Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

Mini-Brains

And here is one of the coming hard problems in spirituality and human identity, which would have been science fiction a few years ago but now is shoved right in our faces:

TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese researchers said Thursday they had created functioning human brain tissues from stem cells, a world first that has raised new hopes for the treatment of disease.

Stem cells taken from human embryos have been used to form tissues of the cerebral cortex, the supreme control tower of the brain, according to researchers at the government-backed research institute Riken.

The tissues self-organised into four distinct zones very similar to the structure seen in human foetuses, and conducted neuro-activity such as transmitting electrical signals, the institute said.

Embryonic stem cells are harvested by destroying a viable embryo, a process that some people find unacceptable.

Riken said cortex tissues were also obtained from "induced pluripotent stem cells," which are similar to embryonic stem cells but artificially induced, typically from adult cells such as skin cells.

The tissues can also be selectively induced to different cortex types controlling memories, visual sensation and other tasks.

Is a human foetus human? Does it have a soul?

What about a 'mini foetus brain' grown from stem cells?

If you don't believe in such a thing as a soul -- if you have the current standard consensus scientific-materialist framework -- the first question may well have an answer based on ethics, but the second is a nonsense and can only be answered in the negative: 'of course not, souls are abstractions, not realities'.

But evidence from evaluation of ESP, afterlife research, psi and mystical writings seems to be converging back toward the premodern religious paradigm again. That yes, there is such a thing as a soul -- some kind of meta-dimensional reality structure which *causes* physical effects or information ordering in biological systems, though there are what seem like paradoxes associated with the concept, such as that souls seem not to be entirely 'separate' from each other. One of the clearest elaborations of this idea seems to be in Mary Baker Eddy's works: there is one substance, but where consensus modern materialism would say 'the one substance is matter', it seems like it might solve more practical problems in explaining ESP and psi and 'miracles' and afterlife experiences to say 'the one substance is mind' and work back from there.

So far so good. But given this idea, suddenly the story above starts getting complicated.

Does a human embryo 'have' a soul, or does a soul somehow 'inhabit' or attach to the embryo during pregnancy - in the same way that a human player might 'log in' to a character in a 3D virtual world and start receiving sense impressions from it?

Does a blood cell have a soul? Does a brain cell have a soul?

Does a cluster of brain cells grown from cultured adult-skin-cell-derived genetically engineered stem cells have a soul?

If it doesn't have a soul, yet it behaves functionally identically with a similar cluster of neurons in a standard living-human, soul-inhabited brain, and processes memories -- where does that leave us as humans?

Frankly I think it's pretty darn creepy that we're playing with human brain tissue in such a way without having anything like a philosophical framework to answer these questions (other than 'no humans are alive unless they can speak', which seems scary dangerous to me).

But we are, and questions from Star Trek, tacky vinyl eyebrows and all, are now staring right at us. It's like one of those horrible nightmares where you get asked impossibly ridiculous questions for your final exam, and you're naked, and the thesis examiners are circus clowns. We can't be being asked this bizarre kind of ethics rule -- and yet, there it is.

Stem-cell human mini-brains.

We could build computers out of them, or stick them in missiles. We probably will. We possibly are already. These aren't computer circuits. They have human DNA. They might have the potential to be human. They might literally have *souls*. They might be children of God.

Fully grown *humans* are children of God too, and yet we enslaved them, and still do. Some cultures ate them. Might still do. Ancient Rome had infanticide; in the civilised West today we routinely abort foetuses with beating hearts and functioning brains and destroy them like medical waste, and the practice (and the definition of human life which it entails) is defended vociferously by the triumphant, progressive Left, and anyone questioning it is knee-jerk slammed as a Neanderthal hater of women.

The Right deserved to lose the US elections, Bush was a moral disaster, Palin freaks me out, and the Obama phenomenon is a historic and staggering victory for grassroots democracy -- but that doesn't mean the Evangelicals are wrong on abortion or that Markos Moulitsas is right. There are philosophical twists here with daggers in them.

Stem-cell human mini-brains.

These things might be tasty-delicious little medical tools, clones grown for spare parts, or organic computing machines. They'll probably be patented, and sold in packs in corner drugstores like disposable razors. Killed without mercy. We'd like to think they're not us, not a possible vehicle for our souls, not part of our reality... but they *are* literally our flesh and blood, and there *are* such things as souls.

The science fiction writer Bruce Sterling wrote some chilling words in his essay Cyberpunk in the ’90s:

We’re just not much good any more at refusing things because they don’t seem proper. As a society, we can’t even manage to turn our backs on abysmal threats like heroin and the hydrogen bomb. As a culture, we love to play with fire, just for the sake of its allure; and if there happens to be money in it, there are no holds barred. Jumpstarting Mary Shelley’s corpses is the least of our problems; something much along that line happens in intensive-care wards every day.

Human thought itself, in its unprecedented guise as computer software, is becoming something to be crystallized, replicated, made a commodity. Even the insides of our brains aren’t sacred; on the contrary, the human brain is a primary target of increasingly successful research, ontological and spiritual questions be damned. The idea that, under these circumstances, Human Nature is somehow destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems weirdly beside the point. It’s as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage, about to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big Science, were to piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must triumph.

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it’s the truth. It won’t go away because we cover our eyes.

The Dali clock is melting and the angry clown with Spock ears wants our thesis. How do we answer? What philosophy will give us the resources to answer sanely?

Doctor Chandra, will I dream?