You know I have no issue with use clones of human cells for research or with a wide variety of reproductive technologies; this advance though does give me the heebie jeebies. Given that we have no idea what amount of organization gresults in any or what degree of human consciousness, given a construct that there is no point that the ghost inhabits the machine but rather the ghost emerges from the machine gradually beyond some level of organization and complexity, proceeding down this path seems ethically troublesome. The “thrilled” let’s run with this attitude of the researchers and lack of any ethical concern being expresed by the magazine gives me pause. Usually I mock the Crighton and Shelly type fears, but this time I am not so sure.
So what think you? Should this research proceed unfettered? What are the ethics of this sort of research and what if any limits should be placed, and why?
A human brain, even an entire one, isn’t a person until it’s exposed to stimuli and it learns to be a person. I’m sure there are people who will have ethical concerns about this, but out of principle rather than actual reality.
I am virtually always on the side of progress but I do share the OP’s concern.
At the moment, it’s pretty clear that what they have created isn’t conscious, a person, or experiencing qualia.
However, if these techniques advance, such certainties will fade. I don’t think anyone knows when we will cross these lines, and that’s the concern.
That was my first thought, but . . . what degree and kind of stimuli are necessary, and what do you get with less than that? A full human brain growing from infancy to adulthood in a jar without external stimulation–what would that be, and what would it experience?
Unfortunately, the only way to know will be to do it: to create many of them over many years with exposure to many levels and types of stimulus. And eventually we’ll be able to figure out exactly where we crossed the line many years prior and pull back. And along the way, we’ll discover many things that will reduce the future suffering of humanity forever.
Let us start out accepting Mangetout’s premise and formalize and expand upon Alan’s questions.
Question 1a. What type and what level of stimulation do you require to reach “person”? Self-organizing brain tissue self-stimulates, driviing development. In “the wild” that allows the brain to be ready to develop both expectant of certain environmental stumulations and driven by certain environmental stimulations. Deprive those particular stimulations and the brain still develops, and experiences, but in a distorted from normal manner.
Question 1b. Would a human (if you will accept me using that term) born and immediately placed in a complete sensory deprivation environment, alive but unable to move or to experience be a non-person? It certainly would not be a functional one or one able to communicate with us. Would that be okay to ceate and study?
Question 2. Accepting a premise that however far they get these brain organs to develop they are not “persons” … if these brain organs experiences qualia of some sort, assuming, in the absence of typically expectant environmental stimulation a sort that is not the same sort of qualia you and I experience, what then are they?
Question 3. How would you know what sort of qualia, if any, the brain organ experienced? I am reminded of an old Harlan Ellison short story: “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” I do not think that we can take the position in this case that if we cannot/do not measure it it must not exist. Qualia are by there very nature not objectively measurable; we assume them in others by proxies, verbal reports, behaviors … but even with fully intact humans whose past experiences during brain development are comparable to our own, we are only making assumptions about the qualia and sensation of consciousness and agency of others. (How GDs have we had about that?) I agree that the chance that there is any level of qualia at the level currently reached is low. But forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain regions … hippocampus and prefrontal cortex! Regions that are specific to human brains! I am not so comfortable in assuming that having some sort of “experience”, which by definition would be human experience, is nescessarily far off.
Rushing, thrilled, and just seeing what happens as we create human brains orgainzing as human brain organs and developing some sort of function, without consideration of where we even approach the line, as fuzzy as that line is going to be … just seems very wrong.
Yay! I agree with you on something! (Grin!) Seriously, yeah: at this point, it isn’t a concern, but we don’t know when it might become an issue. We don’t know how to know!
That said…fascinating avenue of research, and I am deeply curious to know what might be learned from it.
(Think how much of value might be learned from Dr. Frankenstein’s notes!)
(In that vein, someone who knows much more than I do was able to reassure me that Josef Mengele’s notes are absolutely worthless, and the “mad science” of the Nazis was utterly crap. So there’s no moral ambivalence there, thank God.)
Excellent post, DSeid. You make a very god point about self-organizing brain tissue self-stimulating. I also thought of “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” It also reminds me of this meme.
As the thought of what we would do with alien lifeforms crossed my mind, I remembered this interesting definition of a person:
So, IMHO once the the brainoid beings begin to ask for it and we also see evidence for it, it qualifies as a person from then on.
Not ok, just before being born, the distinctive sounds of a newborn’s first cries may be influenced by the mother tongue of its parents. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120131516
Putting a new born in a chamber would be very cruel and also illegal.
Zombies!
No, really, the Philosophical kind:
TL : DNR: Basically I think that the research in the OP opens the possibility that soon the philosophical zombies (in practice, they would be persons too IMO) would be more than just a philosophical entity they are now very possible.
IMHO this does open the gates to investigate if there is such a thing as Qualia to begin with, OTOH, there could be ways to measure and quantify sensations in ways that was not though to be possible.
Does a moral right of self-determination get determined by whether or not an entity can request it? Moreover lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. A person is that which has a moral right of self determination. Why does it have a right of self-determination? Because it is a person. I don’t see that as helping much.
Ignore legality (what is legal is not always ethical and what is ethical is not always legal). Let us imagine a deaf baby who had no chance to imprint upon mother’s voice if that seems significant to you. Does the lack of change in cry to verbal stimulation change the moral right of the baby?
As far as philosophical zombies go - it has always struck me as a silly argument. (Sorry.) If two things are identical not just as static objects but as dynamic objects in spacetime, then they are the same object with all the same emergent features. If x has physical state P which results in phenomenal state S then x prime does as well. Without imagining the supernatural the zombie that is physically and dynamically identical cannot be imagined. Yes I can imagine the supernatural but I reject that such implies anything other than that humans with physical states can imagine a wide variety of things.
The concern I have is precisely that because the phenomenol state S cannot be reported and that the usual proxies of such cannot be observed, the brain organ will be presumed to not have it. And it might not until some level of complexity and organization is met and it might be extremely “mild” awareness at that threshold level as well. Without normal inputs having been fed to it it certainly would not be the same as that which normal humans experience even at the same level of complexity. And that is exactly what makes this path potentially so squicky to me.
I agree that there’s definitely a line here somewhere, and that we should probably just pause here for a moment until we can figure out at least some sense of where that line is. Yeah, we’re probably still on the OK side of it-- That’s why we stop here.
