ISSN 2150-7740
17 papers in the library · 83 citations · publishing 2020-2026
AJOB Neuroscience April 3, 2026 Adina L. Roskies, Nicolas Rouleau
The target article by Van Gyseghem et al. (2026) surveys discussions of consciousness in papers involving human brain organoids (HBOs). They rightly point out that there are many divergent concepts...
AJOB Neuroscience April 3, 2026 Mario Picozzi, Renzo Pegoraro, Alberto Carrara
The systematic mapping by Van Gyseghem and colleagues (2026) provides a welcome and careful reconstruction of how consciousness is discussed within the ethical and philosophical literature on human...
AJOB Neuroscience July 9, 2025 Aileen Van Gyseghem, Kris Dierickx, Andrew J Barnhart 17 citations
Human brain organoids (HBOs) are three-dimensional structures derived from human pluripotent stem cells that model aspects of fetal brain development. As HBO models grow more complex, ethical concerns arise, particularly around the potential for consciousness. Defining and detecting consciousness in HBOs remains unresolved, with existing theories offering conflicting predictions. This...
AJOB Neuroscience June 16, 2025 Owen Thomas, Francisca Silva
In "Prescription for Love: An Experimental Investigation of Laypeople's Relative Moral Disapproval of Love Drugs," Lantian, Boudesseul, and Cova (2024) explore the moral implications of hypothetical romantic love-enhancing biotechnological interventions. Their study reveals "love drugs" (LDs) are viewed as less acceptable than psychological therapy due to the perceived inauthenticity of the...
AJOB Neuroscience February 5, 2024 Julian D. Sandbrink, Kyle Johnson, Maureen Gill et al. 13 citations
The psychedelic psilocybin has shown promise both as treatment for psychiatric conditions and as a means of improving well-being in healthy individuals. In some jurisdictions (e.g., Oregon, USA), psilocybin use for both purposes is or will soon be allowed and yet, public attitudes toward this shift are understudied. We asked a nationally representative sample of 795 US Americans to evaluate the...
AJOB Neuroscience April 3, 2023 Daniel Rosenbaum, Matthew Cho, Evan Schneider et al. 11 citations
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AJOB Neuroscience April 3, 2023 R. Ozeki-Hayashi, D. Wilkinson
In their target article, Peterson et al. discuss the intriguing prospect of using psychedelics as a treatment for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (AD/ADRD) (Peterson et al. 2023). They provide a helpful analysis of ethical issues that may arise in research or clinical use. However, while they mention the use of psychedelics in indigenous spiritual practices, Peterson et...
AJOB Neuroscience April 3, 2023 Kai Rudolph
Beauchamp, T. L., and J. F. Childress. 2019. Principles of biomedical ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyle, J. 2004. Medical ethics and double effect: the case of terminal sedation. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 25 (1):51–60. doi:10.1023/b:meta.0000025096.25317.22. Creutzfeldt, C. J., B. M. Kluger, and R. G. Holloway. 2019. Neuropalliative care: A guide to improving the lives of...
AJOB Neuroscience April 3, 2023 Sarah Diner, M. Gaillard
10.1080/21507740.2022.2048726. Stoekl e, H. C., A. Ivasilevitch, G. Marignac, and C. Herv e. 2021. Creation and use of organoids in biomedical research and healthcare: The bioethical and metabioethical issues. Cell Adhesion & Migration 15 (1):285–94. doi: 10.1080/19336918.2021.1996749. Stoekl e, H. C., L. Ladrat, T. Landrin, P. Beuzeboc, and C. Herv e. 2022. Bio-ethical issues in oncology...
AJOB Neuroscience April 3, 2023 B. Blackshaw
It is widely agreed that possession of consciousness contributes to an entity’s moral status. Therefore, if we could identify consciousness in a machine, this would be a compelling argument for considering it to possess at least a degree of moral status. However, as Elisabeth Hildt explains, our third person perspective on artificial intelligence means that determining if a machine is conscious...
AJOB Neuroscience 2023 Andrew Peterson, Emily A Largent, Holly Fernandez Lynch et al. 42 citations
In this paper, we examine the case of psychedelic medicine for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD). These "mind-altering" drugs are not currently offered as treatments to persons with AD/ADRD, though there is growing interest in their use to treat underlying causes and associated psychiatric symptoms. We present a research agenda for examining the ethics of psychedelic medicine...
AJOB Neuroscience 2023 Elisabeth Hildt
Can machines be conscious and what would be the ethical implications? This article gives an overview of current robotics approaches toward machine consciousness and considers factors that hamper an understanding of machine consciousness. After addressing the epistemological question of how we would know whether a machine is conscious and discussing potential advantages of potential future...
AJOB Neuroscience 2023 Federico Zilio, Andrea Lavazza
Human cerebral organoids are three-dimensional biological cultures grown in the laboratory to mimic as closely as possible the cellular composition, structure, and function of the corresponding organ, the brain. For now, cerebral organoids lack blood vessels and other characteristics of the human brain, but are also capable of having coordinated electrical activity. They have been usefully...
AJOB Neuroscience 2023 Spyridon Orestis Palermos
It has been recently suggested that if the Extended Mind thesis is true, mental privacy might be under serious threat. In this paper, I look into the details of this claim and propose that one way of dealing with this emerging threat requires that data ontology be enriched with an additional kind of data-viz., mental data. I explore how mental data relates to both data and metadata and suggest...
AJOB Neuroscience March 24, 2022 Brett J. Kagan, Daniela Duc, I. Stevens et al.
The development of neural organoids—three-dimensional constructs of neural tissue—resulted in significant advances in neurophysiological understandings, as well raising key ethical concerns. Sawai et al. (2022) discuss the use of these neural organoids, proposing policies to regulate this technology. The most pressing issue arises in the proposed metrics for assessing phenomenological...
AJOB Neuroscience 2022 Laura Specker Sullivan
For more than 20 years, Western science education has been incorporated into Tibetan Buddhist monastics' training. In this time, there have been a number of fruitful collaborations between Buddhist monastics and neuroscientists, neurologists, and psychologists. These collaborations are unsurprising given the emphasis on phenomenological exploration of first-person conscious experience in...
AJOB Neuroscience March 31, 2020 J. Banja
In the acknowledgements section of her 2019 book Artificial You, Susan Schneider relates that “This book was a delight to write.” (Schneider 2019, 153) It shows. The book is a delight to read. Artificial You is relatively short and, thankfully, without a lot of neurophilosophical jargon. Its primary objective is to present a multi-faceted exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI) and its...