I am both fascinated and horrified by this story from Guillaume Thierry in The Conversation. It definitely falls into the category of, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
And transplanting lab grown brains into animals is disgusting. It’s one thing to conduct experiments on tissue, it’s another to put that tissue into another living thing. That is both unethical and cruel.
I realise no amount of legislation or control will stop some motivated party exploring the many potentials of the technology. Perhaps they should also consider the possibility that lab grown brains might play a part in the Singularity.
For those who don’t know the Singularity is the point at which “technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.”
The unfathomable changes could bring some kind of utopia. They could also bring judgment day, and Terminators dispatched to destroy us.
It’s sobering to think science fact is accelerating past science fiction.
Darrin // Nightingale 
Yes I agree there is a great temptation to act immorality in scientific experiments . Personally I believe that progress is unstoppable and has been since the industrial revolution.
Life itself depends on reproduction so intelligent machines must be self replicating or at the minimum self sustaining.
Modern computers may often give the impression of consciousness but this may merely be the effect of performing billions calculations per second .
Self -awareness is a unique form of consciousness that we have and has given rise to our moral nature. Freud put it neatly ‘ we are at war with ourselves ‘.
There are those philosophers who believe the self is an illusion and there is no free will.
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Thanks for your comments.
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Extremely sobering. I doubt utopia will eventuate as that would mean the elimination of self interest and greed. Impossible!
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Thanks for your comments. I doubt utopia too. But we can hope. There does seem to be a realisation, in the discourse around ecological collapse, that is forcing people to rethink their understanding of self-interest/greed way of the world. Ironically its taken the extinction of the species to focus people’s minds, and realise greed is not good. I have a feeling this kind of uncontrolled scientific research, the kind that will happily put a lab grown brain into a living animal, also functions concurrently with the the kind of consumerist-capitalism that has self-interest and greed at it’s heart. I’m probably wrong and naive to even think this way, but who really knows?
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I hope that as long as people are talking and writing about these issues we will move past allowing things like this to happen!
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