
Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves? - benwen
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/science/organoids-brain-alysson-muotri.html
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devoply
If we are okay doing it to mice and chimps, we should be fine doing it to
organoids. These are not going to be much smarter and self-aware than either
of those and yet we have no issues. Further these are brains in vats not
linked to any sensors and what not. Their existence appears and disappears
like that without any input from their environment. Our brains don't feel
pain.

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cairo_x
Nobody has any idea what their inner experience is. People who've been blind
since birth still exhibit visual activity during REM sleep and dreaming, as do
fetuses (Schöpf et al. (2014). Some people born without limbs still feel pain
in phantom limbs. Most people born with congenitally missing limbs do not
experience phantom limbs, but a small subset _do_ (body maps exist in the
brain inherently). Pain can absolutely be perceived without any form of
'input'.

Be that as it all may, it is impossible to tell whether something is
experiencing qualia. The best we have to go on are brain waves and the
existence of neurotransmitters which serve qualia--both of which organoids
begin to produce.

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0xdeadb00f
For anyone who read this comment and was wondering what "qualia" actually is,
I found an old episode of VSause about it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evQsOFQju08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evQsOFQju08)
.

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dr_dshiv
Consciousness is almost certainly hierarchical. Humans have specific
abilities, through language, to build uniquely massive hierarchies. (See
Chomsky's latest paper [1] conceiving "language" as the ability to merge two
elements into a single element, in a hierarchy) But given that we start from a
single cell, it is unclear that any event switches on consciousness. It may
well be there in a single cell, however less developed than an adult human
brain. And it may well be there in hierarchies of humans, as well.

As for these organoids -- neurons are oscillators. When powered oscillators
are coupled, in any medium, they synchronize. So, not at all surprising that
they make brain waves.

[1] Friederici, A. D., Chomsky, N., Berwick, R. C., Moro, A., & Bolhuis, J. J.
(2017). Language, mind and brain. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(10), 713.

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cskodolade
It’s not surprising there are brain waves. Phase synchronization in coupled
oscillators is well studied. I guess someone had to show it but otherwise the
finding is boring.

Remove brain from mouse and stick in organoid. Understaning how networks learn
and finding both continuities and discontinuities between single cell
plasticity and network level plasticity is (in my humble opinion) more
interesting.

