PieFed DKFive-Year-Old Mini Brains Can Now Mimic a Kindergartener’s Neural Wiring. It’s Time to Talk Ethics.
artifexsingularityhub.com/2025/12/25/five-year-old-min…
Among pressing ethical concerns are whether brain organoids can feel pain or become conscious—and how would we know?
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In older organoids, progenitor cells—these are young cells that can form different types of brain cells—quickly decided what type of brain cell they would become. But in younger organoids, the same cells took time to make their decision. As the blobs grew over an astonishing five years, their neurons matured in shape, function, and connections, similar to those of a kindergartner.
Those last few words just seems like irresponsible writing for the sake of clicks. It’s a sudden leap from a dry discussion of cell structures to something that’s designed to shock and elicit an emotional reaction. But the author doesn’t add anything to explain the comparison, so we aren’t given any tools to evaluate the claim or its implications. It feels manipulative.
These also have no real inputs and outputs, so it’s hard to see how they could have some kind of consciousness. Still, brain organoids have been a source of ethical debate since the beginning. The assembloid things mentioned sound a little riskier yet.
UnderpantsWeevilMimic
ethical concerns
My shadow puppet has all the same behaviors of my hand, which raises some alarming philosophical questions.
Who upvotes this phony bullshit from “singularityhub”?
There’s only one worthwhile sentence in this slop:
edit: A reason behind the hype. “Biotech” is yesterday’s “AI”.
people upvote sensationalist bullshit because it’s what they emotionally respond to.
lemmy is rapidly become reddit redux, at an even faster pace. tons of crazy people on this site who are just here to get high on ragebait.
Reasoning.
Does a ALU detect pain? Yes. Does it feel pain? No.
Just because it’s organic circuits, doesn’t mean they suddenly develop consciousness. That requires secific circuitry and data processing facilities. Organoids are far from sufficient.
Let’s not pretend we understand the mechanics of consciousness. If you can prove what is required for consciousness, there’s at least a Nobel prize in it for you.
So glad someone already said it. I’m a neuroscience PhD student who works with brain organoids and the article is absolutely ridiculous.
Also, I’m not aware of any labs or research that has been able to produce brain organoids with functional blood vessels. Having a necrotic core is normal for old organoids.
It links to an article about brain organoids with blood vessels:
https://singularityhub.com/2018/04/18/mini-brains-just-grew-their-own-blood-vessels-heres-why-thats-great-news/
Ok it sounds like they got functioning vessels after xenografting into mice (which has its own issues) and it mentioned connecting to micro fluidic chambers in the future for full ex vivo, but they don’t have a functioning model for that yet. It’s a very interesting and promising area of research but with practical lab work nowadays it’s just not feasible. I hope they’re able to get a full ex vivo model working soon though, that would be really exciting!
Also, note that article’s 8 years old and way out of date.
I havent read any of the comments or article yet, just wanted to predict how they’re going :
Fuck ethics, push science. As long as they don’t kill children to get the brains out, ethics-mumblers should keep their mouths shut.
You know “ethics” in scientific pursuit doesn’t mean just one thing, right? ie there’s a wide swath of territory between “let’s breed these fruit flies to study genetics” and “now where did I put my baby decapitator?”, and it’s important to evaluate the ethical ramifications of an action at each step along the way.
“Fuck ethics” and “don’t kill children” are mutually incompatible statements.
You believe in ethics, you just put the line at a different point than other people. Maybe that means exactly what the article says - our society needs to start discussing the situation to see where we want to draw the line.
And don’t get me wrong, I agree with you in general. Humans tend to be TOO worried about ethics, for example GMO plants are generally quite harmless despite being outright banned in large swaths of the world.
Oof wtf?
As well, if you go so far, why exclude killing children? Are you a closeted ethics-mumbler yourself?
But can’t we just have a LITTLE Bladerunner style dystopia, as a treat?
We have Bladerunner style dystopia at home!
We have one Bladerunner style dystopia, yes, but what about second Bladerunner style dystopia?
There’s always Bladerunner style dystopia in the banana stand.
Facepalm.
Yeah, totally not a nazi perspective, after all no crimes of war were committed in the name of science ever