10.23.04

Brain in a Vat

Posted in Philosophy, Technology at 7:20 pm by Danny Dawson

Tell me: when you take neurons from a rat and put them in a dish, and cultivate them to create a neural network which interacts with the environment it is able to percieve, what have you created? Is it still a rat? Is it just a bunch of cells? Is it…human?

Now what if you take neurons from a human and put them in a dish, and cultivate them to create a neural network which interacts with the environment it is able to percieve: then what have you created? Is it still a human? Is it just a bunch of cells? Is it even any more human than the rat? Do the laws of morality still apply?

In the case below, scientists have given their “neural network” an environment it can interact with in the form of the dimensions such as up, down, left, right, tilt, etc., as well as a body it has the ability to control, in the form of a plane. But tell me, what motivation does the neural network have to maintain its bearings and stability unless it knows fear or joy? Does this neural network have a pleasure center, or a will to exist? If it does, is it any less of a living creature than a car-accident victim on life-support? What is this new being?

This news both excites and scares me. It excites me because studies such as these have the ability to provide a significant amount of information about our own consciousnesses. It scares me because I sincerely expect a strong backlash from religious conservatives about the morality of these studies if they are to continue. They will bring up the same points I have mentioned above.

And I will not be able to refute them.

Discuss.

Currently the brain has learned enough to be able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated F-22 fighter jet in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to hurricane-force winds. Initially the aircraft drifted, because the brain hadn’t figured out how to control its “body,” but over time the neurons learned to stabilize the aircraft to a straight, level flight…

While scientists can study neural activities from groups of cells in a dish, they can’t watch them learn and grow as they would within a living body unless the neurons have some kind of body to interact with.

By taking these cells and giving them back a “body,” the researchers hope to uncover how the neurons communicate with each other and eventually translate that knowledge to develop novel computing architecture.

“Granted, this is just a handful of neurons in a dish,” said Potter, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s neuroengineering laboratory. “It isn’t a full-blown brain. It doesn’t have a real body. But with this kind of system you can literally watch these things compute and you have a chance to learn how the brain does its computation.”

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,65438,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

Permalink