this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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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.
This is exactly my point though. You think these aren't conscious, yet nobody can define what consciousness is in a brain. Is a single thought consciousness? Is a thought created by the movement of signals in the brain? Does a thought require the storage of memories - and what structures or thresholds does that require? Nobody can measure a thought (if they can I'd love to see the study).
Nobody knows what the threshold is from a group of brain cells having electrical inputs and providing outputs (these organoids) to what we experience as thinking. But there is a threshold.
You have a good point about a fetus, actually. When does a developing fetus actually produce thinking and thoughts. This is something that we can't measure either, because we can't ask a fetus. But, fetuses move around in tummies and respond to sounds and movement. Do they have thoughts? Almost certainly, right? As much as a frog or a mouse or a worm. (Note: this is not a pro-life argument, I am certainly pro-choice).
We can measure brain activity, but looking at electrical and magnetic fields on a brain doesn't mean we understand what consciousness or a thought is.
Anyway, I guess my point is that if you "think" it's not thinking because it doesn't seem like it could be, that's my point. The ethics of this work is vibes based.
I don't think they're conscious, and you can't just say they're conscious because we can't prove they aren't. This is a great platform for studying neural pathway degredation though and I hope it bears fruit.
As some sort of torment nexus type tool, this is pointless, incredibly expensive, and impossible to train. It's hard enough to train regular humans to do simple tasks and they have the benefit of 15+ years of social education and constant interfacing with the real world.
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.
This is definitely not the correct takeaway from what I was saying, and honestly reads like something that a right wing grifter would say as a jab at pro-choice.
i wasn't taking that from you i was saying it doesn't matter because the bodily autonomy of the parent survives regardless of any status given to a fetus. we also see this in the violinist analogy.
I believe their unstated point was that nobody can be forced to violate their bodily autonomy to save another person's life. You cannot be required to donate a kidney, for example. The bans and hullabaloo around abortion are the sole (hypocritical) exception.