Posted by kevinak 20 hours ago
PS: It's still very cool but also scary.
There is a line somewhere here that I personally feel we should not cross.
We know that neurons can produce subjective experience.
This is the first time in my life that I've felt a scientific avenue of research should shut down.
There’s lots of bad stuff humans shouldn’t be doing.
Factory farming too. The way we treat chickens in particular is out of a horror movie, and that’s in countries with some standards. Globally I’m sure many billions of animals are constantly submitted to the most grotesque torture for food.
Unless your proposition is that no collection of human neurons outside of live birth can become sentient, and I’m not sure how you’d arrive at that conclusion without invoking some kind of spiritual argument.
Next up, we teach it to speed run Getting Over It. What a horrible existence.
Sure, a neuron is a machine.
200,000 neurons connected in a matrix is a brain, albeit a very primitive one. Ants have 250,000 neurons in their brains.
Me? I didn't like the idea (then or now), but it would be demagogic to try to fight against it, with so much wrong already existing. The difference between a neuron and a nanostructure is merely the embedded technology.
Back in the 50s and 60s, guided rockets used pigeons. Laika in space. Chimpanzees in orbit. Let's accept that we will have bio-drones and Jonny-Mneumonic style upload interfaces.
We know a human can play Doom, so it kind of makes sense a portion of a human brain can do so in some fashion. But it's way more interesting when an animal that normally doesn't play Doom can, specially if it's just a portion of its brain.
Outside of that, I'm personally not very fond of hardware that can rot or die from malnutrition though. It's fun as an experiment, but as a thing you can actually use I just don't see it. It has a literal limited lifespan, requires more maintenance and imagine trying to debug it ("Turns out it caught some bacteria and it's malfunctioning" kinda scenarios? No thanks.)
Does anyone have insight into how you would even start to source or grow/create the cells?
Also the machines look very organic and clearly have to keep the cells alive. Do they have to change them out every so often?
Today there are several immortalized neuron cell lines used in research to model neuronal function, like HeLa but of neuron type obviously, that are also typically derived from tumours (e.g., SH-SY5Y, PC12) or immortalized via genetic modification (e.g., v-myc) like CTX0E03 [2] which was designed to allow for continuous growth in the presence of particular reagents.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
2. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/reneuron-announces-...
I ask as someone who's has personally experienced loss of several loved ones from cancer (as most people my age probably have), but doesn't share your aversion to this particular use case (research.)
If you're in the US, you can buy human neurons online at sciencellonline.com/en/human-neurons/