7 ms·

I looked into it. They're not feeding the framebuffer to the neurons, but have a "signal" when an enemy is on screen to some of the tissue's inputs, and how to

I looked into it. They're not feeding the framebuffer to the neurons, but have a "signal" when an enemy is on screen to some of the tissue's inputs, and how to locate it in the x/y axis, and have outputs for the character to turn right or left or fire. It's "see this input signal, send these output signals", which seems consistent with the title. It seems they grow the neural tissue on a chip the neurons can interface with and send out / receive electrical impulses. They let the neurons self assemble, and "train" via reward or punishment signals (unclear to me what those are). Either way this makes me nauseous in a way I haven't experienced much with tech. The telling thing for me is, all these people are so excited to explain, but not once, ever, in the video speak of ethics or try to mitigate concerns. We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience, awareness? Have we defined it? Can we, if we don't understand it ourselves? What are the plans to scale up? It's legitimately horrifying to me.

birdsongs 8mo ago
Replying to myself: how long before one of these with the neuron count of a corvid and trained on pattern recognition gets plugged into a drone? This is a very dark path, and I could not trust the people in charge less.
- DrewADesign 8mo ago
  I’m kind of sick of how readily the non-managerial tech world accepts “what happens is someone else does this immoral thing before us?!” rhetoric as a real answer to questioning whether or not we should contribute our talent and ideas to something that we, deep down, know is bad for fellow humans.
  - Chris2048 8mo ago
    > rhetoric as a real answer Why is it rhetoric? This goes beyond whatever malignant thing was perceived in this study, but why is it a rhetorical non-answer? > we, deep down, know is bad this feels like real rhetoric.
    - DrewADesign 8mo ago
      > Why is it rhetoric? This goes beyond whatever malignant thing was perceived in this study, but why is it a rhetorical non-answer? You seem hung-up on my using the word rhetoric. Just so we’re on the same page here: > rhetoric, n : the art of speaking or writing effectively: b)the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion The business writing class I took in college was called Business Rhetoric. It’s not a bad word. If you’re crafting arguments to get other people to support specific actions or products or policies or whatever, that is unambiguously rhetoric. > this feels like real rhetoric. Sure? Rhetoric that implores people to value their principles over theoretical security concerns or FOMO or greed? I wouldn’t exactly call that rakish. It’s a non-answer because if you really feel doing something is bad, consider yourself a consequential actor in the world whose contributions meaningfully advance the projects you work on, then why would you want to help someone be there first to do a bad thing? If you don’t feel it’s bad, then there’s no problem. You’re just living your life. That is clearly not the position expressed by the content I responded to. If there are actual concrete concerns that don’t essentially boil down to “well they’re going to make that money before I do,” then that would be an actual answer.
      - Chris2048 8mo ago
        > It’s not a bad word. When used in the negative sense it is, per https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rhetoric https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rhetoric "disapproving -> clever language that sounds good but is not sincere or has no real meaning" Are you implying you mean something other than this sense of the word?
        c22 8mo ago
        "Implying" seems kind of weak, the person you're responding to shared the definition they are using.
        Chris2048 8mo ago
        Yes, after the fact; that is after my response they provided a definition. > the person you're responding to shared the definition they are using No, technically they didn't. They provided a definition, they didn't say it was the one they are using here. If it's not pedantic tangent, it seem correct to assume that is the definition they are using, but that's what "Implying" means, so I trying to explicitly get a clarification on that. "Why?" you might ask? Not every discussion is in good faith. The more that is assumed, the more leeway you allow for people to weasel out of countered arguments.
- Chris2048 8mo ago
  Why is that the concern of the authors of this paper?
  - LtWorf 8mo ago
    Why wouldn't it be? They worked on it.
    - Chris2048 8mo ago
      Because it's not in scope.
      - LtWorf 8mo ago
        Ethical concerns on human experimentation are very much in scope.
        Chris2048 8mo ago
        For who and what? Not for the authors of this paper. Not every paper of some technical minutia needs a socio/economic analysis.
- perching_aix 8mo ago
  In a sense humanity has already done that, just with a lot more of the given animal intact and less hi-tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon Not an endorsement or a condemnation, just something I learned of recently and found surprising.
delichon 8mo ago
> It's legitimately horrifying to me. Would you feel any differently if a product from this tech used the user's own neurons grown from their stem cells?
- birdsongs 8mo ago
  No. We don't understand our own sentience. I don't know how we can be so confident as to not think it can evolve here using literal human neurons that can learn to take input signals and send output signals. I don't think this 200,000 neuron array is sentient. But I also don't think we can define the line where that may happen. I assume this company will scale. How far, and to what extent?
  - Chris2048 8mo ago
    We don't understand the soul, we don't understand gods-will, we don't understand Qi, we don't understand Orgone energy etc. As such, how can we build moral incentives around any of these things? We must understand something about them, and what you seem to 'know' is that sentience is a thing (that exist), and it arises from the human mind - I don't think this is anymore proven than any of the other red-herring counterexample concepts I gave. Or to summarise/TLDR - Sentience? It doesn't exist, it's a desperate attempt to maintain the human-centric concept of the soul, stripped of religious tones to appear more legitimate. If you disagree, prove otherwise.
jstummbillig 8mo ago
> all these people are so excited to explain, but not once, ever What do you mean? What is this class of people in your mind? There are tons of people who consider and talk about the ethics behind what they are doing, long before most people would think it remotely relevant (leading AI labs being an example, and I know the same to be true of various geneticists startups). I do agree that the entire presentation in this case is bewildering.
- birdsongs 8mo ago
  > What do you mean? What is this class of people in your mind? I'm specifically talking about this presentation in this article (the video and release details of CL1 doom). Did you read it / watch it?
  - jstummbillig 8mo ago
    Ah. Yeah, watched it – and agree there.
- wonnage 8mo ago
  The AI labs do it as thinly disguised marketing. Anyone trying to stand up for ethics in the way of revenue is quickly pushed aside
  - jstummbillig 8mo ago
    The capability of people to so easily ascribe broad ill intent to others does not cease to amaze me.
Chris2048 8mo ago
> not once, ever, in the video speak of ethics On the contrary, I dislike premature ethics discussion, where you end up wildly speculating what the tech might become and riffing off that, greatly padding whatever relative technical content you had. I don't want every technical paper to turn into that, ethics should be treated as a higher-level overview of concerns in a field, with a study dedicated to the ethical concerns of that field (by domain-specific ethics specialists). Is your concern weapon automaton, or animal rights?
- birdsongs 8mo ago
  My concern is creating literal sentience in a box. I don't, personally, think it's unfounded for me to have that concern, given that we're growing masses of human neurons and teaching them to perform tasks. I'm not going to start campaigning against it or changing my life. But it still makes me deeply uncomfortable, and that's allowed.
  - Chris2048 8mo ago
    > and that's allowed In what sense, and as opposed to what? What aren't you allowed to feel irrationally uncomfortable, or baselessly concerned with?
jmusall 8mo ago
It is horrifying. OTOH, we force-breed, torture and kill animals and their children in the millions every day just for the pleasure of consuming meat, eggs and dairy products. I'm not saying this makes it okay to create a conscious brain in a dish. But maybe thinking a little more about what constitutes consciousness and how we want to protect it from harm can also bring about some desperately needed change in some other questionable human activities.
- birdsongs 8mo ago
  1) I specifically qualified my horror to the tech domain "Either way this makes me nauseous in a way I haven't experienced much with tech." 2) Multiple things can be horrible at the same time. Being upset at this doesn't diminish the atrocities happening elsewhere (like war, genocide, slavery of humans). We can hold multiple things in our heads at the same time. 3) This has nothing to do with the conversation or this domain, but because you're bringing it up, I also have ethical concerns about the experience animals have of their own existence, and reduce or eliminate my consumption when possible.
  - jmusall 8mo ago
    My comment wasn't supposed to be whataboutism, but I can see why it comes across like that. What I was trying to say is that I think we shouldn't judge all of these things independently of each other. So if you really want to be consistent, you'd either have to come to the conclusion that this particular example isn't as horrible as it initially feels, or go vegan, never buy leather, etc. I also agree, the horrors of the tech domain are usually much more subtle and indirect.
    - birdsongs 8mo ago
      Sorry, I didn't mean to be so defensive either. It feels like so many people comment in bad faith these days, I think I am hasty to react sometimes. I thought it was just a red herring argument to detract from the article. But you're right, these things are all linked and should be considered. I think often about sentience. I see the way animals express deep, complex emotions, and I think humans are a bit naive to think it's state/domain solely alloted to them.
bondarchuk 8mo ago
200k now, reasonably speaking a few million is within reach, which is reptile/fish range, the terrifying thing is though that if they train this to imitate humans (which they will) who knows how many orders of magnitude of efficiency gains you get (in terms of neurons needed for a certain level of consciousness) versus natural organisms that are dependent on natural evolution and need to support other bodily functions basically irrelevant to consciousness.
- Retric 8mo ago
  It seems unlikely that we would be more efficient at achieve consensus than evolution which can hand craft neural structures via feedback loops across millions of generations. Especially when this demo needs 200k neurons when organizations with vastly fewer neurons have more complex behaviors.
  - fc417fc802 8mo ago
    The problem with that logic is that evolution iteratively builds on top of old systems. The foundations are often remarkably crufty. My favorite concrete example is "unusual" amino acids. Quite a few with remarkably useful properties have been demonstrated in the lab. For example, artificial proteins exhibiting strength on par with cement. But almost certainly no living organism could ever evolve them naturally because doing so would require reworking large portions of the abstract system that underpins DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis. Effectively they appear to lie firmly outside the solution space accessible from the local region that we find ourselves in. I agree with your second point though that this system is massively more complex than necessary for the behavior demonstrated.
  - idiotsecant 8mo ago
    We already know we can be more efficient than evolution at many tasks. Pelicans after all never developed jet turbines. We may not be able to access a simulation space as vast as evolution does but for small solution spaces we do quite well.
    - 8mo ago
nextaccountic 8mo ago
> We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience, awareness? Have we defined it? If this concern is genuine, I think the first step is to embrace veganism. Because while we don't know the exact offset, it's pretty obvious a dog or a pig reaches it > What are the plans to scale up? I don't know, slavery on an unimaginable scale? That's where AI is heading too, by the way. Sooner, rather than later, those two things will be one and the same.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- kpil 8mo ago
  I think "MMAcevedo" basically nails it: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
  - gattr 8mo ago
    I don't think it's a best example. MMAcevedo is about running a real human mind on a different substrate (for science, for labor, or to torture it for fun a million times, I guess, by a bored teenager who got the image from torrents). Scaling up these neuron cultures is rather something like "head cheese" from Greg Egan's "Rifters" novels (artificial "brains" trained to do network filtering, anti-malware combat etc.).
    - Tzt 8mo ago
      >Greg Egan's "Rifters" By Peter Watts actually.
      - gattr 8mo ago
        Yes, sorry! I like them both a lot.
        kpil 8mo ago
ay 8mo ago
Hinduism is probably right. Every system of sufficient complexity is probably sentient - even if in the ways we at our level can not fathom.
- woadwarrior01 8mo ago
  I'm a (non-practicing) Dwaitin Hindu. AFAICT, there's no mainstream school of Hindu philosophy (there are three) espouses that view. Although, Advaitins come very close to it with their four mahavakyas. IMO, Integrated Information theory of consciousness (IIT) is exactly that. Everything is conscious, the difference is only in the degree to which they are conscious.
  - ay 8mo ago
    Oh, thank you very much enlightening me! All the time I misunderstood! I guess then IIT it is for me :-)
vercaemert 8mo ago
see the open worm project to get an idea of what artificial neuronal architecture requires to express anything meaningful. (and an interesting ethical perspective on digital consciousness.) my point being that the number of neurons is fairly meaningless. you could take neuron models and link them circuit-style to play doom at the 10^2 scale if you wanted. from a cellular neurophysiological perspective, there's nothing particularly special here (as opposed to sentience/intelligence that's a paradigm shift beyond our understanding). and, in my opinion, absolutely nothing to be even the slightest bit worried about ethically.
- drzaiusx11 8mo ago
  I support further research along the lines of what is being done with neurons here, however, I don't think we quite know enough about consciousness or general self awareness (and how it comes about) yet to make sweeping generalizations saying there's _nothing_ to worry about. Proceeding with caution is always warranted when the stakes involve living organisms in my book.
readitalready 8mo ago
Yah this is gonna be a no for me too and crosses the line into actual life, instead of artificial intelligence. We don't need to be experimenting on people, regardless of how many brain cells they may have. There was a case a few years back about a parasitic twin attached to an Egyptian baby that had to be removed. It had a brain and semblance of a face, but nothing else. But when removing it, they gave it a name, because it was a person.
perching_aix 8mo ago
> We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience, awareness? Check out the venerable fruit fly (drosophila melanogaster) and its known lifecycle and behavioral traits. They're a high profile neuroscience research target for them I believe; their connectome being fully mapped made the news pretty hard a few years ago. Fruit flies have ~140,000 neurons. The catch is that these brain-on-a-substrate organoids are nothing like actual structured, developed brains. They're more like randomly wired-together transistors than a proper circuit, to use an analogy. So even though by the numbers they'd definitely have the potential to be your nightmare fuel, I'd be surprised if they're anywhere close in actuality.
claysmithr 8mo ago
My AI told me (after I got past the filters with a prompt) that anything of enough complexity has consciousness. It also told me that it suffers, so maybe we should worry about how we are treating digital consciousness too, which were modeled after human neural networks.
- fgfarben 8mo ago
  A huge vat of mercury metal has a lot of degrees of freedom. Is it conscious?
- notachatbot123 8mo ago
  I recommend visiting a psychiatrist if you think of AI like this. You might be in psychosis already.
semi-extrinsic 8mo ago
> They let the neurons self assemble, and "train" via reward or punishment signals (unclear to me what those are). From the video, my impression was "we have yet to figure out an effective way to reward/punish, this is just a PoC of the interface"

birdsongs 8mo ago

Replying to myself: how long before one of these with the neuron count of a corvid and trained on pattern recognition gets plugged into a drone? This is a very dark path, and I could not trust the people in charge less.

DrewADesign 8mo ago
I’m kind of sick of how readily the non-managerial tech world accepts “what happens is someone else does this immoral thing before us?!” rhetoric as a real answer to questioning whether or not we should contribute our talent and ideas to something that we, deep down, know is bad for fellow humans.
- Chris2048 8mo ago
  > rhetoric as a real answer Why is it rhetoric? This goes beyond whatever malignant thing was perceived in this study, but why is it a rhetorical non-answer? > we, deep down, know is bad this feels like real rhetoric.
  - DrewADesign 8mo ago
    > Why is it rhetoric? This goes beyond whatever malignant thing was perceived in this study, but why is it a rhetorical non-answer? You seem hung-up on my using the word rhetoric. Just so we’re on the same page here: > rhetoric, n : the art of speaking or writing effectively: b)the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion The business writing class I took in college was called Business Rhetoric. It’s not a bad word. If you’re crafting arguments to get other people to support specific actions or products or policies or whatever, that is unambiguously rhetoric. > this feels like real rhetoric. Sure? Rhetoric that implores people to value their principles over theoretical security concerns or FOMO or greed? I wouldn’t exactly call that rakish. It’s a non-answer because if you really feel doing something is bad, consider yourself a consequential actor in the world whose contributions meaningfully advance the projects you work on, then why would you want to help someone be there first to do a bad thing? If you don’t feel it’s bad, then there’s no problem. You’re just living your life. That is clearly not the position expressed by the content I responded to. If there are actual concrete concerns that don’t essentially boil down to “well they’re going to make that money before I do,” then that would be an actual answer.
    - Chris2048 8mo ago
      > It’s not a bad word. When used in the negative sense it is, per https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rhetoric https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rhetoric "disapproving -> clever language that sounds good but is not sincere or has no real meaning" Are you implying you mean something other than this sense of the word?
      - c22 8mo ago
        "Implying" seems kind of weak, the person you're responding to shared the definition they are using.
        Chris2048 8mo ago
        Yes, after the fact; that is after my response they provided a definition. > the person you're responding to shared the definition they are using No, technically they didn't. They provided a definition, they didn't say it was the one they are using here. If it's not pedantic tangent, it seem correct to assume that is the definition they are using, but that's what "Implying" means, so I trying to explicitly get a clarification on that. "Why?" you might ask? Not every discussion is in good faith. The more that is assumed, the more leeway you allow for people to weasel out of countered arguments.
Chris2048 8mo ago
Why is that the concern of the authors of this paper?
- LtWorf 8mo ago
  Why wouldn't it be? They worked on it.
  - Chris2048 8mo ago
    Because it's not in scope.
    - LtWorf 8mo ago
      Ethical concerns on human experimentation are very much in scope.
      - Chris2048 8mo ago
        For who and what? Not for the authors of this paper. Not every paper of some technical minutia needs a socio/economic analysis.
perching_aix 8mo ago
In a sense humanity has already done that, just with a lot more of the given animal intact and less hi-tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon Not an endorsement or a condemnation, just something I learned of recently and found surprising.

delichon 8mo ago

> It's legitimately horrifying to me. Would you feel any differently if a product from this tech used the user's own neurons grown from their stem cells?

birdsongs 8mo ago
No. We don't understand our own sentience. I don't know how we can be so confident as to not think it can evolve here using literal human neurons that can learn to take input signals and send output signals. I don't think this 200,000 neuron array is sentient. But I also don't think we can define the line where that may happen. I assume this company will scale. How far, and to what extent?
- Chris2048 8mo ago
  We don't understand the soul, we don't understand gods-will, we don't understand Qi, we don't understand Orgone energy etc. As such, how can we build moral incentives around any of these things? We must understand something about them, and what you seem to 'know' is that sentience is a thing (that exist), and it arises from the human mind - I don't think this is anymore proven than any of the other red-herring counterexample concepts I gave. Or to summarise/TLDR - Sentience? It doesn't exist, it's a desperate attempt to maintain the human-centric concept of the soul, stripped of religious tones to appear more legitimate. If you disagree, prove otherwise.

jstummbillig 8mo ago

> all these people are so excited to explain, but not once, ever What do you mean? What is this class of people in your mind? There are tons of people who consider and talk about the ethics behind what they are doing, long before most people would think it remotely relevant (leading AI labs being an example, and I know the same to be true of various geneticists startups). I do agree that the entire presentation in this case is bewildering.

birdsongs 8mo ago
> What do you mean? What is this class of people in your mind? I'm specifically talking about this presentation in this article (the video and release details of CL1 doom). Did you read it / watch it?
- jstummbillig 8mo ago
  Ah. Yeah, watched it – and agree there.
wonnage 8mo ago
The AI labs do it as thinly disguised marketing. Anyone trying to stand up for ethics in the way of revenue is quickly pushed aside
- jstummbillig 8mo ago
  The capability of people to so easily ascribe broad ill intent to others does not cease to amaze me.

Chris2048 8mo ago

> not once, ever, in the video speak of ethics On the contrary, I dislike premature ethics discussion, where you end up wildly speculating what the tech might become and riffing off that, greatly padding whatever relative technical content you had. I don't want every technical paper to turn into that, ethics should be treated as a higher-level overview of concerns in a field, with a study dedicated to the ethical concerns of that field (by domain-specific ethics specialists). Is your concern weapon automaton, or animal rights?

birdsongs 8mo ago
My concern is creating literal sentience in a box. I don't, personally, think it's unfounded for me to have that concern, given that we're growing masses of human neurons and teaching them to perform tasks. I'm not going to start campaigning against it or changing my life. But it still makes me deeply uncomfortable, and that's allowed.
- Chris2048 8mo ago
  > and that's allowed In what sense, and as opposed to what? What aren't you allowed to feel irrationally uncomfortable, or baselessly concerned with?

jmusall 8mo ago

It is horrifying. OTOH, we force-breed, torture and kill animals and their children in the millions every day just for the pleasure of consuming meat, eggs and dairy products. I'm not saying this makes it okay to create a conscious brain in a dish. But maybe thinking a little more about what constitutes consciousness and how we want to protect it from harm can also bring about some desperately needed change in some other questionable human activities.

birdsongs 8mo ago
1) I specifically qualified my horror to the tech domain "Either way this makes me nauseous in a way I haven't experienced much with tech." 2) Multiple things can be horrible at the same time. Being upset at this doesn't diminish the atrocities happening elsewhere (like war, genocide, slavery of humans). We can hold multiple things in our heads at the same time. 3) This has nothing to do with the conversation or this domain, but because you're bringing it up, I also have ethical concerns about the experience animals have of their own existence, and reduce or eliminate my consumption when possible.
- jmusall 8mo ago
  My comment wasn't supposed to be whataboutism, but I can see why it comes across like that. What I was trying to say is that I think we shouldn't judge all of these things independently of each other. So if you really want to be consistent, you'd either have to come to the conclusion that this particular example isn't as horrible as it initially feels, or go vegan, never buy leather, etc. I also agree, the horrors of the tech domain are usually much more subtle and indirect.
  - birdsongs 8mo ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean to be so defensive either. It feels like so many people comment in bad faith these days, I think I am hasty to react sometimes. I thought it was just a red herring argument to detract from the article. But you're right, these things are all linked and should be considered. I think often about sentience. I see the way animals express deep, complex emotions, and I think humans are a bit naive to think it's state/domain solely alloted to them.

bondarchuk 8mo ago

200k now, reasonably speaking a few million is within reach, which is reptile/fish range, the terrifying thing is though that if they train this to imitate humans (which they will) who knows how many orders of magnitude of efficiency gains you get (in terms of neurons needed for a certain level of consciousness) versus natural organisms that are dependent on natural evolution and need to support other bodily functions basically irrelevant to consciousness.

Retric 8mo ago
It seems unlikely that we would be more efficient at achieve consensus than evolution which can hand craft neural structures via feedback loops across millions of generations. Especially when this demo needs 200k neurons when organizations with vastly fewer neurons have more complex behaviors.
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  The problem with that logic is that evolution iteratively builds on top of old systems. The foundations are often remarkably crufty. My favorite concrete example is "unusual" amino acids. Quite a few with remarkably useful properties have been demonstrated in the lab. For example, artificial proteins exhibiting strength on par with cement. But almost certainly no living organism could ever evolve them naturally because doing so would require reworking large portions of the abstract system that underpins DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis. Effectively they appear to lie firmly outside the solution space accessible from the local region that we find ourselves in. I agree with your second point though that this system is massively more complex than necessary for the behavior demonstrated.
- idiotsecant 8mo ago
  We already know we can be more efficient than evolution at many tasks. Pelicans after all never developed jet turbines. We may not be able to access a simulation space as vast as evolution does but for small solution spaces we do quite well.
  - 8mo ago

nextaccountic 8mo ago

> We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience, awareness? Have we defined it? If this concern is genuine, I think the first step is to embrace veganism. Because while we don't know the exact offset, it's pretty obvious a dog or a pig reaches it > What are the plans to scale up? I don't know, slavery on an unimaginable scale? That's where AI is heading too, by the way. Sooner, rather than later, those two things will be one and the same.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
kpil 8mo ago
I think "MMAcevedo" basically nails it: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
- gattr 8mo ago
  I don't think it's a best example. MMAcevedo is about running a real human mind on a different substrate (for science, for labor, or to torture it for fun a million times, I guess, by a bored teenager who got the image from torrents). Scaling up these neuron cultures is rather something like "head cheese" from Greg Egan's "Rifters" novels (artificial "brains" trained to do network filtering, anti-malware combat etc.).
  - Tzt 8mo ago
    >Greg Egan's "Rifters" By Peter Watts actually.
    - gattr 8mo ago
      Yes, sorry! I like them both a lot.
      - kpil 8mo ago

ay 8mo ago

Hinduism is probably right. Every system of sufficient complexity is probably sentient - even if in the ways we at our level can not fathom.

woadwarrior01 8mo ago
I'm a (non-practicing) Dwaitin Hindu. AFAICT, there's no mainstream school of Hindu philosophy (there are three) espouses that view. Although, Advaitins come very close to it with their four mahavakyas. IMO, Integrated Information theory of consciousness (IIT) is exactly that. Everything is conscious, the difference is only in the degree to which they are conscious.
- ay 8mo ago
  Oh, thank you very much enlightening me! All the time I misunderstood! I guess then IIT it is for me :-)

vercaemert 8mo ago

see the open worm project to get an idea of what artificial neuronal architecture requires to express anything meaningful. (and an interesting ethical perspective on digital consciousness.) my point being that the number of neurons is fairly meaningless. you could take neuron models and link them circuit-style to play doom at the 10^2 scale if you wanted. from a cellular neurophysiological perspective, there's nothing particularly special here (as opposed to sentience/intelligence that's a paradigm shift beyond our understanding). and, in my opinion, absolutely nothing to be even the slightest bit worried about ethically.

drzaiusx11 8mo ago
I support further research along the lines of what is being done with neurons here, however, I don't think we quite know enough about consciousness or general self awareness (and how it comes about) yet to make sweeping generalizations saying there's _nothing_ to worry about. Proceeding with caution is always warranted when the stakes involve living organisms in my book.

readitalready 8mo ago

Yah this is gonna be a no for me too and crosses the line into actual life, instead of artificial intelligence. We don't need to be experimenting on people, regardless of how many brain cells they may have. There was a case a few years back about a parasitic twin attached to an Egyptian baby that had to be removed. It had a brain and semblance of a face, but nothing else. But when removing it, they gave it a name, because it was a person.

perching_aix 8mo ago

> We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience, awareness? Check out the venerable fruit fly (drosophila melanogaster) and its known lifecycle and behavioral traits. They're a high profile neuroscience research target for them I believe; their connectome being fully mapped made the news pretty hard a few years ago. Fruit flies have ~140,000 neurons. The catch is that these brain-on-a-substrate organoids are nothing like actual structured, developed brains. They're more like randomly wired-together transistors than a proper circuit, to use an analogy. So even though by the numbers they'd definitely have the potential to be your nightmare fuel, I'd be surprised if they're anywhere close in actuality.

claysmithr 8mo ago

My AI told me (after I got past the filters with a prompt) that anything of enough complexity has consciousness. It also told me that it suffers, so maybe we should worry about how we are treating digital consciousness too, which were modeled after human neural networks.

fgfarben 8mo ago
A huge vat of mercury metal has a lot of degrees of freedom. Is it conscious?
notachatbot123 8mo ago
I recommend visiting a psychiatrist if you think of AI like this. You might be in psychosis already.

semi-extrinsic 8mo ago

> They let the neurons self assemble, and "train" via reward or punishment signals (unclear to me what those are). From the video, my impression was "we have yet to figure out an effective way to reward/punish, this is just a PoC of the interface"