[HN Gopher] In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when em...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a
       game-world(2022)
        
       Author : rolph
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2026-03-08 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.cell.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.cell.com)
        
       | LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
       | Prior art:
       | https://research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/extract2...
       | 
       | ( "Brain" In A Dish Acts As Autopilot Living Computer, 2005 )
        
       | shomp wrote:
       | The fact that the perceptron is modeled after the neuron should
       | make this an unsurprising find, but the question of active
       | sentience starting as early as in vitro should give everyone
       | pause for where personhood begins. That zinc spark.
        
         | serf wrote:
         | >That zinc spark.
         | 
         | it's not a literal spark. it was a florescence caused by an
         | expulsion of zinc ions during egg cortical reaction in the
         | midst of FluoZin-3, a dye that binds to zinc and fluoresces.
         | 
         | I think that experiment does a bad job at explaining that,
         | because every damn person in the world is using that as some
         | kind of 'spark of life' analogy when really there is no easier
         | way to prevent triploidy than to force everything away for a
         | moment.
        
           | shomp wrote:
           | Describing the chemistry doesn't invalidate the metaphor.
           | It's still the moment fertilization initiates embryonic
           | development. Explaining the gears of a watch doesn't make
           | "the moment it starts keeping time" any less real, nor does
           | it explain time.
        
         | Kim_Bruning wrote:
         | You have to squint really hard.
         | 
         | I was doing some modelling over Christmas, and was digging in
         | to the papers. It turns out that bioneurons are not very much
         | like perceptrons at all. Depending on type, they are more like
         | a small microcontroller of some sort.
        
         | vercaemert wrote:
         | at present, it's just a fun discussion
         | 
         | the complexity of advanced connectomes is so far beyond our
         | imaging capabilities that we have no way of knowing how far
         | away from understanding intelligence we are
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2026-03-08 23:01 UTC)