The Case Against Organoid Consciousness

As Michael Tye puts it, “a condition of adequacy on any theory of the nature of experience is that it cover all and only creatures that have experiences. But if we don’t already agree on which creatures these are, how are we to construct the theory in the first place?” [118]: 11).

This is most obviously true of unguided organoids, but we would argue that it is also true of regionalised organoids whose development is ‘guided’, for the guidance in question doesn’t provide anything like the kind of fine-grained sculpting that is provided by embodiment and sensorimotor engagement with the world.

We do, however, acknowledge that there are versions of internalism that would reject (or are at least not committed to) EC. As far as we can see, substance dualists would have no reasons to embrace EC, nor would advocates of the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness. We thank a referee for raising this issue.

We are grateful to a referee for raising this point.

Strictly speaking, all that this objection really requires is the claim that conscious systems are representational systems, rather than the claim that conscious states are representations.

The representational nature of some of these accounts is not always fully appreciated. For example, Birch and Browning [12] suggest that Merker’s mid-brain account of consciousness would give rise to the reasonable suspicion that a functional midbrain DNO is conscious, since Merker’s theory (they suggest) posits a functioning midbrain as sufficient for consciousness. In our view, this is a misreading of Merker’s position, and treats his view as a kind of identity theory rather than as a form of representationalism. On our reading, Merker holds that midbrain processing is sufficient for consciousness only insofar as it integrates interoceptive and exteroceptive information into a unified model. Disembodied ‘mid-brain structures’ (if indeed they deserve that label) might support neural activity, but—we suggest—that activity would not realise the kinds of representations that Merker’s account takes to be required for consciousness.

We are indebted to a referee for this point.