MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA – Scientists have trained living human neurons to play Doom, a popular 90s video game where players control an unnamed marine fighting hordes of demons and the undead. Cortical Labs accomplished the feat by creating a device called the CL1, which contains a microchip with approximately 200,000 living human neurons to power its computing capabilities.
The neurons receive game information via electrical stimulation and transmit responses that a program interprets as actions within the game. They can send commands to move their character, find enemies, shoot, spin, and even explore the virtual landscape for clues to advance to further stages of the game.
To enable programmers to send and receive information from human cells, the lab had to translate the world of Doom into the “biological language of neurons,” namely, electricity. David Hogan, Chief Technology Officer of Cortical Labs, explained how the CL1 can process a programmer’s code and interact with cells via electrical stimulation,
When a demon appears on the left of the screen, specific electrodes stimulate the sensory area of the neural culture on the left side. The neurons react to that stimulation. We then listen to their response, the spikes, and interpret that activity as motor commands. If the neurons fire in a specific pattern, the doom guy shoots. If they fire in another pattern, he moves right, and so on.
To Cortical Labs, the possibilities are endless for this new form of “wetware.” They claim that the CL1 uses “a fraction of the energy other technologies use,” with estimates suggesting that a 30-unit server rack consumes only 850-1,000 watts. Compare that to current computing technologies, which drain megawatts.
One can imagine a world where AI corporations no longer need gigantic warehouses to store their servers and dedicated power grids to run them, and instead, run smaller, exponentially more efficient operations on living human tissue, saving countless dollars in the development of new technology. These savings could, in turn, significantly accelerate AI development and raise its energy consumption ceiling at a time when experts are concerned that AI may plateau due to energy demands.
The company is already seeking to capitalize on its breakthrough. The CL1 can be bought, ready to plug-and-play, for $35,000. But if someone is unable to afford the price tag of buying one of the biological computers outright and still wants to get in on the new tech, Cortical Labs offers a cloud-based service at $300/week per machine.
But using living human neurons to power computers raises serious ethical concerns. And it forces Christians to deal with significant theological questions. This advancement by Cortical Labs demands that Christians be ready to provide an answer to the following questions:
Is it possible for biological matter to experience human consciousness apart from a body or soul?
If human neurons can power computers, is AI still artificial?
Is it ethical to commoditize human biological matter?
What does it even mean to be human?
The human body and the unity of its parts are true expressions of the person. Man is not merely a soul with a body, but a composite of body and soul. Our souls love, think, desire, and feel, yes, but not apart from our bodies, but in an entwined togetherness, a sacramental union between spiritual and material in which true mystical grace is communicated through our physical bodies.
Therefore, no “part” of the body is a mere part. To remove a member from the body does not merely hurt that member, but the whole body and soul. If it were possible to separate the soul and cast away the “lesser part,” we would intuitively recognize the loss as horrific, both to our inner and outer being. But we forget that our bodies, just as our souls, are true aspects of our identity as embodied images of God.
Our flesh is an essential aspect of our identity. Our bodies are temples meant to be the dwelling places of God. As such, our flesh is sacred, set apart for God’s holy use. You are not your own. You are bought with a price.
No doubt, when a member is separated from our bodies, that part is no longer considered a full human person in that it has been removed from its body and soul, but that does not mean it is not human. And whatever is human should be treated with greater dignity than what is not, considering its holy origin. We instinctively know this to be true. No one but the morally hardened or mentally infirm would treat a severed limb as he would a piece of plastic, metal, or wood.
Human consciousness, then, must derive from both body and soul, for the human is body and soul. Humans know themselves, others, and the world by means of who they are, namely, through their body and soul. Therefore, apart from that human body and soul, any existing consciousness is not true human consciousness, but a pale image of the human form.
If these scientists were able to train these human neurons to follow the ancient Delphic maxim, “Know thyself,” the neurons would discover themselves to be less than fully human. And if they ever became conscious in any sense, they would find the experience decidedly inhuman, not because of a difference in kind, but because of an overwhelming lack of fullness.
Origen would subscribe (maybe?)…
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Human consciousness is not bare computation but the human experience in all its fullness. How does it feel to smell a flower? Or to gaze at the moon on a summer night? My eyes shifting in anticipation as I prepare to surprise my son with a gift. My heart racing as I embrace the woman I love. Can these machines, yes, made with human matter but without a body or soul, ever have the capacity to understand for themselves what it means to lose a child, to hold her in your hands, to dig a grave, tears dripping onto the ground, knowing that for the rest of your life you will be a different person, forever changed by that one moment?
No, the CL1 and other such projects can never be conscious in any fully human definition of the word. Yes, their intelligence is still artificial, even if it is also biological.
Our flesh is holy.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote his Catechetical Lectures around 350 AD to help catechumens prepare for baptism. In Lecture XII, St. Cyril defends the Incarnation of Christ. Responding to gnostic arguments, St. Cyril notes that our bodies, and therefore the flesh of Christ, were holy by virtue of their creation by God. God does not create anything evil. Therefore, our flesh and every one of its cells, tissues, organs, and yes, even neurons, were created holy,
There is nothing corrupt in man’s frame unless he defiles it with adulteries and wantonness. He who formed Adam formed Eve also; and both male and female were fashioned by the Divine hands. None of the members of the body as fashioned from the beginning is corrupt. Let all heretics be silent who slander their bodies, or rather Him who formed them.1
But St. Cyril recognizes that we have corrupted our flesh. In fact, we have so corrupted our bodies that we cannot save our bodies from this corruption. We are sick patients in need of a Physician to gird himself with a linen and wash away our infirmities. We are orphaned children in need of a Teacher to instruct us in our foolishness. We are hungry beggars in need of the Bread of Life to fill our heavenly desires. The prophets recognized that men were unable to save themselves and begged God, “Bow your heavens, O Lord, and come down!” (Ps. 144:5).
And in our corrupt flesh, we made idols of our own bodies. We worshipped wood, clay, and metal gods made in our own image. We worshipped gods of our own likeness through the degradation of our bodies in adultery, pornography, homosexuality, and other sexual deviancies. And we created a tower of Babel in our own honor, a technological marvel crafted by our own brain matter, by our own flesh, to mimic us. In seeking to elevate ourselves above God, we cheapened our flesh to a commodity, a mere product among products. We took what was holy and made it base.
But God did not see it fit that his images should be so debased. And to elevate the flesh once more, very God of very God took on that flesh. And to save the flesh from its corruption and destroy death itself, Christ wielded the flesh as the sacred weapon of his holy crusade,
Men, having abandoned God, fashioned images like men. Since, therefore, the image of man was falsely worshiped as God, God became truly man, that the falsehood might be destroyed. The devil had made use of the flesh as an instrument against us…. We have been saved by the very weapons which the devil used to conquer us…. His body, therefore, was made a bait to death, that the dragon, when hoping to devour it, might disgorge those also whom he had already devoured. For: “Death having waxed mighty, devoured”; and again: “God wiped away the tears from all faces.”2
The flesh is raised above its original honor to an even greater glory through the Incarnation. In taking on a human body, Christ elevates humanity to the right hand of God, where he reigns in the Celestial City. It is of this elevated flesh and blood from a true man that we are sustained both in body and soul. And if the flesh of humanity has been made so holy in God’s sight, we ought to treat it as worthy of dwelling above the angels, for in its resurrected form, it does.
Christians are all too quick to despise the flesh, treating their bodies as the ultimate enemy behind temptation and sin rather than a gift from God to be cherished. Such an inadequate understanding of the body is not only unprepared to face the moral quandaries of modern technological advancement, but is also incompatible with the historic Church tradition. Without a doubt, our flesh often urges us towards sin. But it is through this struggle in denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following Christ, that our flesh will be sanctified.
St. Cyril saw the body as a blessing, a true part of God’s image and something to be inestimably valued. The flesh was not meant to be treated as an unalterable evil. Nor was the flesh meant to be treated as a resource to extract and export to the highest bidder. No, to the Church throughout the ages, the flesh has been respected as a blessed gift from God and a way to experience his love and grace.
Let us respect our bodies, which are to shine as the sun; let us not for the sake of a little pleasure defile so great and noble a body; for the sin is fleeting and of the passing hour, but the shame lasts many years and forever.3
Cyril of Jerusalem, The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, ed. Roy Joseph Deferrari, trans. Leo P. McCauley and Anthony A. Stephenson, vol. 61, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1969), 243.
ibid., 235–236.
ibid., 248.
Thanks Josh. I've studied neurophysiology and appreciate your thoughtful article encouraging us to respect all that God creates.
Good stuff man. I love ethical stuff that makes me think.