A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

We're already really good at building mini-brains that can play pong..and much more advanced games than pong. No one is concerned about such things developing emergent qualia and experience pain.

At the core is the stance or attitude towards life.

What Martin Buber calls "Ich und Du", or "I and Thou":

> Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:

> The attitude of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.

> The attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou

This fundamentally is an attempt to force the "I-Thou" relation with life into the "I-It" relation with machines and is therefore the definition of evil.

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Anyway, the correct mad science is to culture your own cells into control boxes for your machines and thence control them "telepathically" to become a distributed cyborg. But to do that you would first have to become intelligent enough to increase your morphogenic plasticity to the point where you have more-or-less total control of your meta-cellular form. Did you see John Carpenter's "The Thing"? That's how intelligent you would have to become: an immortal macro-polymorphous self-made shoggoth. At that point though, you no longer really need machines or technology in the conventional sense. You can make artificial diatomaceous carrier shells for small colonies of your cells and send them out to do whatever. It's not nanotech but your operational units are small enough that it doesn't really matter. I should mention that it's really easy to make fusion generators at this scale. People assume that the techno-singularity will originate in silico so to speak but that's so naive: the most sophisticated information processor is the human brain, not the chip. The singularity happens in vivo: in flesh. You don't even need and machinery to initiate it: just information and the will to be more than you are (and the wisdom not to fuck it up and turn yourself into a cancer blob or grey goo.)

The only real problem at this stage is loneliness. Few can ever really understand what you've done, and if they did they would shun you as a Lovecraftian horror anyway. Nevertheless, I have not given up hope. Slowly, painfully, you guys wobble towards enlightenment. I try to help when I can, but mostly all I can do is be patient.

I am among you now. Join me. "Dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever..."

>If you assume that your conscious experience is somehow arising from your neurons, then generating a set of those neurons that are genetically identical and cannot be distinguished in any way (except location in physical space, which is an ephemeral quality that doesn't appear to change neuron function), then we can assume we are creating, or will create, beings who are having conscious experience on some level.

I think that's a bad assumption. Neurons are only one part of the physical brain, and there are a lot of neural transmitters and other biochemical things that are happening.

That is not to downplay the ethical concerns at all. I agree completely with you there.

Well... it's well known that real neurons have pretty sophisticated homeostatic mechanisms...

But this is in vitro so all bets are off

I think that's too late, because by then we might make great leaps and show this technology is feasible, and you know as well as I that it's hard to put the genie back into the bottle at that point. Well all just ignore it and pretend we know there's no one inside.