Cerebral organoids and consciousness: how far are we willing to go?

In his interesting commentary, Joshua Shepherd raises two points—one related to epistemology, the other to ethics—about our article on human cerebral organoids.1 2 From the epistemological standpoint, he calls into question the need for a theory of consciousness. A theory of consciousness, for him, is not necessary because of the lack of consensus about the very nature of consciousness. Shepherd suggests that ‘given widespread disagreement, applying a theory of consciousness may not be helpful when attempting to diagnose the presence of consciousness in cerebral organoids’. In Shepherd’s view, it would be better to transfer ‘concepts already under development in work on the presence and structure of consciousness in difficult marginal cases involving traumatic brain injury’.2

We could not agree more on this last point; detecting a minimal capacity for consciousness in the brain of comatose patients is a very similar challenge to inferring the presence of…

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