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That is genuinely horrifying. I seems people can stomach anything when you’re not experimenting on humans... A brain still a brain. If you don’t believe in a

That is genuinely horrifying. I seems people can stomach anything when you’re not experimenting on humans... A brain still a brain. If you don’t believe in a soul it seems logical to operate with the idea that as long as the brain has electrical waves propagating through it, it’s experiencing consciousness. waves resembling normal consciousness specifically

mattnewton 8y ago
I think the brain was likely totally comatose, from the article: “”” Sestan now says the organs produce a flat brain wave equivalent to a comatose state, although the tissue itself “looks surprisingly great” and, once it’s dissected, the cells produce normal-seeming patterns. The lack of wider electrical activity could be irreversible if it is due to damage and cell death. The pigs’ brains were attached to the BrainEx device roughly four hours after the animals were decapitated. However, it could also be due to chemicals the Yale team added to the blood replacement to prevent swelling, which also severely dampen the activity of neurons. “You have to understand that we have so many channel blockers in our solution,” Sestan told the NIH. “This is probably the explanation why we don’t get [any] signal.” “”” But yes this would be scary if that wasn’t true.
- __blockcipher__ 8y ago
  Ah, good catch there. I stand corrected. I definitely agree a flat-line is way different from being fully conscious.
  - redisman 8y ago
    But if something goes wrong (which sounds very likely at some point in such an imprecise operation)? That'll be a helluva existential crisis situation.
logicallee 8y ago
I don't get something. When modelled in software instead, I don't see why a simulating function couldn't use pseudorandom functions and inputs only (nothing truly random, no source of input), and, therefore, be deterministic. I don't see how it makes its results worse. But if it's deterministic, I'm having a hard time seeing how actually running it can have a moral side effect, or how that effect is worse depending on how many times you run it. Especially since there are further levels of silent optimizations (such as by the compiler, or in the CPU) based on the abstraction that the result is all we really care about. Would the calculation involved have a moral side effect at one level of abstraction, but not another? What if you cache intermediate results? Final results? It is really hard to give pure deterministic calculation itself a moral component, yet it seems a simulation could in the end be just that. Any solution to this problem?

mattnewton 8y ago

I think the brain was likely totally comatose, from the article: “”” Sestan now says the organs produce a flat brain wave equivalent to a comatose state, although the tissue itself “looks surprisingly great” and, once it’s dissected, the cells produce normal-seeming patterns. The lack of wider electrical activity could be irreversible if it is due to damage and cell death. The pigs’ brains were attached to the BrainEx device roughly four hours after the animals were decapitated. However, it could also be due to chemicals the Yale team added to the blood replacement to prevent swelling, which also severely dampen the activity of neurons. “You have to understand that we have so many channel blockers in our solution,” Sestan told the NIH. “This is probably the explanation why we don’t get [any] signal.” “”” But yes this would be scary if that wasn’t true.

__blockcipher__ 8y ago
Ah, good catch there. I stand corrected. I definitely agree a flat-line is way different from being fully conscious.
- redisman 8y ago
  But if something goes wrong (which sounds very likely at some point in such an imprecise operation)? That'll be a helluva existential crisis situation.

logicallee 8y ago

I don't get something. When modelled in software instead, I don't see why a simulating function couldn't use pseudorandom functions and inputs only (nothing truly random, no source of input), and, therefore, be deterministic. I don't see how it makes its results worse. But if it's deterministic, I'm having a hard time seeing how actually running it can have a moral side effect, or how that effect is worse depending on how many times you run it. Especially since there are further levels of silent optimizations (such as by the compiler, or in the CPU) based on the abstraction that the result is all we really care about. Would the calculation involved have a moral side effect at one level of abstraction, but not another? What if you cache intermediate results? Final results? It is really hard to give pure deterministic calculation itself a moral component, yet it seems a simulation could in the end be just that. Any solution to this problem?