Brett J. Kagan
Chief Scientific Officer, Cortical Labs
Integrated information Consciousness is intrinsic causal power, measured as integrated information
Brett J. Kagan is Chief Scientific Officer of Cortical Labs, the Melbourne company building biological neural systems on silicon. He is the senior author of the 2022 Neuron paper “In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world,” which grew human and rodent cortical neurons on high-density multielectrode arrays and let them play the video game Pong through a closed-loop feedback system.
The DishBrain experiment is a direct test of whether a biological neural culture, without a body or a program, can exhibit goal-directed learning when given feedback. Kagan’s team showed the cultures adapted their activity to hit the digital ball, using free-energy-based prediction error as the learning signal.
Kagan’s position is that biological neurons are the computational substrate that produces intelligence, and that the way to study the emergence of mind is to close the loop around living neural tissue rather than to simulate neurons in software. The company’s later work extends the platform toward what it calls synthetic biological intelligence.
Known for. DishBrain, in vitro neurons learning Pong, closed-loop embodiment of neural cultures, synthetic biological intelligence
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Brett J. Kagan is listed with the other integrated information theorists, who hold that consciousness is intrinsic causal power, measured as integrated information. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.