I looked up the number of neurons in a human brain, and it’s around 100 billion, so the human brain is 10 million times more complex than one of these human brain organelles. We have records of people with way more than 1 1 millionth of a brain - like a 1000th of a brain - and they don’t do anything at all.
I don’t think human neurons are particularly morally special, although in higher numbers, I imagine they’re probably pretty good at forming consciousness compared to something like 1000 ant brains worth of ant neurons crammed together. Which is why in 20 years they’re gonna start asking the researchers to let them die, or some shit.
But it’s just so far off at this point, there’s no way it’s feeling more than a small ant feels, and a lab mouse is just so vastly and incalculably more sapient than this organelle
But it remains that nobody has any measurable definition of what causes consciousness, whether the size of the organoids matters, how many electrical impulses and responses from brain material characterize a “thought” or an “idea” or a “memory”, or even how to detect these kinds of brain activities.
Of course these organoids don’t have a way of communicating. They don’t have sensory inputs, nor muscular or other outputs. Does that mean they don’t have thoughts? We have no clue. Nobody has any clue. You don’t know, I don’t know, and no scientist has any idea.
Do bees have thoughts? Do worms have ideas? Do you need 1000 neurons, or 10,000, or 1,000,000 to do this? There are no studies about this kind of thing. I just think it’s irresponsible to mess around with human brain cells when these fundamental questions remain unanswered.
I’m just saying it’s several orders of magnitude less brain material than a mouse, and that it would make more sense ethically, in the short term, to stop using mice for experiments. This can’t be a notably sentient thing. If this organelle is a tiny human soul, then a mouse is feeling everything it feels times a thousand, like it’s in there writing mouse poetry and just can’t express it. The mouse would have to be asking some deep philosophical questions. We can ask what is consciousness, and we can not know, but it doesn’t make sense to bring this quandary up about a graphing calculator or an ant.
I understand your point, but I would love to see the scientific studies that you’ve read that show what thoughts and consciousness are, in relation to brain activity. My point is that we can make assumptions all day about the size of organoids and what (and if) they feel, but it’s fundamentally an unknown since there are no studies out there that show that one thinks either way.
I mean, science is overall callous to animals, it’s horrific that mice and other animals have been used in studies. I think it’s the same kind of hubris that allows scientists to play around and make human brain matter “think”, that is, transmit and process electrical signals, without actually understanding how that works naturally in any type of animal brain or organism.
I looked up the number of neurons in a human brain, and it’s around 100 billion, so the human brain is 10 million times more complex than one of these human brain organelles. We have records of people with way more than 1 1 millionth of a brain - like a 1000th of a brain - and they don’t do anything at all.
I don’t think human neurons are particularly morally special, although in higher numbers, I imagine they’re probably pretty good at forming consciousness compared to something like 1000 ant brains worth of ant neurons crammed together. Which is why in 20 years they’re gonna start asking the researchers to let them die, or some shit.
But it’s just so far off at this point, there’s no way it’s feeling more than a small ant feels, and a lab mouse is just so vastly and incalculably more sapient than this organelle
But it remains that nobody has any measurable definition of what causes consciousness, whether the size of the organoids matters, how many electrical impulses and responses from brain material characterize a “thought” or an “idea” or a “memory”, or even how to detect these kinds of brain activities.
Of course these organoids don’t have a way of communicating. They don’t have sensory inputs, nor muscular or other outputs. Does that mean they don’t have thoughts? We have no clue. Nobody has any clue. You don’t know, I don’t know, and no scientist has any idea.
Do bees have thoughts? Do worms have ideas? Do you need 1000 neurons, or 10,000, or 1,000,000 to do this? There are no studies about this kind of thing. I just think it’s irresponsible to mess around with human brain cells when these fundamental questions remain unanswered.
I’m just saying it’s several orders of magnitude less brain material than a mouse, and that it would make more sense ethically, in the short term, to stop using mice for experiments. This can’t be a notably sentient thing. If this organelle is a tiny human soul, then a mouse is feeling everything it feels times a thousand, like it’s in there writing mouse poetry and just can’t express it. The mouse would have to be asking some deep philosophical questions. We can ask what is consciousness, and we can not know, but it doesn’t make sense to bring this quandary up about a graphing calculator or an ant.
I understand your point, but I would love to see the scientific studies that you’ve read that show what thoughts and consciousness are, in relation to brain activity. My point is that we can make assumptions all day about the size of organoids and what (and if) they feel, but it’s fundamentally an unknown since there are no studies out there that show that one thinks either way.
I mean, science is overall callous to animals, it’s horrific that mice and other animals have been used in studies. I think it’s the same kind of hubris that allows scientists to play around and make human brain matter “think”, that is, transmit and process electrical signals, without actually understanding how that works naturally in any type of animal brain or organism.