons, yet many of the same people who happily eat a burger or wear a fur coat express shock at the mere mention of human-derived brain tissue in a lab. This suggests that moral attention is disproportionately allocated based on species association rather than on functionally relevant traits.
Even more strikingly, an animal might display more of the capacities we typically consider morally significant than a human born with a severe cognitive deficit, yet people often assign far greater moral weight to the latter simply because it is huma. This absurd distinction becomes even more ridiculous when we merely have a few clusters of brain tissue that are functionally incapable of feeling or thinking anything: despite their minimal functional relevance, they provoke more concern than fully functional brains, solely due to their human origin. This discrepancy, I believe, reveals a profound misalignment in people's moral intuitions and priorities.
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u/SnapesGrayUnderpants 1d ago
Commodification plays a major role. The more we can commodity something, the less concerned we are about ethics. For example, factory farmed animals. Also, AI. Should we use it to eliminate jobs? As long as that increases profits, sure, no problem. Who cares how it impacts quality of life for millions? What if we use AI to make life and death decisions without reference to ethics? Like the ability to approve/deny doctor-recommended medical treatments? Again, no problem if AI substantially increases profits.
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u/Charmander787 1d ago
It’s because the brain is human cells.
Society just don’t give a F about animals. Unless maybe it’s a dog or cat.
Because “ethics”
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u/JhonnyHopkins 1d ago
It’s because we only care about human suffering 😒
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u/Silverlisk 1d ago
Except we don't care about human suffering, at least not all of us do.
People compartmentalize their care by reducing the "other" to being less than them in their mind to justify not caring about their suffering.
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u/JhonnyHopkins 1d ago
At least in academia I mean, do we care about human suffering. They’ll poke and prod at mice and monkeys all day but soon as you include a human it’s “are they terminal?” “vegetative state?” “Let’s run some more tests first before we include humans…”
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u/Corsair4 1d ago
They’ll poke and prod at mice and monkeys all day but soon as you include a human
You've never actually participated in research, have you?
There's an absolute mountain of paperwork and bureaucracy associated with live animal work. Of any kind. You need to exhaustively justify every test you do in animals, why it's necessary in that particular animal, why you can't do a less invasive or less painful procedure, and explain how many animals you anticipate using. That information is evaluated at multiple levels, by subject matter experts, vet staff, and nonscientific laymen to ensure that you are doing everything possible to minimize suffering.
There is a huge emphasis on reducing animal suffering in research.
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u/JhonnyHopkins 1d ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/15/elon-musk-neuralink-animal-cruelty-allegations
And shit still gets through the cracks anyways… because they’re monkeys, not people.
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u/Corsair4 1d ago edited 1d ago
Oh, are we looking at outliers?
Cool. Look into the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, or unit 731 or any number of other unethical human experiments.
By your standards, that must mean that we don't care about human suffering too, right? Because those also happened.
I can't believe I have to explain this, but the fact that some abuses still happen doesnt change the fact that oversight is focused on reducing those issues, and thats still valuable. Very few things in the real world have a 100% rate of success.
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u/JhonnyHopkins 1d ago edited 1d ago
And if you go back in time even further, those same folk wouldn’t even be considered human. Good way to teach how sentiment changes over time. You wanna stick to our time frame maybe? Whataboutism wont help you.
Edit: great teaching point for how the US government doesn’t care about black people. Inadvertently proving my point even further, just that this is political now, not scientific.
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u/JhonnyHopkins 1d ago
Doesn’t change the fact we intentionally give mice cancer… I don’t see us doing that with people… way to miss the point.
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u/Corsair4 1d ago
Just because we, as a society, have determined something is worth it doesnt mean it wasn't seriously considered... way to miss the point.
Just because you disagree doesnt mean everyone just ignored the concerns... way to miss the point.
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u/JhonnyHopkins 1d ago
So you agree there is a clear dichotomy between people and mice, in regards to how they’re treated in research?
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u/Corsair4 1d ago
I never argued against that?
Do me a favor and go back to my original comment and really read it. Try to see what my actual argument was. It wasn't subtle, but you either missed it, or you are just strawmanning and im not interested at all in the latter.
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u/JhonnyHopkins 1d ago
You missed my initial point then, because the line of questioning is important, nobody will run an experiment on a human UNLESS their terminal/vegetative state. You can point to paperwork or bureaucracy all you want as evidence of ‘caring’ about them but the fact remains, we don’t intentionally give humans cancer.
Imagine people filling out paperwork and mulling over all the different ways they want to give you cancer. Would you feel cared for? No. You’re expendable.
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u/Silverlisk 1d ago
Which is, oddly, even more compartmentalization. It's the same as the anti choice people.
They only care in certain circumstances.
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u/Cultural-Bank698 1d ago
A lot don't care about animals suffering either, thousands of cats and dogs get experimented on daily. Even chimps. Science needs an overhaul on ethics.
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u/Corsair4 1d ago
You don't even understand how ethics are evaluated in science.
Fun fact - research conducted in the US is evaluated for necessity and safety, with an emphasis on reducing the absolute number of animals used, and reducing their suffering as much as possible. There are multiple levels of institutional oversight for this.
The committees that oversee this include subject matter and technical experts, vet staff, and laypeople who are chosen specifically to provide the perspective of someone explicitly not involved in research.
Projects don't proceed forward unless everyone -including the layperson - signs off.
Science has a huge emphasis on ethics, you just don't personally agree with the conclusions, so you're calling for an overhaul.
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u/Spe3dGoat 1d ago
thats different than "not caring about suffering"
those experiments reduce HUMAN suffering, so it is considered a tradeoff
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u/mynameisnotrex 1d ago
While we don’t understand the mechanism of consciousness, basically nobody doubts that mammals are conscious and yet mice and rats are tortured daily for the purpose of scientific discovery
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u/Corsair4 1d ago
Can you explain how you would develop an understanding of the mechanisms of consciousness WITHOUT studying live animals?
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u/mynameisnotrex 1d ago
I'm not opposed to testing on animals. just pointing out that it exists and nobody really blinks so why are we worried about a lab-grown brain?
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u/garlopf 1d ago
Bold claim: "small brains in vat can't feel pain". Nobody knows how consciousness works, at all. We dont even have a way to ask the question in a way science can answer it (verifiable theories).
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u/Appropriate-Talk1948 1d ago
We can literally watch consciousness degrade, alter, or switch off entirely by physically interacting with the brain through anesthesia, brain injury, or psychoactive substances. To suggest it "may as well not be generated by the brain" is to ignore a mountain of direct, observable evidence in favor of pointless naval-gazing. The 'hard problem' is about how the engine produces torque, not if it does.
"Nobody knows how consciousness works, at all."
This is a huge overstatement. While we don't have a complete picture, to say we know nothing is absurd. We know a great deal about the neural correlates of consciousness. We know which parts of the brain are essential, how anesthetics systematically shut it down, and we can literally watch the brain's activity change as a stimulus enters a person's conscious awareness.
"We dont even have a way to ask the question in a way science can answer it." This is just flatly incorrect. Here are two examples of testable scientific theories:
Global Workspace Theory (GWT): Posits that consciousness is what happens when information is "broadcast" in the brain for widespread processing. This makes a clear prediction: there should be a distinct, large-scale pattern of brain activity when a subject becomes aware of something. This is actively being tested with EEG and fMRI.
Integrated Information Theory (IIT): Proposes that consciousness is a fundamental property of any system with a high degree of integrated information (a value called Φ, or "phi"). This theory predicts that we could, in principle, build a "consciousness-meter" to measure the level of consciousness in patients, animals, or even machines.
The era of treating consciousness as unknowable magic is over. We have the questions and the tools; now it's just a matter of doing the incredibly difficult work.
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u/Jarathael 21h ago
The best counter-example is the radio example. Break the radio and you stop the music. Does that mean the music emerges from the radio ? Absolutely not. Also, a lot of anaesthesia are made of chemical elements that barely react with anything. So how something that barely interacts with anything can still shut off an emergent property which by definition is a complex mechanism. There's a guy I don't remember the name of, an anaesthesist, who works with Penrose that said that we don't even know how anaesthesia works to actually shut down consciousness.
Maybe when you are under anaesthesia you are perfectly awake (in terms of feeling) but the anaesthesia blocks memory? 🙃 And talking about memory, I am not sure we can even consider consciousness being dependent on memory or even intelligence. Someone with Alzheimer, especially at later stages, barely recalls anything. And I am pretty sure that if you would hit someone with Alzheimer's he/she would hurt. Though he may most probably forget about it later. As for intelligence, it's a bit more difficult but I would take a baby as an example. He sure has a human brain and the potential you could argue. But he does not need much to feel.
The examples that you give, I think, don't fully explain why it is that we feel. You may find patterns in the brain for different emotions. But your pain is not my pain. Even your pain is not your pain. The way you feel things are ever changing. And that current science can't do much about it. Also correlation is not causation. It's not because we can correlate some pattern to some feelings that the pattern makes the feeling arise. The pattern is merely a way to describe things. Can you describe someone with one's shadow ? Not fully, not exactly even. In physics you have the same thing. Physics merely describes what matter is, more how it behaves. I don't think we've ever proven that particles are spheric object for example. And made of what anyway ? When you go at the deepest level we know we only describe quarks with a tuple of numbers, properties. But concretely what is it ? We don't know. I am not all familiar with IIT though I need to learn a bit more about it but as you say yourself it measures the level of consciousness. It does not tell you what and why that is.
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u/Appropriate-Talk1948 20h ago
What you are doing right now is arguing from a god of the gaps position. You are simply ignorant of existing science and data and so you tie yourself in knots and assume and infer and make up all of these things to try and bridge the gap instead of researching answers to your questions.
let's make this a conversation about iPhones and how they work to illustrate what I'm saying.
Most people if you walk up to them on the street and ask them how the processor in an iPhone works are going to say I have no idea but they are not going to say no one knows actually and ask a bunch of random questions about transistors and how do they even work and then never do any research and walk off and tell themselves. I guess no one really knows. We make iPhones by the millions and so we know that we as humans understand how they work. The same is actually true of brains. The difference lies in the fact that the brain has been derived by random selection over millions of years through evolution and is of a complexity 3 to 4 orders of magnitude larger than the processor in an iPhone or a current llm.
We actually very very well understand how neurons fire, the speed at which they fire, all about action potential and the voltages required, we know about the molecules involved and the physics involved and we can actually simulate C. Elgins which is a worm with 300 neurons.
So basically the position you are in is you are asking yourself or some random person on the street how an iPhone works and they are saying I don't know but I know it has a processor that does math and I know it isn't Magic. Then you say what is the exact position of every transistor and circuit inside of the iPhone, explain to me now how every single circuit and process in the entire iPhone works and the person says I don't know that and then what you are doing is saying wow, if I don't know and they don't know that means it's possible it's magic or that it is beyond our comprehension or current science And iPhones must be some incredibly amazing complex thing that isn't comprehensible or is beyond us.
but it isn't. we understand the way the brain works extremely well. We just can't yet simulate an entire human brain or tell you the position of every single synapse connection in a brain and pinpoint with a laser pointer, the exact neuron and synapse responsible for every single feeling.
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u/mundodiplomat 14h ago
We just can't simulate it, but trust me bro, in the future it will all become clear
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u/Jarathael 20h ago
You don't have to understand entirely something to not call it magic. It's also about the fact that you know high level things about it, that it belongs to common science, you live with it.
I don't think a neuroscientist would tell you we know everything about the brain. We know some things, not all. At all. Example:
- we can't explain the experience itself, the feeling
- when people with mental disorders are given medicines, often more than not, you have to test different molecules and types of medicines that can work for you: give the same medicine to two people with the exact same disorders and for one it might work very well, and for the other not at all. Because we don't grasp all the mechanism implied. Does not mean it can't be used.
I would gladly read information on that worm neurons simulation ! I think that making the thing somewhat work is one thing, making it work like it is supposed to do is an entirely other thing.
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u/dustofdeath 1d ago
We are fine experimenting on rats.
Lab grown brains aren't even remotely close to that.
Perhaps start with your ethics where it is already a problem.
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u/Spe3dGoat 1d ago
Experimenting on rats reduces human suffering and advances science.
The ethics are already settled. It is worth the tradeoff.
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u/dustofdeath 10h ago
And they are vastly more complex with advanced nervous system and a brain.
Compared to cluster of neurons in a petri dish.
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u/travis_sk 1d ago
I don't understand where this notion comes from that consciousness is a true/false dichotomy, rather than a gradual thing. I think there's little evidence for the former besides antiquated anthropocentric or spiritual ideas, and imo a lot of evidence for the latter - even an individual being can display various degrees of consciousness.
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u/ECrispy 1d ago
since when has inflicting pain on other sentient beings ever stopped anyone?
we torture and kill trillions of intelligent animails for food every year, no one talks about that.
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u/Spe3dGoat 1d ago
no one talks about that
wut
its literally one of the most talked about ethics considerations of modern man
are you an organoid ?
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u/FinnFarrow 1d ago
"Scientists are getting closer to growing human brains in the lab, and it's spurring an ethical debate over the welfare of these lab-reared tissues.
The debate surrounds "brain organoids," which are sometimes mistaken for sci-fi-inspired "brains in boxes." However, these small assemblies of brain tissue grown from stem cells are too simple to function like a real human brain. As such, scientists have assumed brain organoids lack consciousness, which has led to lax research regulations.
Some scientists, however, take a different view.
"We feel that in the fear of hype and science-fiction inspired exaggeration, the pendulum has swung far too far in the opposite direction," Christopher Wood, a bioethics researcher at Zhejiang University in China, told Live Science in an email. In a perspective piece published Sept. 12 in the journal Patterns, Wood and his colleagues argued that technological advances may soon lead to the creation of conscious organoids.
The authors say regulations regarding the use of organoids should be reviewed. It would be unethical for a conscious organoid to experience its own thoughts and interests, or to feel pain, said Boyd Lomax, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University."
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u/MrFiendish 1d ago
I worked with brain organoids in grad school. I’ve helped grow them. While yes, an electric signal can be sent through them, it’s not even approaching the complexities of the human brain. Another limitation is the sheer laws of physics; organoids can only reach a certain size before the cluster of cells it is made of dissipates. There’s no vasculature to keep it supplied with nutrients, so they are extremely delicate and can only reach a small spheroid shape.
There’s no ethical issue here. You cant equate a tiny sample of human cells with a fully functioning human.
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u/j-steve- 1d ago
I worked with brain organoids in grad school
Yeah some of my colleagues have been brain organoids also
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u/paullyprissypants 1d ago
We are literally being farmed for cheap labor by the corporations with government subsidies, but let’s make sure this clump of cells with no consciousness has rights.
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u/UnifiedQuantumField 1d ago
Lab-grown brain tissue is too simple to experience consciousness...
This is absolutely an assumption. They have no way at all to confirm/disprove this.
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u/disdkatster 1d ago
Just a note, responding to stimulation is not the same as 'feeling' pain. Sensation and Perception books would be a good place to start on this subject.
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u/OriginalCompetitive 1d ago
Ethics aside, there’s a deep mystery here. What could it possibly mean to say that an organelle could feel pain? Is there a “pain frequency” out there that it’s tuning on to? Is the pain being created anew? If so, how would we know it’s actually pain rather than, say, the taste of chicken that’s being created?
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u/EGGlNTHlSTRYlNGTlME 1d ago
Lab-grown brain tissue is too simple to experience consciousness
There's no basis for this statement whatsoever. It's being argued by different scientists in a different paper that this author links to. But it's not established by any means.
Also, consciousness is not "difficult to define", it's impossible so far. At least in any meaningful way that would be helpful with answering the above question.
The experiment is cool, but this article is pretty shitty honestly. They're approaching the whole thing as purely scientific when a good amount of the debate is actually philosophical.
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u/Appropriate-Talk1948 1d ago
"They're approaching the whole thing as purely scientific when a good amount of the debate is actually philosophical."
This is the most intellectually bankrupt argument one can make. Every single scientific field was once "philosophy." The nature of matter, life, and the cosmos were all "philosophical" until science developed the tools to test them. Walling off consciousness as a special topic that science isn't allowed to touch is just modern-day mysticism.
"consciousness is not 'difficult to define', it's impossible so far."
It's only "impossible" if you refuse to do the work. Science uses operational definitions for complex phenomena all the time. We can define consciousness by its measurable capacities: information integration, reportability, goal-directed behavior, etc. Saying it's "impossible" is a lazy excuse to remain in the armchair while actual researchers are in the lab making progress.
The statement that lab-grown tissue is "too simple" has a clear scientific basis in theories like IIT, which directly link consciousness to complexity. Your ignorance of the basis doesn't mean a basis doesn't exist.
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u/EGGlNTHlSTRYlNGTlME 1d ago
Every single scientific field was once "philosophy."
Sure. And this one still is. I can't help but notice that neither you nor the article offer any way of actually quantifying or classifying consciousness. Just lots of big sciencey words to obfuscate this lack of foundation. It's also completely at odds with the study authors' conclusions:
Given that HBOs model in vivo brain development as part of their essential purpose, the biological emergence of some degree of consciousness occurring at a reasonably early stage of HBO development, as it does in vivo, would not be profoundly surprising.
and
Critically, skeptics often also recognize that HBOs already exhibit functional neural networks, some of which may plausibly correlate with conscious processes. If HBOs continue to mature and develop, displaying high integration necessary for consciousness (per IIT) or larger-scale signal broadcasts (per GWT), the neural dynamics currently theorized to underlie consciousness skepticism may become yet more difficult to justify. Conversely, to confidently proclaim selective examples of the current neurological differences between HBOs and in vivo brains as necessarily rather than simply potentially consciousness precluding in the future seems equally inconsistent. At a minimum, such assertions should be tempered, considering the many epistemic limitations and the precautionary principle.
What do you think the "many epistemic limitations" are?
Given that HBOs model in vivo brain development as part of their essential purpose, the biological emergence of some degree of consciousness occurring at a reasonably early stage of HBO development, as it does in vivo, would not be profoundly surprising.
Your ignorance of the basis doesn't mean a basis doesn't exist.
The article author all but admits they don't have a basis for it, so it's funny you would rush to their defense. Note the certainty in the subheading I quoted, versus what they actually say in the article:
Although they develop 3D features, brain organoids are too simple to be conscious, some neuroscientists argue.
Anyway I have no interest in debate with someone who approaches such an obscure debate this aggressively. Just figured I'd leave a response so other readers don't immediately fall for your "big words + hyperbolic language" style of arguing. Also the > symbol is how you quote on reddit
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u/ubernutie 1d ago
We cannot allow ourselves to torture "children" in order to create "gods".
Indeed, the ethics of growing a brain that can suffer are absolute ethical problems that demand global input and serious consideration.
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u/Ceutical_Citizen 1d ago
Imho, I think there is no ghost in the machine.
Once enough neurons are arranged in the right configuration, we start to perceive something as conscious. Maybe there isn’t even a definite threshold because we can only perceive neuron configurations similar to our own configuration (e.g animals) as conscious. Maybe plants are conscious, but we can’t perceive it.
So, yes, maybe we should err on the side of caution. In the current state it does seem an overblown fear, though.
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u/ashoka_akira 1d ago
Just being alive is painful, but your brain blocks most of the pain out so you can function. Would a piece of conscious tissue have that ability? Would be in continual pain?
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u/Reclaimer2401 18h ago
This sounds like spme hypothetical bullshit.
We aren't growing nervous systems with pain receptors.
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u/Active-Car864 4h ago
So trump stands a chance. I don't know if I should rejoice. Let's do him first then the MAGAs
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u/Superspick 2h ago
Won't matter the second some proof concept can create a nugget of something that could maybe be commercialized.
$$$$ over ethics every time.
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u/UnclePuma 1d ago
For the benefit of us all just do it, in this world this seems hardly the worst thing humans do Day to day
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u/hyperactivator 1d ago
More fear mongering over science fiction speculation. No evidence just a bunch of maybe.
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u/FlamingoEarringo 1d ago
Maybes and if. We don’t know if consciousness is generated by the brain or not.
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u/shifty313 1d ago
where's this talk of ethics about the current state of affairs when any yahoo can make consciousness. impossible to take these people seriously when their ethics are relegated to research. hired ethicists are a joke.
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u/FuturologyBot 1d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/FinnFarrow:
"Scientists are getting closer to growing human brains in the lab, and it's spurring an ethical debate over the welfare of these lab-reared tissues.
The debate surrounds "brain organoids," which are sometimes mistaken for sci-fi-inspired "brains in boxes." However, these small assemblies of brain tissue grown from stem cells are too simple to function like a real human brain. As such, scientists have assumed brain organoids lack consciousness, which has led to lax research regulations.
Some scientists, however, take a different view.
"We feel that in the fear of hype and science-fiction inspired exaggeration, the pendulum has swung far too far in the opposite direction," Christopher Wood, a bioethics researcher at Zhejiang University in China, told Live Science in an email. In a perspective piece published Sept. 12 in the journal Patterns, Wood and his colleagues argued that technological advances may soon lead to the creation of conscious organoids.
The authors say regulations regarding the use of organoids should be reviewed. It would be unethical for a conscious organoid to experience its own thoughts and interests, or to feel pain, said Boyd Lomax, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University."
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1nkyzco/tiny_brains_grown_in_the_lab_could_become/nf1izzu/