{"id":291,"date":"2004-11-05T07:15:00","date_gmt":"2004-11-05T15:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/brain-in-vat-flies-fighter-jet\/"},"modified":"2004-11-05T07:15:00","modified_gmt":"2004-11-05T15:15:00","slug":"brain-in-vat-flies-fighter-jet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2004\/11\/05\/brain-in-vat-flies-fighter-jet\/","title":{"rendered":"Brain in vat flies fighter jet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ha, I bet you think the title is some clever metaphor for some contemporary political situation about which I will now snarkily comment. Nope, it’s just the straightforward truth. Philosophy, Etc.<\/a> links to a report from the University of Florida about researchers who have grown a brain of rat cells in a vat<\/a>. Aforementioned brain, feeling all cooped up, then took a fighter jet for a spin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To be clear, the “brain” is a collection of 25,000 neurons extracted from the brain of an actual rat, and cultured in a Petri dish. The neurons are placed separately in the dish, at which point they stretch out to each other and grow connections. Thomas DeMarse<\/a>, the scientist leading the study, obviously has a sense of humor, so the first thing he did was to hook up the newly-formed brain to an F22 fighter simulator. The brain interacted with the simulator through electrodes, both giving and receiving information.<\/p>\n

Just think of that poor rat brain, tricked into thinking it’s a fighter pilot when it’s really stuck in a dish in a laboratory. Philosophers<\/a> love this stuff<\/a>. (What will Daniel Dennett think? Or Descartes, for that matter?) The scientific justification is that there are certain tasks that organic brains are much better at than computers — pattern recognition being a simple example. Someday the autopilot on your plane might be constructed from neurons rather than integrated circuits. Let’s just hope they don’t rise up and take over the world!
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ha, I bet you think the title is some clever metaphor for some contemporary political situation about which I will now snarkily comment. Nope, it’s just the straightforward truth. Philosophy, Etc. links to a report from the University of Florida about researchers who have grown a brain of rat cells in a vat. Aforementioned brain, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}