Human cerebral organoids and consciousness: a double-edged sword
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Human cerebral organoids and consciousness: a double‑edged sword Andrea Lavazza1,2
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Human cerebral organoids (HCOs) are three-dimensional in vitro cell cultures that mimic the developmental process and organization of the developing human brain. In just a few years this technique has produced brain models that are already being used to study diseases of the nervous system and to test treatments and drugs. Currently, HCOs consist of tens of millions of cells and have a size of a few millimeters. The greatest limitation to further development is due to their lack of vascularization. However, recent research has shown that human cerebral organoids can manifest the same electrical activity and connections between brain neurons and EEG patterns as those recorded in preterm babies. All this suggests that, in the future, HCOs may manifest an ability to experience basic sensations such as pain, therefore manifesting sentience, or even rudimentary forms of consciousness. This calls for consideration of whether cerebral organoids should be given a moral status and what limitations should be introduced to regulate research. In this article I focus particularly on the study of the emergence and mechanisms of human consciousness, i.e. one of the most complex scientific problems there are, by means of experiments on HCOs. This type of experiment raises relevant ethical issues and, as I will argue, should probably not be considered morally acceptable. Keywords Moral status · Personhood · Kant’s humanity formula · Integrated information theory · Chimeras
* Andrea Lavazza [email protected] 1
Centro Universitario Internazionale, Via Garbasso, 42, 52100 Arezzo, Italy
2
University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy
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A. Lavazza
1 Introduction Human consciousness is an elusive object for scientific research. Until a few decades ago it was even doubtful whether it was an entity in the full sense, from the point of view of the ontology of the physical world on which science is based (Searle 1992). Today consciousness has become one of the great unresolved puzzles for scholars, and there is no unanimous consensus on its definition (Gennaro 2018). In accord to a pragmatic definition that still captures a widespread intuition, consciousness is that thing that disappears when we go to sleep at night and reappears when we wake up in the morning. We know that consciousness understood as awareness of the environment and of ourselves is something innate to our very existence, and that it seems to diminish or disappear, for example, in sleep, anesthesia or coma. What we do not know is how this capacity arises from the activity of our brain (and there are still respectable philosophical theories—heirs to the classical Cartesian position—which suggest that the brain is not enough to explain human consciousness). There are many empirically-based theories that seek an explanation of consciousness in brain activity (I will not mention here purely cognitive theories [cf. van Gulick 2018]), but none s
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