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The essay "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace came to my mind. In that essay he describes how extraordinary the nervous system of a lobster is and ho
by hi41 5y ago
The essay "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace came to my mind. In that essay he describes how extraordinary the nervous system of a lobster is and how mindlessly and cruelly we boil them live. If David were still alive, he would definitely welcome this development. I really miss David. I am awestruck by his other essay "This is Water". I am amazed at his deep insights into human nature and how well he describes it, kindly.
- mrsmee89 5y agoBoth of those essays are fantastic. I find “This is water” to be especially poignant.
- Issaclabs 5y agoVery pleased to see this comment here :). I would definitely recommend his essays and especially his book infinite jest, if you have the stomach for it.
- jjcon 5y agoLobsters have essentially the same number of neurons in their entire nervous system (including the “brian”) as a fruit fly does. Complex yes? Interestingly complex? Not even close. A cockroach has 10x more.
- omnicognate 5y agoNot sure what you mean by "interestingly complex". To say we are nowhere near understanding the nervous systems of fruit flies would be a massive understatement. Even for C.Elegans, for which we know the complete connectome and much more besides (and which has a thousandth of the number of neurons a fruit fly does), we're not close to explaining (or simulating) the behaviour of the animal in terms of the properties of the nervous system.
- stickfigure 5y agoAre you suggesting I should feel bad about squishing fruit flies?
- omnicognate 5y agoNo, I squish flies all the time. However, as an empathetic human you should probably feel a bit squeamish about inflicting unnecessary suffering on them.
- catlikesshrimp 5y agoNot if you need to, and your mind feels bad about it to keep the balance. But if you do it for fun, I would keep my distance from you and stay close to a pike.
- dTal 5y agoWhy do you squish fruit flies? They're harmless,
- biofox 5y agoThey lay eggs on my fruit, and in my plant pots... Not cool
- afiori 5y agoIt might be nice not to slowly boil them alive
- robbrown451 5y agoYou should maybe feel bad about how much time you are wasting squishing them, compared to using one of those electric tennis racket bug zappers. They clear a kitchen of fruit flies in minutes, while giving you a most satisfying sound as you send them to the great fruit fly beyond.
- yummypaint 5y agoElectric zappers make insects explode and spray atomized guts all over the space spreading disease
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoWasn't simulation done? https://github.com/Flowx08/Celegans-simulation https://github.com/Flowx08/Celegans-simulation
- omnicognate 5y agoThat's a simulation based on the connectome and a trivially simple body, producing a very small piece of behaviour. I don't mean to minimise it, it's very cool and I'm not an expert. The video itself says that it is limited. As I understand it, C. Elegans displays a surprisingly large and complex set of behaviours given its (relatively) extremely simple nervous system. A database of thousands of these "behavioural phenotypes" has been built and provides a well-defined goal for attempts to reproduce the behaviours in simulations. Very few of these behaviours have been replicated. To solve the problem will apparently require a lot more than the connectome, which has been known for a long time. It's not enough to know that neuron A connects to neuron B, or even the full 3D structure of that connection. You need to know how that connection influences the behaviour of the connected neurons. People refer to this as "knowing the weights" but AFAIK it's still an open question whether a model based on "weights" is sufficient. This is a recent comment from one of the researchers about progress on this over the last 10 years: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brain-emulation-no-progress-on-c-elgans-after-10-years#comment-sbHAk72sDFHAzLz6j https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-b...
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoThat model's phase space is about 2000 bits, realistically speaking its behavior never repeats. It can't be searched either, our computational limit today is about 70 bits.
- omnicognate 5y agoI'm not clear what you're saying there. You shouldn't need to exhaust the phase space to check if the model exhibits a particular behaviour, but perhaps you're not claiming that?
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoIt’s still enough to feel being boiled alive.
- Yizahi 5y agoPlease define "feel". They experience structural damage - yes, same as every other living organism or plant if damaged. If I tear dandelion in half it will emit poisonous juice. Does it "feel" pain though? I think no. The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify.
- mFixman 5y agoDifferent sets of neurons fire for different people on the same stimulus. Does that mean you don't feel pain in the same way another person feels pain?
- Yizahi 5y agoThat's an open question. But if we would assume that answer is "no", then all alive beings can "experience pain" because it' the same mechanism in all of them. Jellyfish can "feel the pain" if we will assume such answer, and I imagine a single boat travel cutting and tearing thousands of jellyfish will easily beat this whole lobster conundrum in the severity of the problem :) PS: I'm not advocating for cruel behavior against animals. It's just that some questions don't have an easy clear answer at all, especially scaled to the planet level.
- DyslexicAtheist 5y agoon point imo! does one need to feel pain in the same way for it to be classified as pain. pain is pain. one of the things that unites us as humans is our ability to feel it and empathize with another. if an animal can feel pain it doesn't matter if it is the same pain. Also I recall that Nirvana once sang "It's ok to eat fish because they don't have any feelings". For generations people thought that is true. Some in my family call themselves Pescaterean because they for some reason don't want to inflict pain on animals (that look like us). my point is pain is pain - the rest is just mental gymnastics that allow us to justify our own behavior.
- MattPalmer1086 5y agoThanks for posting this. Just read This is Water. Now I'm going to have to read all his other stuff.
- SyzygistSix 5y agoHave fun reading Infinite Jest. I mean it seriously but it's a lot of book.
- MattPalmer1086 5y agoBy a strange coincidence, it turns out my wife has a copy by her bed she hasn't read yet!
- therealdrag0 5y agoA very common occurrence ><
- dmarchand90 5y agoI'm not sure if he would care. I'll need to dig it up the source, but in an interview a friend of his said that DFW actually went and ate two lobsters that evening after writing the essay.
- irthomasthomas 5y agoI love DFW. I heard from his house mate that he ate two lobsters while writing that. (`●__●ˊ) /
- maaaaattttt 5y agoI had never read "This is Water" and somehow (and I'm sure I see that because I know the outcome) you can really feel the depression lurking in his words, and maybe even his internal battle against it. The back and forth one can have between seeing the world as a playground and seeing it as a prison. I think some (very often smart) people are cursed by the ability to see the absurdity of life and not being able to do anything against it.