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We would expect that if there was any moral outrage to have over the treatment of cultured neural tissue, it would occur in an art gallery. Something about an art gallery sensitizes us to the well-being of critters we might not usually care about - as in the case of Garnet Hertz's Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot  (a three wheeled robot about half the size of R2D2, driven by a Madagascar hissing cockroach) - and to cry out over events that we might otherwise willfully ignore or even accept as routine - as in Guillermo Vargas's infamous “ You Are What You Read ,” (where a starving dog was taken off the street and brought into a gallery) [1].  Instead, when neural tissue is given a robotic body and placed on display (sometimes remotely) in an art gallery, most responses seem to focus on the ambiguous nature of the works.  Artist Stephane Dumas wrote, referring to MEArt (a drawing robot controlled by a culture of rat brain cells), that “the public can experience the drawi...

50,000 cultured brain cells sit in a petri dish. Through a combination of electronic sensors, software engineering and robotic sculpture , the physiology of the cells interacts with the psychology of some patrons of an art gallery [1]. From this transaction, judgments arise - the audience might report feelings of being watched, of play, or simply of remotely observing an oblivious 'seizure machine.' One particular type of audience member, the Animal Ethicist, might even wonder if we should be worried that the culture of brain cells (as a former animal) might be in pain. Brain cells, electrodes, and tiny Peter Singer (image from here ).  While in most cases it is fairly straightforward to determine that a human is in pain, when one starts to asks if non-humans (or even humans with severe communication problems, such as locked-in patients) are in pain, it is common to turn to neuroscience for help. The idea is that while mental states (such as pain and suffering) can only b...

In his opening chapter of the biological art compendium “Signs of Life,”  Eduardo Kac  makes a particularly suggestive comment about the biological sciences in general.  I think this quote has even more significance to neuroscience specifically: “The extreme difficulty in dealing with very complex biological interactions leads to the simplified treatment of life processes as quantified data that exhibit statistical patterns.  In turn, this can lead to an objectification of life and a disregard for the subjects and their rights.”[1] From Zachary Weinersmith's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal This claim seems to echo Tom Wolfe's sentiment that scientific progress will lead to the death of the soul [2]: by reducing biological systems down to so many quantities and equations (all accurate within some statistical bounds), have we lost an important intuition about their intrinsic worth?  Is biology really just physical laws, with the same degree of moral importance ...

Previously on this blog I've discussed the case of cultures of living rat neurons, removed from their natural environment (the inside of the skull of a rat), and grown on top of an electrical interface that allows the neurons to communicate with robotic systems - effectively, we remove part of the rat's brain, and then give this reprocessed bit of brain a new, robotic body.  One of the stranger issues that pops up with this system is that it is extraordinarily easy to 'switch' between bodies in this situation. [1] For instance, I could easily write a computer program that creates a brief, pleasant sound reminiscent of raindrops every time the culture increases it's electrical activity.  Alternatively, the same burst of activity could be used to trigger an emotionless, electronic voice to say “Please help me. I am in pain.” While nociception (the low-level transmission of pain information) and unconscious reactions to pain both occur in the spine and peripheral nerv...