In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a game-world(2022) (opens in new tab)

it's not a literal spark. it was a florescence caused by an expulsion of zinc ions during egg cortical reaction in the midst of FluoZin-3, a dye that binds to zinc and fluoresces.

I think that experiment does a bad job at explaining that, because every damn person in the world is using that as some kind of 'spark of life' analogy when really there is no easier way to prevent triploidy than to force everything away for a moment.

I was doing some modelling over Christmas, and was digging in to the papers. It turns out that bioneurons are not very much like perceptrons at all. Depending on type, they are more like a small microcontroller of some sort.

the complexity of advanced connectomes is so far beyond our imaging capabilities that we have no way of knowing how far away from understanding intelligence we are