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Ryan Collison

I write about cool science and share it here.

Synthesis—organoid intelligence revealing principles of biological coherence

Synthesis: What Organoid Intelligence Teaches About Biological Coherence

Series: Organoid Intelligence | Part: 9 of 9 There’s a particular moment in organoid research that clarifies everything. You watch neural tissue in a petri dish—no skull, no sensory organs, no evolutionary history—spontaneously organize itself into rhythmic firing patterns. You watch it respond to electrical stimulation with something

Organoid implementing active inference—biological free energy minimization

Organoids Meet Active Inference: Biological Free Energy Minimizers

What if organoids aren’t just biological tissue we’re teaching—but natural computers already running the most sophisticated inference algorithm in the universe? Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle (FEP) proposes that all self-organizing systems—from cells to brains to societies—exist by minimizing surprise. They build internal

Ethical considerations for organoid consciousness and moral status

The Ethics of Organoid Intelligence: When Does Tissue Become Someone?

Series: Organoid Intelligence | Part: 7 of 9 In 2019, a team at Johns Hopkins grew a collection of human brain cells in a dish. These cells organized themselves into something resembling cortical tissue. They developed electrical activity patterns that looked eerily like those of developing brains. And then the researchers

DishBrain system—organoid neurons playing Pong

DishBrain and Beyond: Current State of the Field

Series: Organoid Intelligence | Part: 6 of 11 In December 2022, a paper appeared in Neuron with a title that sounded like science fiction: “In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world.” The authors claimed they had taught a dish of brain cells to play

Brain-computer interface connecting organoid to electronic hardware

The Interface Problem: Connecting Wetware to Hardware

Series: Organoid Intelligence | Part: 5 of 9 You can grow a brain in a dish. You can watch it develop neurons that fire, networks that self-organize, patterns of activity that look unmistakably like computation. But here’s the problem: you can’t talk to it. This is the interface

Organoid learning—neural tissue acquiring patterns through stimulation

Teaching Organoids: How Brain Tissue Learns

Series: Organoid Intelligence | Part: 4 of 9 In 2022, researchers at Cortical Labs taught a cluster of neurons to play Pong. Not a simulation. Not a neural network. Actual living brain tissue—800,000 human neurons grown on a chip—learned to intercept a digital ball with a paddle. They

Energy comparison—biological neural tissue vs silicon computation

The Energy Equation: Why Wetware Beats Silicon

Series: Organoid Intelligence | Part: 3 of 11 Your brain runs on about 20 watts. That’s less power than a standard LED lightbulb. Meanwhile, the supercomputers trying to simulate even small portions of neural activity consume megawatts—literally millions of times more energy. This isn’t a detail. This is