this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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I know this generally sparks of reaction of “they’re torturing conscious beings”, but I’m unsure. They’re tiny bundles of cells that don’t have the same structure or complexity as a brain, human or otherwise. If we’re upset over the conscious state of these organoids, I have a feeling ghat we’re violating significantly more conscious beings in significantly more severe ways.
My worry is that these chips become financially viable and scaling them means growing full organs at which point we may very well be creating conscious beings that can suffer.
I always argue this point - nobody has a clue what makes a group of cells think or what a thought is or looks like. Or is awareness an emergent function of electrical signals passing through brain matter? Who knows!
We don't know if ants or bees or frogs have "thoughts" (I presume they do, nobody could prove me wrong).
I think these organoids are terrible simply because nobody working on them can cite whether they meet some kind of "threshold" for thinking, awareness, or consciousness -- simply because that is not known by anyone.
And yeah, to your last, great point - what is the ultimate purpose of these? Scale up. To full torment brains? Or, linking together many smaller organoids? Has anyone considered that maybe linking together many small organoids also creates a full sized brain?
Eh. I'm not totally sure about a bundle of neurons reaching the state of being conscious. I think consciousness requires a huge amount of qualia to manifest. Something that these cell bundles don't have access to.
If you want to call something like this conscious, you're opening up the door to start calling a fetus conscious as well since that bundle of cells definitely has more structure and complexity than these experiments.
The lede always gets buried in these stories too. Things like this are great ways to see how neurons link and interact with each other, and can actually have implications for research in the field of neurological disorders like Alzheimer's. Having something that has "learned" how to press buttons then intentionally atrophying it and seeing what happens is actually a useful baseline test that doesn't involve cutting open dead people or probing living people/mice with Alzheimer's.
meh. consciousness wouldn't give it any more right to gestation. the anti-choice freaks would all murder someone who was taking food out of their fridge.
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