[Linkpost] Can lab-grown brains become conscious?

My first thought was that organoid-sized animal brains are more likely to be conscious than organoids themselves. If we're worried about organoids, we should be even more worried about animals.

I then realized that, AFAIK, we don't know whether qualia like pain and distress are "sophisticated" emotions, requiring a lot of elaborate brain architecture to produce. Qualia might just as easily be "unsophisticated," easy to generate even in a brain organoid. It may be that elaborate brain architectures of evolved animals are useful to filter, shape, and transform those "unsophisticated" qualia into survival-enhancing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. If so, we might worry that brain organoids can feel a lot of qualia, and lack the brain structures animals have that make qualia tolerable.

Yes. But not at sesame-seed size, or at least not in the sense I care about.

I also don't expect sesame-seed-sized organoids made of human cells be much different that if they were made of pig cells, or bird cells. I expect a lot of moral panic to be motivated by baseless human exceptionalism.

But I agree this is a wild story.

Damn! That Muotri guy sounds exactly like a mad-scientist supervillain

For his part, Muotri sees little difference between working on a human organoid or a lab mouse. “We work with animal models that are conscious and there are no problems,” he says. “We need to move forward and if it turns out they become conscious, to be honest I don’t see it as a big deal.”

He even has a classic supervillain backstory

Muotri wants his organoid systems to be comparable, in at least some ways, with human brains, so that he can study human disorders and find treatments. His motivation is personal: his 14-year-old son has epilepsy and autism. “He struggles hard in life,” Muotri says. Brain organoids are a promising avenue, because they recapitulate the earliest stages of brain wiring, which are impossible to study as a human embryo develops. But studying human brain disorders without a fully functioning brain, he says, is like studying a pancreas that doesn’t produce insulin. “To get there, I need a brain organoid model that really resembles a human brain. I might need an organoid that becomes conscious.”