I tried to find the original scientific work online, but it appears to be so new it isn’t, yet.
The researcher is Rene Anand, and the conference it is being presented at is the Military Health System Research Symposium, which is in progress right now. Perhaps there will be more information there after the conference. At the moment there isn’t even a programme listing, and most of the information that is there is behind a registration wall.
Here is his university’s press release, which mentions having been able to grow the brain to the 12-week point, and speculating about 16 or 20 weeks.
At what time is it currently thought that the fetal brain can be said to be conscious? If this brain-in-a-vat was grown to the equivalent of full term, with no sensory or motor nerves, how would we decide whether it was conscious? Or to put the real issue, how would we decide if it could legitimately be treated as an inanimate object for experimental purposes? How would a religious person decide if it had a soul, bearing in mind that it was created from skin cells, not eggs and sperm?
The aim of the research is to create model tissues for studying neurological disorders, but some further possibilities are obvious, along with their moral hazards. For example, give it some sort of sensory inputs and motor outputs, see if it can learn, and look at the effect on its structures. Have the motor outputs cause external effects that produce sensory inputs (think of a baby with a rattle), and watch it learn to control features of its environment. If a brain-in-a-vat can learn to do useful things, could it be practically used as an embedded controller for a complex machine, such as a chemical plant? Or a robot body? How intelligent could these brains-in-vats be? How insane?
I tried to find the original scientific work online, but it appears to be so new it isn’t, yet.
The researcher is Rene Anand, and the conference it is being presented at is the Military Health System Research Symposium, which is in progress right now. Perhaps there will be more information there after the conference. At the moment there isn’t even a programme listing, and most of the information that is there is behind a registration wall.
Here is his university’s press release, which mentions having been able to grow the brain to the 12-week point, and speculating about 16 or 20 weeks.
At what time is it currently thought that the fetal brain can be said to be conscious? If this brain-in-a-vat was grown to the equivalent of full term, with no sensory or motor nerves, how would we decide whether it was conscious? Or to put the real issue, how would we decide if it could legitimately be treated as an inanimate object for experimental purposes? How would a religious person decide if it had a soul, bearing in mind that it was created from skin cells, not eggs and sperm?
The aim of the research is to create model tissues for studying neurological disorders, but some further possibilities are obvious, along with their moral hazards. For example, give it some sort of sensory inputs and motor outputs, see if it can learn, and look at the effect on its structures. Have the motor outputs cause external effects that produce sensory inputs (think of a baby with a rattle), and watch it learn to control features of its environment. If a brain-in-a-vat can learn to do useful things, could it be practically used as an embedded controller for a complex machine, such as a chemical plant? Or a robot body? How intelligent could these brains-in-vats be? How insane?