9 ms·

Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

89 points by pr337h4m 3y ago

pencilcode 3y ago
This gives me nightmares tbh. Love that they say that they’re happy and healthy, lol.
- imposterr 3y ago
  Very "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" for me.
  - dsego 3y ago
    Darkness, imprisoning me All that I see, absolute horror I cannot live, I cannot die Trapped in myself, body my holding cell Landmine, has taken my sight Taken my speech, taken my hearing Taken my arms, taken my legs Taken my soul, left me with life in Hell
    - edf13 3y ago
      It’s all it’s known, all it ever has… a higher being may feel the same sadness about us mere humans.
      - isoprophlex 3y ago
        A pig, in a cage, on antibiotics
trulyhnh 3y ago
Never thought the day that brain in a vat is no longer a philosophical question but a practical one would come so soon.
- sparrowInHand 3y ago
  To be honest, i thought it would first go the other way around. To many billionaires afraid of death, trying to encode there mindstate-personality into a machine and become semi-imortal.
  - Version467 3y ago
    I've never understood this. Even if we would have perfect mind-uploading capabilities, this doesn't help the billionaire who is afraid of death, right? It'd just be a copy of them. An immortal one, sure, but the original person would die just the same, no?
    - falcor84 3y ago
      There's the philosophical argument that we have no continuity of consciousness in our meatbag bodies either - e.g. when you wake up, it's rebooting your consciousness from suspended memories.
      - freilanzer 3y ago
        Lucid dreaming would like a word.
        ben_w 3y ago
        Even then it's not continuous over all your sleep.
      - mofunnyman 3y ago
        Not to mention that nearly all of the atoms in your body are replaced every decade, meaning most of you went into sewage treatment long ago.
        kyleyeats 3y ago
        We actually breathe out most of our previously-us mass.
- dr_j_ 3y ago
  One day we'll have biological networks of the size that can compete with today's biggest artificial neural networks, capable of running things like, well, ChatGPT. Then the philosophical questions will run even deeper....
  - komali2 3y ago
    Since they're both neural networks, what questions have changed? I don't see what that clarifies or confounds about the nature of consciousness.
    - bergen 3y ago
      Nobody would argue that turning off ChatGPT is killing a sentient being. With a biological network, "turning it off" and killing it are very close if not the same (depending on who you ask). Biological network are present in our physical reality, you have some matter to deal with, which also makes the experience completely different. People fall in love and have compassion with ChatGPT, what would you think happens if you care for a brain a vat for months? If it is an actual neural structure resembling natural ones, than it might be possible it forms memories and becomes sentient. This is a completetly different array of ethical questions, you can't think of (living) biological matter like a machine, especially not regarding ethics.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        > Nobody would argue that turning off ChatGPT is killing a sentient being. Some do, judging by surveys. And there was a famous case last year with a different LLM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims
    - superb_dev 3y ago
      “neural nets” may mimic organic neurons but they are not comparable in that way
      - soco 3y ago
- pjc50 3y ago
  See "MMAcevdeo": https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
- andrepd 3y ago
  "Neural networks" as in chatgpt and friends have almost nothing to do with "neural networks" as understood in biology, more than a passing analogy to how synapses fire. I'm very skeptical of projects which seek to conflate the two in some vague way.
mnode 3y ago
Beautiful website. They massively over-claim on their science though. Their 'tech' is nothing special, people have been culturing and recording from neurons for years. And their claims of 'sentient' neurons in a dish should be taken as being somewhat flexible with the meaning of the word.
- deleted 3y ago
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- isoprophlex 3y ago
  When I see something so over-engineered on the aesthetics front, my knee jerk reaction is to think "this is overcompensating, and i guess they don't really have what they promise"
  - samuelec 3y ago
    plus it feels like in the 90' where "webmasters" would try to impress you with an Adobe Flash animation. So bad
- pmontra 3y ago
  The website reminds me of mid 90s multimedia presentations on CDs. It takes a long time to scroll and read and there is not much to learn about them. Maybe their research page would be a better starting point https://corticallabs.com/research.html https://corticallabs.com/research.html The latest article is "Critical dynamics arise during structured information presentation within embodied in vitro neuronal networks"
boschfish 3y ago
The Neurally Controlled Animat: Biological Brains Acting with Simulated Bodies (2001) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440704/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440704/
anon-3988 3y ago
If the goal is to mimic the human brain, how is this different than just...starting with a human brain? Either way, you will be subjugating a possibly conscious mind into servitude. I am sure they are "happy" (however you want to measure it) about it either way lol
- jagrsw 3y ago
  > you will be subjugating a possibly conscious mind into servitude. Is the distinction between a protein-and-salt-water model versus an electronic-gates-and-memory model meaningful? From a computational standpoint, they both manipulate states and store data. Does substrate matter unless we're invoking metaphysical claims? Regarding the video (https://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/1716312250422796590 https://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/1716312250422796590), the device seems untypically polished but also a bit sus. Even if it contains living neurons, their functionality appears limited to mere survival rather than meaningful data processing. The claim that it's/can-be "more efficient than a GPU" (even if in the future) is premature at this point IMO.
  - anonymouszx 3y ago
    We know that the human brain is able to generate qualia (conscious experiences) despite having no model for how these are generated. (To be clear, by consciousness, I mean the ability to have conscious experiences such as experiencing a color or pain, not self-awareness.) On the other hand, the hypothesis that a Turing machine on its own could generate conscious experiences leads to many seemingly absurd scenarios. Notably, one has to ask how a simulation of supposedly conscious Turing machine using pen and paper could possibly be conscious, or indeed, why one would need to "run" a Turing machine for consciousness to arise and why a mere description of it would not suffice. And how could the mere description of a Turing machine (or equivalently, some C code) be enough for all of its unlived life's consciousness to manifest? If that were the case, one would have to concede that the set of all possible conscious Turing machines is conscious and their experiences are manifested already. If that were the case, then it's hard to see any point in moral reasoning, so for the purpose of debating moral and ethics, I think we can rule this out. Now, one might propose that consciousness only arises when a computational process is physically run in certain ways but not others (this is what proponents of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) typically believe). Assuming this is the case, then implementing a potentially conscious process with biological neurons presents much higher moral hazard vs an implementation of the same process electronically, or safer still, on a Von Neumann machine. I would go even further however, and propose that a conscious being (e.g. a being capable of generating the qualia of the color red for instance) cannot be simulated, i.e. conscious processes are generally noncomputable. Why? Well, consider what Chalmers calls the meta-problem of consciousness, which is to say the problem of why we perceive there to be a (hard) problem of consciousness in the first place (and why we are having this very conversation). A simulation of a conscious being would by definition present the same behaviours as that being (given the same stimulus, but for simplicity, we can consider the stimulus as part of the simulation itself without loss of generality). Therefore a simulation of myself for instance, would generate the same thoughts about consciousness itself, and this very same text. But, if we accept the proposition of my first paragraph —that a Turing machine on its own cannot be conscious— this would imply that our whole thought process surrounding consciousness and indeed our very belief that we are conscious is purely coincidental. After all, the unconscious simulation of myself would claim and "believe" just as strongly as I do that it is conscious while that is not the case, which means that the process by which it derives these thoughts and conclusions would be wholly unrelated to the object of these thoughts (actual consciousness). As such, it is my fairly strong belief that there is some physical "device" in our bodies which allows us to generate qualia and get feedback allowing us to store a record of these experiences. If I had to guess, I would say that this "device" is very likely located in our brains, and that it is quite likely spread throughout our neurons and possibly each one of them. It should be noted that although I do not believe I can be simulated in my entirety for the above reasons, I do believe that I could likely be emulated with a high level of accuracy from the perspective of an outside observer. Actually we see this already with ChatGPT being able to play the role of a conscious being. But unconscious objects appearing conscious is nothing new in a sense since even a novel (especially told from a first person perspective) can be thought of as such an object already. It will be very interesting to see whether AIs trained without reference to the concepts of consciousness (a hard task to filter that out of the training data!) will ever present signs of consciousness. That would certainly put into question my above philosophical reflections. --- So to summarise and answer your question more directly, I think there is something about our universe that allows for the generation of conscious experience and that our brains, likely on the neural level, have a bidirectional interaction with this something. As to what this is and how it works, I have no clue. Roger Penrose for instance put forth the idea that this might be related to quantum mechanics and certain molecular structures in our neurons capable of interacting with the quantum world in specific ways, but this is still pure speculation. More importantly, we know from our own experience that interconnected biological neurons processing information and put under stress (rewards and penalties) are capable of generating conscious experience including very negative ones. And, whereas I believe there is good reason to assume that Turing-equivalent processes such as electronic circuits are not capable of consciousness, I strongly believe that artificially created biological neural network are very likely to be conscious, perhaps even at a fairly small scale already. So, yes, I think any work creating artificial information processing systems using biological neurons needs to very tightly regulated, if not stopped entirely. At the risk of sounding dramatic, we might accidentally create hell on Earth if we are not careful, at least if biological computing ever becomes competitive with transistor based computing, which until now I'm glad has not looked to be the case... but I'm starting to worry.
Liquix 3y ago
Our biOS composes their reality, sending information about it via electrical signals. It then converts the neuron's activity into actions inside that reality. Their world is mediated through our biOS. The simulation argument asserts that "at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation." (1) is still possible - humankind is armed to the teeth, this tech could be a bunch of hot air, the breakthrough is still N years away, etc. (2) becomes less likely with every headline. If we had the ability today to simulate a consciousness-filled universe thousands of instances would be spun up overnight. (3) is looking more plausible than ever... https://simulation-argument.com/ https://simulation-argument.com/
- deleted 3y ago
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- codeflo 3y ago
  I know that smarter people than me have discussed this to death, but IMO, you simply can't make statistical arguments like that. Let's say you have an input x and a step function f such that the sequence x, f(x), f(f(x)), ... contains (in whatever sense) a conscious mind. Once that sequence is defined, it doesn't (and can't) logically matter whether it is evaluated once, twice or a hundred times, whether it is evaluated on a slow computer or fast computer, or, in fact, not evaluated at all. There is always only one sequence, and the act of evaluating adds no information to it.
poopsmithe 3y ago
Eww, what is up with their website? Just scrolling down lags my entire computer.
- deleted 3y ago
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- Denote6737 3y ago
  Yeah it's pretty unusable site. Clearly designed more for marketing than science.
  - px43 3y ago
    I've seen what happens when you let the researchers build the websites, and it's not great. On the other hand, maybe the internet would be a whole lot better if everything was just a giant wiki, and we let our personal browser bots go scrape for the interesting stuff and report back to us.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  Better accessed with PgUp, PgDown Or, actually, with Ctrl+U (the code is clean, just go to the <main>) Well, for convenience: ==== ==== ==== ==== ###~ What does it mean to grow a mind? ~### The human mind is the north star for digital intelligence. But silicon can only do so much. Cortical is growing human neurons into silicon. Their reality is our simulation. We think these minds will learn better than any digital model and breathe life into our machines. ###~ Human neural networks raised in a simulation ~### The neurons exist inside our Biological Intelligence Operating System (biOS). biOS runs the simulation and sends information about their environment, with positive or negative feedback. It interfaces with the neurons directly. As they react, their impulses affect their digital world. ###~ Our first minds ~### The dishbrain is currently being developed at the CL0 laboratory in Melbourne, AU. We bring these neurons to life, and integrate them into The biOS with a mixture of hard silicon and soft tissue. Our first cohort have learnt to play Pong. They grow, adapt and learn as we do. ###~ Silicon meets neuron ~### Neurons are cultivated inside a nutrient rich solution, supplying them everything they need to be happy and healthy. Their physical growth is across a silicon chip, which has a set of pins that send electrical impulses into the neural structure, and receive impulses back in return. ###~ A direct connection to infinity ~### This creates the highest bandwidth connection possible between an organic neural network and a digital world. Our biOS composes their reality, sending information about it via electrical signals. It then converts the neuron's activity into actions inside that reality. Their world is mediated through our biOS. ###~ The Ultimate Learning Machine ~### Those actions have a positive or negative effect in biOS, which the mind perceives, adapting to improve that feedback. The human neuron is self programming, infinitely flexible, the result of four billion years of evolution. What digital models try and emulate, we begin with. ###~ Why? ~### There are many advantages to organic-digital intelligence. Lower power costs, more intuition, insight and creativity in our intelligences. But most importantly we are driven by three core questions. ###~ What will we discover if our intelligences train themselves? ~### We know an organic mind is a better learner than any digital model. It can switch tasks easily, and bring learnings from one task to another. But more important is what we don’t know. What are the limits of a mind connected to infinity? What can it do with data it literally lives in? ###~ What happens if we take a shortcut to generalised intelligence? ~### Machine Learning algorithms are a poor copy of the way an organic neural network functions. So we’re starting with the neuron, replacing decades of algorithms with millions of years of evolution. What happens as these native intelligences start solving the problems we’d previously left to software? ###~ How can we surpass the limits of silicon? ~### Silicon is raw, rigid, unchanging. Our organic neural networks sit on top of this raw power, but the way they grow and evolve isn’t limited to the software they run on. There is no software, it's coded in their DNA. How will computing change as we shift from hard silicon to soft tissue? ###~ RFN: Request For Neurons ~### The dishbrain is learning and growing in biOS today, and soon we’re opening an early access preview for selected developers. The biOS is our simulation environment, where you can program tasks, challenges and objectives for our minds. Join our developer program to get early access to our SDK, and secure training time with our minds. ###~ What comes next ~### We’re not making smarter computers, more efficient data centers, or more personalised advertising. We’re doing this to see what happens. What happens if we grow a mind native to the infinite possibility space of digital computing? We wonder what it will mean for digital spaces, for robotics, science, personal care. To explore the delineation between the personal mind, the distributed mind, digital and physical realities. To blur those boundaries. We wonder what it means to grow a mind, born of the physical world, but a native of the digital world, where that mind will go, and what it will teach us. Wonder with us.
epups 3y ago
It's clear that you can get some actual neurons in a dish to behave as an artifical neuron network. It is a fascinating concept as a research question. What's not clear is what is the business value here - do they expect these natural networks to outperform ANNs for any foreseeable application?
- freilanzer 3y ago
  Science does not need a business value.
- px43 3y ago
  Yeah, power-performance is a big one. The entire human brain runs at about 12 watts. Human neurons are several orders of magnitude more efficient for neural computing than anything that's been dreamt up in silicon. That might not always be the case, but I imagine there are still another several orders of magnitude at least that artificial neurons might fill as this technology evolves. Imagine something like a Raspberry Pi with a neural network mounted on it that is significantly more powerful than an h100.
  - epups 3y ago
    The brain might need only 12W, but I guarantee you that their setup maintaining 10 orders of magnitude fewer neurons in a dish is already using far more than that. I get that brains are far more efficient than computers. What I'm wondering is how a business case can be made today for even considering an approach like this.
pmontra 3y ago
Their blog is one post per year at https://corticallabs.medium.com/ https://corticallabs.medium.com/
Denote6737 3y ago
So head cheese. Or Bio-Neural Gel Packs. Depending on your sci-fi of choice.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Don't forget to feed your PC every day otherwise it gets grumpy and will drop all your tables.
akie 3y ago
No ethical considerations to be found anywhere. Typical.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  > Neurons are cultivated inside a nutrient rich solution, supplying them everything they need to be happy and healthy Neurons are considered organic entities that are satisfied with an healthy environment. It is supposed that nothing suffers.
seydor 3y ago
For those interested beyond the new age marketing speak that shouldn't exist on any real research company: These are the guys behind Dishbrain, which is not really a brain but a patch of human induced pluripotent stem cells grown on the Maxone silicon chip [2] which allows recording from the entire ~5x5mm chip with high resolution. [1] https://newatlas.com/computers/human-brain-chip-ai/ https://newatlas.com/computers/human-brain-chip-ai/ [2] https://www.mxwbio.com/products/maxone-mea-system-microelectrode-array/ https://www.mxwbio.com/products/maxone-mea-system-microelect...
psychoslave 3y ago
>What happens if we grow a mind native to the infinite possibility space of digital computing? Nothing we need to care about, as there is no such a thing. Mankind has put a significant portion of its limited attentional power on building interconnected silicon computers, that in a space whose scale is so small compared to human bodies that illusion of infinity is easy to fall into. In the same time, mankind went with global policy of massively draw on non-renewable energy stock, destroying vast sustainable life supporting environment in the process. There is nothing like unlimited resources and infinite space. Now, obviously, this page is marketing idle talk, with a weak connection to the actual work in their labs. From a purely scientific point of view, I wonder if that kind of device is just as vulnerable to magnetic storms as a pure silicon based device. From a human perspective, without much more context, this seems just horrific and I wish them much ethical and legal barriers to stop them already.
Jean-Papoulos 3y ago
Ah, sweet. Man-made horrors beyond my comprehension. Hopefully this will lead to brain implants that can help with solving a bunch of brain issues, and not to what we're all thinking of.
- deleted 3y ago
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- jojobas 3y ago
  May I ask if you have a mouth, and/or a commitment to screaming?
  - compressedgas 3y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTffic7uq6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTffic7uq6Y
c7DJTLrn 3y ago
This is kind of the plot of the third season of Sword Art Online.
the_absurdist 3y ago
This does not appear to be new or novel technology, aside from the fact that the neurons-on-chip are housed in a portable incubator. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w41gH6x_30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w41gH6x_30
api 3y ago
In the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts this technology is referred to as “head cheese”. It’s used as a form of AI as it turns out silicon can never beat biology at analog reasoning. It ends up playing a role in the plot. IRL If the masses of neurons start getting large this starts to be ethically questionable… in direct proportion to how large.
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  From the paper: > Under this theory, BNNs [biological neural networks] hold “beliefs” about the state of the world, where learning involves updating these beliefs to minimize their VFE [variational free energy] or actively change the world to make it less. If true, this implies that it should be possible to shape BNN behavior by simply presenting unpredictable feedback following “incorrect” behavior. Incorrect behavior is punished by pushing static, simulating an "unpredictable" environment, so that the BNN (biological neural network) acts differently. I really hope that if they continue this line of development that they find something other than "chaos overrides" to sensory input because at a certain level of intelligence, that would lead to insanity.
notpushkin 3y ago
Just finished watching the Pantheon (2022) series about “uploaded intelligence” last week. Pretty ironic timing!
- larodi 3y ago
  Sadly the show is not to be continued. IMHO very nice show, and riddled with less nonsense and rubbish compared to the website of these guys…
- Kerbonut 3y ago
  More like, “What a coincidence!”
luke-stanley 3y ago
Surely you'd just want to copy how the neurons work enough to run them on normal silicon rather than dealing with wetware? Or has that hit a wall? Amazing, scary, and perhaps absurd, all at the same time!
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  We don't understand how human neurons in particular are so good at what they do. We have some understanding, which has been mathematically approximated with back-propagation algorithms and transformers. That's why we have diffusion nets and LLMs that are as good as they are. But the nuts and bolts of how neural systems give rise to reasoning or even what consciousness is... we only know that neural systems are responsible for reasoning, and we don't even know definitively that neural systems cause consciousness. We only know that if you suppress their activity consciousness is retarded, and if you damage them enough consciousness is snuffed out.
slowmovintarget 3y ago
The actual paper: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 Of note: This is an active test of the "Free Energy Principle" [1] with seemingly supportive results. Their definition, in the paper, of sentience is as follows: > It is proposed that these neural cultures would meet the formal definition of sentience as being “responsive to sensory impressions” through adaptive internal processes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle

89 points by pr337h4m 3y ago

pencilcode 3y ago

This gives me nightmares tbh. Love that they say that they’re happy and healthy, lol.

imposterr 3y ago
Very "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" for me.
- dsego 3y ago
  Darkness, imprisoning me All that I see, absolute horror I cannot live, I cannot die Trapped in myself, body my holding cell Landmine, has taken my sight Taken my speech, taken my hearing Taken my arms, taken my legs Taken my soul, left me with life in Hell
  - edf13 3y ago
    It’s all it’s known, all it ever has… a higher being may feel the same sadness about us mere humans.
    - isoprophlex 3y ago
      A pig, in a cage, on antibiotics

trulyhnh 3y ago

Never thought the day that brain in a vat is no longer a philosophical question but a practical one would come so soon.

sparrowInHand 3y ago
To be honest, i thought it would first go the other way around. To many billionaires afraid of death, trying to encode there mindstate-personality into a machine and become semi-imortal.
- Version467 3y ago
  I've never understood this. Even if we would have perfect mind-uploading capabilities, this doesn't help the billionaire who is afraid of death, right? It'd just be a copy of them. An immortal one, sure, but the original person would die just the same, no?
  - falcor84 3y ago
    There's the philosophical argument that we have no continuity of consciousness in our meatbag bodies either - e.g. when you wake up, it's rebooting your consciousness from suspended memories.
    - freilanzer 3y ago
      Lucid dreaming would like a word.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Even then it's not continuous over all your sleep.
    - mofunnyman 3y ago
      Not to mention that nearly all of the atoms in your body are replaced every decade, meaning most of you went into sewage treatment long ago.
      - kyleyeats 3y ago
        We actually breathe out most of our previously-us mass.
dr_j_ 3y ago
One day we'll have biological networks of the size that can compete with today's biggest artificial neural networks, capable of running things like, well, ChatGPT. Then the philosophical questions will run even deeper....
- komali2 3y ago
  Since they're both neural networks, what questions have changed? I don't see what that clarifies or confounds about the nature of consciousness.
  - bergen 3y ago
    Nobody would argue that turning off ChatGPT is killing a sentient being. With a biological network, "turning it off" and killing it are very close if not the same (depending on who you ask). Biological network are present in our physical reality, you have some matter to deal with, which also makes the experience completely different. People fall in love and have compassion with ChatGPT, what would you think happens if you care for a brain a vat for months? If it is an actual neural structure resembling natural ones, than it might be possible it forms memories and becomes sentient. This is a completetly different array of ethical questions, you can't think of (living) biological matter like a machine, especially not regarding ethics.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > Nobody would argue that turning off ChatGPT is killing a sentient being. Some do, judging by surveys. And there was a famous case last year with a different LLM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims
  - superb_dev 3y ago
    “neural nets” may mimic organic neurons but they are not comparable in that way
    - soco 3y ago
pjc50 3y ago
See "MMAcevdeo": https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
andrepd 3y ago
"Neural networks" as in chatgpt and friends have almost nothing to do with "neural networks" as understood in biology, more than a passing analogy to how synapses fire. I'm very skeptical of projects which seek to conflate the two in some vague way.

mnode 3y ago

Beautiful website. They massively over-claim on their science though. Their 'tech' is nothing special, people have been culturing and recording from neurons for years. And their claims of 'sentient' neurons in a dish should be taken as being somewhat flexible with the meaning of the word.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
isoprophlex 3y ago
When I see something so over-engineered on the aesthetics front, my knee jerk reaction is to think "this is overcompensating, and i guess they don't really have what they promise"
- samuelec 3y ago
  plus it feels like in the 90' where "webmasters" would try to impress you with an Adobe Flash animation. So bad
pmontra 3y ago
The website reminds me of mid 90s multimedia presentations on CDs. It takes a long time to scroll and read and there is not much to learn about them. Maybe their research page would be a better starting point https://corticallabs.com/research.html https://corticallabs.com/research.html The latest article is "Critical dynamics arise during structured information presentation within embodied in vitro neuronal networks"

boschfish 3y ago

The Neurally Controlled Animat: Biological Brains Acting with Simulated Bodies (2001) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440704/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440704/

anon-3988 3y ago

If the goal is to mimic the human brain, how is this different than just...starting with a human brain? Either way, you will be subjugating a possibly conscious mind into servitude. I am sure they are "happy" (however you want to measure it) about it either way lol

jagrsw 3y ago
> you will be subjugating a possibly conscious mind into servitude. Is the distinction between a protein-and-salt-water model versus an electronic-gates-and-memory model meaningful? From a computational standpoint, they both manipulate states and store data. Does substrate matter unless we're invoking metaphysical claims? Regarding the video (https://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/1716312250422796590 https://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/1716312250422796590), the device seems untypically polished but also a bit sus. Even if it contains living neurons, their functionality appears limited to mere survival rather than meaningful data processing. The claim that it's/can-be "more efficient than a GPU" (even if in the future) is premature at this point IMO.
- anonymouszx 3y ago
  We know that the human brain is able to generate qualia (conscious experiences) despite having no model for how these are generated. (To be clear, by consciousness, I mean the ability to have conscious experiences such as experiencing a color or pain, not self-awareness.) On the other hand, the hypothesis that a Turing machine on its own could generate conscious experiences leads to many seemingly absurd scenarios. Notably, one has to ask how a simulation of supposedly conscious Turing machine using pen and paper could possibly be conscious, or indeed, why one would need to "run" a Turing machine for consciousness to arise and why a mere description of it would not suffice. And how could the mere description of a Turing machine (or equivalently, some C code) be enough for all of its unlived life's consciousness to manifest? If that were the case, one would have to concede that the set of all possible conscious Turing machines is conscious and their experiences are manifested already. If that were the case, then it's hard to see any point in moral reasoning, so for the purpose of debating moral and ethics, I think we can rule this out. Now, one might propose that consciousness only arises when a computational process is physically run in certain ways but not others (this is what proponents of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) typically believe). Assuming this is the case, then implementing a potentially conscious process with biological neurons presents much higher moral hazard vs an implementation of the same process electronically, or safer still, on a Von Neumann machine. I would go even further however, and propose that a conscious being (e.g. a being capable of generating the qualia of the color red for instance) cannot be simulated, i.e. conscious processes are generally noncomputable. Why? Well, consider what Chalmers calls the meta-problem of consciousness, which is to say the problem of why we perceive there to be a (hard) problem of consciousness in the first place (and why we are having this very conversation). A simulation of a conscious being would by definition present the same behaviours as that being (given the same stimulus, but for simplicity, we can consider the stimulus as part of the simulation itself without loss of generality). Therefore a simulation of myself for instance, would generate the same thoughts about consciousness itself, and this very same text. But, if we accept the proposition of my first paragraph —that a Turing machine on its own cannot be conscious— this would imply that our whole thought process surrounding consciousness and indeed our very belief that we are conscious is purely coincidental. After all, the unconscious simulation of myself would claim and "believe" just as strongly as I do that it is conscious while that is not the case, which means that the process by which it derives these thoughts and conclusions would be wholly unrelated to the object of these thoughts (actual consciousness). As such, it is my fairly strong belief that there is some physical "device" in our bodies which allows us to generate qualia and get feedback allowing us to store a record of these experiences. If I had to guess, I would say that this "device" is very likely located in our brains, and that it is quite likely spread throughout our neurons and possibly each one of them. It should be noted that although I do not believe I can be simulated in my entirety for the above reasons, I do believe that I could likely be emulated with a high level of accuracy from the perspective of an outside observer. Actually we see this already with ChatGPT being able to play the role of a conscious being. But unconscious objects appearing conscious is nothing new in a sense since even a novel (especially told from a first person perspective) can be thought of as such an object already. It will be very interesting to see whether AIs trained without reference to the concepts of consciousness (a hard task to filter that out of the training data!) will ever present signs of consciousness. That would certainly put into question my above philosophical reflections. --- So to summarise and answer your question more directly, I think there is something about our universe that allows for the generation of conscious experience and that our brains, likely on the neural level, have a bidirectional interaction with this something. As to what this is and how it works, I have no clue. Roger Penrose for instance put forth the idea that this might be related to quantum mechanics and certain molecular structures in our neurons capable of interacting with the quantum world in specific ways, but this is still pure speculation. More importantly, we know from our own experience that interconnected biological neurons processing information and put under stress (rewards and penalties) are capable of generating conscious experience including very negative ones. And, whereas I believe there is good reason to assume that Turing-equivalent processes such as electronic circuits are not capable of consciousness, I strongly believe that artificially created biological neural network are very likely to be conscious, perhaps even at a fairly small scale already. So, yes, I think any work creating artificial information processing systems using biological neurons needs to very tightly regulated, if not stopped entirely. At the risk of sounding dramatic, we might accidentally create hell on Earth if we are not careful, at least if biological computing ever becomes competitive with transistor based computing, which until now I'm glad has not looked to be the case... but I'm starting to worry.

Liquix 3y ago

Our biOS composes their reality, sending information about it via electrical signals. It then converts the neuron's activity into actions inside that reality. Their world is mediated through our biOS. The simulation argument asserts that "at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation." (1) is still possible - humankind is armed to the teeth, this tech could be a bunch of hot air, the breakthrough is still N years away, etc. (2) becomes less likely with every headline. If we had the ability today to simulate a consciousness-filled universe thousands of instances would be spun up overnight. (3) is looking more plausible than ever... https://simulation-argument.com/ https://simulation-argument.com/

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codeflo 3y ago
I know that smarter people than me have discussed this to death, but IMO, you simply can't make statistical arguments like that. Let's say you have an input x and a step function f such that the sequence x, f(x), f(f(x)), ... contains (in whatever sense) a conscious mind. Once that sequence is defined, it doesn't (and can't) logically matter whether it is evaluated once, twice or a hundred times, whether it is evaluated on a slow computer or fast computer, or, in fact, not evaluated at all. There is always only one sequence, and the act of evaluating adds no information to it.

poopsmithe 3y ago

Eww, what is up with their website? Just scrolling down lags my entire computer.

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Denote6737 3y ago
Yeah it's pretty unusable site. Clearly designed more for marketing than science.
- px43 3y ago
  I've seen what happens when you let the researchers build the websites, and it's not great. On the other hand, maybe the internet would be a whole lot better if everything was just a giant wiki, and we let our personal browser bots go scrape for the interesting stuff and report back to us.
mdp2021 3y ago
Better accessed with PgUp, PgDown Or, actually, with Ctrl+U (the code is clean, just go to the <main>) Well, for convenience: ==== ==== ==== ==== ###~ What does it mean to grow a mind? ~### The human mind is the north star for digital intelligence. But silicon can only do so much. Cortical is growing human neurons into silicon. Their reality is our simulation. We think these minds will learn better than any digital model and breathe life into our machines. ###~ Human neural networks raised in a simulation ~### The neurons exist inside our Biological Intelligence Operating System (biOS). biOS runs the simulation and sends information about their environment, with positive or negative feedback. It interfaces with the neurons directly. As they react, their impulses affect their digital world. ###~ Our first minds ~### The dishbrain is currently being developed at the CL0 laboratory in Melbourne, AU. We bring these neurons to life, and integrate them into The biOS with a mixture of hard silicon and soft tissue. Our first cohort have learnt to play Pong. They grow, adapt and learn as we do. ###~ Silicon meets neuron ~### Neurons are cultivated inside a nutrient rich solution, supplying them everything they need to be happy and healthy. Their physical growth is across a silicon chip, which has a set of pins that send electrical impulses into the neural structure, and receive impulses back in return. ###~ A direct connection to infinity ~### This creates the highest bandwidth connection possible between an organic neural network and a digital world. Our biOS composes their reality, sending information about it via electrical signals. It then converts the neuron's activity into actions inside that reality. Their world is mediated through our biOS. ###~ The Ultimate Learning Machine ~### Those actions have a positive or negative effect in biOS, which the mind perceives, adapting to improve that feedback. The human neuron is self programming, infinitely flexible, the result of four billion years of evolution. What digital models try and emulate, we begin with. ###~ Why? ~### There are many advantages to organic-digital intelligence. Lower power costs, more intuition, insight and creativity in our intelligences. But most importantly we are driven by three core questions. ###~ What will we discover if our intelligences train themselves? ~### We know an organic mind is a better learner than any digital model. It can switch tasks easily, and bring learnings from one task to another. But more important is what we don’t know. What are the limits of a mind connected to infinity? What can it do with data it literally lives in? ###~ What happens if we take a shortcut to generalised intelligence? ~### Machine Learning algorithms are a poor copy of the way an organic neural network functions. So we’re starting with the neuron, replacing decades of algorithms with millions of years of evolution. What happens as these native intelligences start solving the problems we’d previously left to software? ###~ How can we surpass the limits of silicon? ~### Silicon is raw, rigid, unchanging. Our organic neural networks sit on top of this raw power, but the way they grow and evolve isn’t limited to the software they run on. There is no software, it's coded in their DNA. How will computing change as we shift from hard silicon to soft tissue? ###~ RFN: Request For Neurons ~### The dishbrain is learning and growing in biOS today, and soon we’re opening an early access preview for selected developers. The biOS is our simulation environment, where you can program tasks, challenges and objectives for our minds. Join our developer program to get early access to our SDK, and secure training time with our minds. ###~ What comes next ~### We’re not making smarter computers, more efficient data centers, or more personalised advertising. We’re doing this to see what happens. What happens if we grow a mind native to the infinite possibility space of digital computing? We wonder what it will mean for digital spaces, for robotics, science, personal care. To explore the delineation between the personal mind, the distributed mind, digital and physical realities. To blur those boundaries. We wonder what it means to grow a mind, born of the physical world, but a native of the digital world, where that mind will go, and what it will teach us. Wonder with us.

epups 3y ago

It's clear that you can get some actual neurons in a dish to behave as an artifical neuron network. It is a fascinating concept as a research question. What's not clear is what is the business value here - do they expect these natural networks to outperform ANNs for any foreseeable application?

freilanzer 3y ago
Science does not need a business value.
px43 3y ago
Yeah, power-performance is a big one. The entire human brain runs at about 12 watts. Human neurons are several orders of magnitude more efficient for neural computing than anything that's been dreamt up in silicon. That might not always be the case, but I imagine there are still another several orders of magnitude at least that artificial neurons might fill as this technology evolves. Imagine something like a Raspberry Pi with a neural network mounted on it that is significantly more powerful than an h100.
- epups 3y ago
  The brain might need only 12W, but I guarantee you that their setup maintaining 10 orders of magnitude fewer neurons in a dish is already using far more than that. I get that brains are far more efficient than computers. What I'm wondering is how a business case can be made today for even considering an approach like this.

pmontra 3y ago

Their blog is one post per year at https://corticallabs.medium.com/ https://corticallabs.medium.com/

Denote6737 3y ago

So head cheese. Or Bio-Neural Gel Packs. Depending on your sci-fi of choice.

moffkalast 3y ago
Don't forget to feed your PC every day otherwise it gets grumpy and will drop all your tables.

akie 3y ago

No ethical considerations to be found anywhere. Typical.

mdp2021 3y ago
> Neurons are cultivated inside a nutrient rich solution, supplying them everything they need to be happy and healthy Neurons are considered organic entities that are satisfied with an healthy environment. It is supposed that nothing suffers.

seydor 3y ago

For those interested beyond the new age marketing speak that shouldn't exist on any real research company: These are the guys behind Dishbrain, which is not really a brain but a patch of human induced pluripotent stem cells grown on the Maxone silicon chip [2] which allows recording from the entire ~5x5mm chip with high resolution. [1] https://newatlas.com/computers/human-brain-chip-ai/ https://newatlas.com/computers/human-brain-chip-ai/ [2] https://www.mxwbio.com/products/maxone-mea-system-microelectrode-array/ https://www.mxwbio.com/products/maxone-mea-system-microelect...

psychoslave 3y ago

>What happens if we grow a mind native to the infinite possibility space of digital computing? Nothing we need to care about, as there is no such a thing. Mankind has put a significant portion of its limited attentional power on building interconnected silicon computers, that in a space whose scale is so small compared to human bodies that illusion of infinity is easy to fall into. In the same time, mankind went with global policy of massively draw on non-renewable energy stock, destroying vast sustainable life supporting environment in the process. There is nothing like unlimited resources and infinite space. Now, obviously, this page is marketing idle talk, with a weak connection to the actual work in their labs. From a purely scientific point of view, I wonder if that kind of device is just as vulnerable to magnetic storms as a pure silicon based device. From a human perspective, without much more context, this seems just horrific and I wish them much ethical and legal barriers to stop them already.

Jean-Papoulos 3y ago

Ah, sweet. Man-made horrors beyond my comprehension. Hopefully this will lead to brain implants that can help with solving a bunch of brain issues, and not to what we're all thinking of.

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jojobas 3y ago
May I ask if you have a mouth, and/or a commitment to screaming?
- compressedgas 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTffic7uq6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTffic7uq6Y

c7DJTLrn 3y ago

This is kind of the plot of the third season of Sword Art Online.

the_absurdist 3y ago

This does not appear to be new or novel technology, aside from the fact that the neurons-on-chip are housed in a portable incubator. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w41gH6x_30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w41gH6x_30

api 3y ago

In the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts this technology is referred to as “head cheese”. It’s used as a form of AI as it turns out silicon can never beat biology at analog reasoning. It ends up playing a role in the plot. IRL If the masses of neurons start getting large this starts to be ethically questionable… in direct proportion to how large.

slowmovintarget 3y ago
From the paper: > Under this theory, BNNs [biological neural networks] hold “beliefs” about the state of the world, where learning involves updating these beliefs to minimize their VFE [variational free energy] or actively change the world to make it less. If true, this implies that it should be possible to shape BNN behavior by simply presenting unpredictable feedback following “incorrect” behavior. Incorrect behavior is punished by pushing static, simulating an "unpredictable" environment, so that the BNN (biological neural network) acts differently. I really hope that if they continue this line of development that they find something other than "chaos overrides" to sensory input because at a certain level of intelligence, that would lead to insanity.

notpushkin 3y ago

Just finished watching the Pantheon (2022) series about “uploaded intelligence” last week. Pretty ironic timing!

larodi 3y ago
Sadly the show is not to be continued. IMHO very nice show, and riddled with less nonsense and rubbish compared to the website of these guys…
Kerbonut 3y ago
More like, “What a coincidence!”

luke-stanley 3y ago

Surely you'd just want to copy how the neurons work enough to run them on normal silicon rather than dealing with wetware? Or has that hit a wall? Amazing, scary, and perhaps absurd, all at the same time!

slowmovintarget 3y ago
We don't understand how human neurons in particular are so good at what they do. We have some understanding, which has been mathematically approximated with back-propagation algorithms and transformers. That's why we have diffusion nets and LLMs that are as good as they are. But the nuts and bolts of how neural systems give rise to reasoning or even what consciousness is... we only know that neural systems are responsible for reasoning, and we don't even know definitively that neural systems cause consciousness. We only know that if you suppress their activity consciousness is retarded, and if you damage them enough consciousness is snuffed out.

slowmovintarget 3y ago

The actual paper: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 Of note: This is an active test of the "Free Energy Principle" [1] with seemingly supportive results. Their definition, in the paper, of sentience is as follows: > It is proposed that these neural cultures would meet the formal definition of sentience as being “responsive to sensory impressions” through adaptive internal processes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle