Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life on Earth – “The union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time. Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself.” (previously)
From up and down and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life
At all
–@jonimitchell, Both sides now[1]
Life’s Edge by Carl Zimmer review – what does it mean to be alive? – “This profound meditation on the science of life explores where it has come from and how it evolves.”
At a medical research laboratory in California, Alysson Muotri has used chemistry to change skin cells into neurons, which have multiplied to form “organoids” – globes of interconnected brain cells. The organoids can expand to hundreds of thousands of cells, live for years, and even produce detectable patterns of brain waves, like those of premature babies. “The most incredible thing is that they build themselves,” says Muotri. He even wonders whether they could one day become conscious.
Such unsettling scientific creations, unknown even 10 years ago, challenge our ideas about life, raising questions for bioethicists and philosophers. As the American science writer Carl Zimmer writes: “Brain organoids are troubling because we feel in our bones that making sense of life should be easy. These clusters of neurons prove that it’s not.”
Lab-made mini brains grow their own sets of ‘eyes’ – “Scientists recently grew mini brains with their own sets of ‘eyes’, according to a new study.”
Organoids are miniature versions of organs that scientists can grow in the lab from stem cells, or cells that can mature into any type of cell in the body. Previously, scientists have developed tiny beating hearts and tear ducts that could cry like humans do. Scientists have even grown mini brains that produce brain waves like those of preterm babies.
Now, a group of scientists has grown mini brains that have something their real counterparts do not: a set of eye-like structures called “optic cups” that give rise to the retina — the tissue that sits in the back of the eye and contains light-sensing cells, according to a statement.
Neuroscientist Anil Seth: ‘We risk not understanding the central mystery of life’ – “His new book, Being You, proposes an idea of the human mind as a ‘highly evolved prediction machine’, rooted in the functions of the body and ‘constantly hallucinating the world and the self’ to create reality.”
I was interested in your section about memory in the book, in particular about Clive Wearing. Wearing is someone who, as a result of a devastating brain infection, lost all conscious memory and lives in a permanent present tense, as if perpetually waking from coma. Yet the studies show that he demonstrates an abiding love for his wife. How is that explained?
I’ve never met Clive or his wife, only read about the case. But it highlights the fact that some of those things we think are necessary for selfhood are obviously not. There are all sorts of different forms of memory. Explicit conscious recall, autobiographical memory, is just one of them. In neurological patients, you often see how the mind is built of processes that in normal life we never see…
There’s a lot of argument about the evolutionary function of consciousness. But the answers you get to that depend on what distinction you’re trying to make. If you’re trying to say why is anything conscious at all, rather than just mechanisms evolving in patterns in the dark?, then you’re simply up against the “hard problem” again. But if you reframe it as what is the evolutionary benefit of the organism having these specific experiences?, then you see that an experience of selfhood is clearly important because it maximises the organism’s chances of survival…
I do think it’s very likely possible for AI to mimic that. In fact, in the book I talk about the pace of this ability to mimic being really quite scary, with the combination of “deep fake” things and natural language processing machines. Instantiation is another thing, though… Building an AI system or a robot that does subjectively experience having a self, as opposed to being a sophisticated machine that gives the appearance of having a self but with nothing actually going on…
A lot of what we know about human consciousness is based on animal experiments. One of the stories in the book is about the time I spent studying octopuses, which was fantastic. They really do demonstrate a wholly different way of being. One of the things that has become more and more embedded for me is that tension between using humans as a benchmark, which we somehow have to do, and recognising that humans are not the benchmark by which all other conscious species should be assessed. It’s important to recognise that if other species have experience, the very first things that they are going to be endowed with by evolution are abilities to feel pain or pleasure or suffering rather than complex, intelligent thinking. When we decide how to treat other animals, we should bear that in mind, rather than assessing how smart they seem to be.
also btw…
Mutant ‘daddy shortlegs’ created in a lab – “Researchers were able to ‘switch off’ the genes behind the arachnid’s famously long legs.”
“To assert that mind can construct the world on its own, or to say that the universe is guaranteed to take the right path without being made to, is in either case to downgrade the real constructive role of intelligence.” –@pgodfreysmith, Complexity and the function of mind in nature[2,3]