Comment by w10-1
4 days ago
The title is misleading, and HN comments don't seem to relate to the article.
The misleading part: the actual finding is that organoid cells fire in patterns that are "like" the patterns in the brain's default mode network. That says nothing about whether the there's any relationship between phenomena of a few hundred organoid cells and millions in the brain.
As a reminder, heart pacing cells are automatically firing long before anything like a heart actually forms. It's silly to call that a heartbeat because they're not actually driving anything like a heart.
So this is not evidence of "firmware" or "prewired" or "preconfigured" or any instructions whatsoever.
This is evidence that a bunch of neurons will fall into patterns when interacting with each other -- no surprise since they have dendrites and firing thresholds and axons connected via neural junctions.
The real claim is that organoids are a viable model since they exhibit emergent phenomena, but whether any experiments can lead to applicable science is an open question.
I think a helpful conclusion is that while the firing pattern in organoids doesn’t preclude a wetware of complex programmed instructions, it could be just the emergent properties of the underlying physics and electrochemical properties of the neurons; analogous to the phenomenon of synchronism when placing pendulums in a common place.
I'm afraid when it comes to the human brain, people just seem to talk about their favorite topics and ignore the article.