> yeah definitely not

I don't know about ants, but after a refresher on the people favorite fruit fly, I'd be hard pressed to be so dismissive - 200K seems to be plenty: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302051

I inspire you to look up what is known about fruit flies' behavior.

The reason it's probably nevertheless not as messed up as people might assume it to be is specifically because it's an organoid, not an actual brain. Which is to say, it has the numbers but not the performance, not by a long shot.

> Surely it makes no difference

It absolutely should, though specifically with organoids, I guess it might not. Ironically, I would expect the ethics angle to be actually worse with small animals. The size of the organoid will be closer to the real thing comparatively, after all, so more chances of it gaining whatever level of sentience the actual organism has.

But then this will be heavily muddled by what people believe consciousness is and whether or how humans are special, I suppose.

> if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not.

I'm not imagining that (although one assumes their plan is to scale this up), but nonetheless there's something troubling to me about taking any living thing and wiring its senses up to a profoundly incomplete simulacrum of reality.

Of course we (as a species) have a long history of doing horrible things to living creatures in the name of science and progress.

These stories evoke a different feeling for me, though.

Elephants have 3x the neurons of a human. Bees have about a million and they have complex relationships, emotions, and can remember the faces of humans. Neuron counts correspond more to body size than actual cognitive abilities.

And brains are pretty complicated in how they're arranged. A large portion of the brain basically serves as an operating system of sorts, just managing breathing, moving, detecting smells, producing language, decoding language, etc. Cut all of that out and we're left with thinking and emotions.

>Somewhat creepy, but if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not.

I don't know if it knows it's in doom - looks like all it knows is to shoot when startled. More than creepy imo.

Given that no one understands how the mental relates to the physical in the first place, I have no idea how you would reach such a confident conclusion about the phenomenological status of 200k human neurons in a petri dish playing Doom?