1/ Fascinating new @NeuroCellPress paper by @CorticalLabs showing that neuronal cultures can be trained to play Pong through a training regime based on active inference cell.com/neuron/fulltex… - 👏🏽 @ANeuroExplorer, Hon Weng Chong and colleagues
2/ I greatly admire the work, but I am concerned about the "exhibit sentience" in the title of the paper. True, sentience can be formally defined merely as 'responsiveness to sensory impressions' - but many people interpret it as a minimal form of consciousness or awareness
3/ There is *no reason* to suppose that @CorticalLabs #DishBrain experiences anything at all, and confusion over this issue is dangerous because the prospect of synthetic awareness in cultures/organoids is ethically highly problematic
4/ Tim Bayne & I (@CIFAR_News) wrote about the possiblity of organoid consciousness in our Islands of Awareness paper in @TrendsCognSci - noting the problem of knowing when an organoid might become conscious, and the ethical catastrophes that could result cell.com/trends/neurosc… 
5/ This debate offers an interesting contrast that over machine consciousness - which I was involved in yesterday at @WorldSummitAI - where, in my view, consciousness is likely even more remote, since the substrate is different (silicon vs carbon) worldsummit.ai/programme-2022/
6/ The @CorticalLabs work is getting lots of media. I hope this coverage is for the right reasons, and not because of a superficial appeal to the possiblity 'sentient' (conscious) "mini-brains". Motto: don't use 'sentience' without being aware of what you're doing 🤓
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