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It is creepy, I agree. I saw this article over the weekend and felt similarly: https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/the-first-multi-behavior-brain-upload ht

It is creepy, I agree. I saw this article over the weekend and felt similarly: https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/the-first-multi-behavior-brain-upload https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/the-first-multi-beha... > Watch the video closely. What you are seeing is not an animation. It is not a reinforcement learning policy mimicking biology. It is a copy of a biological brain, wired neuron-to-neuron from electron microscopy data, running in simulation, making a body move. And the simulated world they put it in is a sort of purgatory-like environment.

IshKebab 8mo ago
It's 200k neurons. Less than an ant has. Somewhat creepy, but if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not. Still I don't understand why they would invite the extra creepy factor of using human brain cells rather than e.g. mouse brain cells. Surely it makes no difference biologically but it's going to lead to fewer comments like this.
- ytoawwhra92 8mo ago
  > if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not. I'm not imagining that (although one assumes their plan is to scale this up), but nonetheless there's something troubling to me about taking any living thing and wiring its senses up to a profoundly incomplete simulacrum of reality. Of course we (as a species) have a long history of doing horrible things to living creatures in the name of science and progress. These stories evoke a different feeling for me, though.
  - fgfarben 8mo ago
    > there's something troubling to me about taking any living thing and wiring its senses up to a profoundly incomplete simulacrum of reality. How do we communicate this to the engineers at YouTube who refuse to make an offramp for children from the infinite baby shark AI video loop?
    - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
      > How do we communicate this to the engineers at YouTube who refuse to make an offramp for children from the infinite baby shark AI video loop? Actually I have a thought which I'd like to share. Why don't we upload good quality/human-curated children media to archive.org and create a more human curated platform instead of shark AI video and we can upload videos for free on archive.org right now. The issue seems to be the more human filter which seems to be the issue. Sharing this because Youtube Kids is absolutely not safe for kids and youtube is turning a blind eye to all of this because of their monopoly and also (profit? from having children watch a single thing on loop for so long) Also a minor reason why I don't trust corporations which say protect the kids or governments when they can try to regulate a public company like youtube much easier than trying to control every device but it feels like surveillance goals more than anything to me. I had watched some video on rabbithole/ "horrors on YT kids" video[0] sometime ago and I rewatched it again and there are even things like Animal Ai Abuse and so so much more vile things being shown to YT kids. There are comments on that video like: "My 7 year old younger brother came up to me asking if you can drink chlorine. I asked him where he heard this and he told me that he was watching a lego building video on youtube KIDS, where suddenly mid video they started saying stuff like this." [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3PtN-CmybE&t=64s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3PtN-CmybE&t=64s (Caution: The thumbnail is terrifying/horrifying and in general the video is not-safe-for-work while showing things are available on YT Kids so just take that into account on how horrifying the thumbnail/videos in YT kids can be)
      - jurgenburgen 8mo ago
        Children should simply not be on YouTube (Kids or not). We don’t need a “safer” alternative for damaging their cognitive development. Just because there’s demand for something doesn’t mean it should be legal to supply.
        Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
        > We don’t need a “safer” alternative for damaging their cognitive development. By Safer, I meant like some educational content or shows which are genuinely good fwiw. So I grew up watching Adventure Time on Cartoon Network. So curating shows like those and channels say veritasium or some Vsauce videos. My question was that, can there not be a human volunteer curated group effort to find some decent channels from Youtube which are nice/safe for kids. Calling the whole of youtube channels as bad might be unwise as well and mix some of it with cartoons and just having an archive/tag designed for it so that either an app or even you yourself could look at the archive tags and see which channels the videos are from and cartoons and just a more collective human effort into making a small library of things that are safe for kids? Because kids will watch Youtube someday and they will hear about it from their friends and feel left out. You then trust that something like YT kids might work only to realize that it doesn't. Even something like rss list of those channels with something like freetube could be good as well fwiw. What do you even recommend that people watch? I used to watch cartoon network for many hours growing up watching shows like beyblade and pokemon and Adventure Time etc. but it seems that cartoon network itself is nowadays struggling compared to Youtube kids :/ there definitely should be more to why/how Youtube kids is so prevalent. one can say bad parenting but I have seen good parents slip up in this case. They think its harmless. There's defintiely more to it (imho)
- callmeal 8mo ago
  >Somewhat creepy, but if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not. I don't know if it knows it's in doom - looks like all it knows is to shoot when startled. More than creepy imo.
- perching_aix 8mo ago
  > yeah definitely not I don't know about ants, but after a refresher on the people favorite fruit fly, I'd be hard pressed to be so dismissive - 200K seems to be plenty: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302051 I inspire you to look up what is known about fruit flies' behavior. The reason it's probably nevertheless not as messed up as people might assume it to be is specifically because it's an organoid, not an actual brain. Which is to say, it has the numbers but not the performance, not by a long shot. > Surely it makes no difference It absolutely should, though specifically with organoids, I guess it might not. Ironically, I would expect the ethics angle to be actually worse with small animals. The size of the organoid will be closer to the real thing comparatively, after all, so more chances of it gaining whatever level of sentience the actual organism has. But then this will be heavily muddled by what people believe consciousness is and whether or how humans are special, I suppose.
  - IshKebab 8mo ago
    > so more chances of it gaining whatever level of sentience the actual organism has Yeah but people have no problems experimenting on actual fully working mice already.
    - perching_aix 8mo ago
      Yes *, and in the real world. The question then is if you rate that to be an equivalent existential horror to being a varyingly maldeveloped, malnutritioned, disembodied version of those mice, forced to live out life in a low fidelity version of the Matrix [0], potentially in constant or recurring agony. You get a potential match or approximate match in cognitive ability and operation, but with a lot different set of circumstances. * They kinda do have a problem with that too, that's why ethics committees exist, and why the term "animal testing" pops up in the news cycle every so often. [0] https://xcancel.com/alexwg/status/2030217301929132323 https://xcancel.com/alexwg/status/2030217301929132323
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- kdheiwns 8mo ago
  Elephants have 3x the neurons of a human. Bees have about a million and they have complex relationships, emotions, and can remember the faces of humans. Neuron counts correspond more to body size than actual cognitive abilities. And brains are pretty complicated in how they're arranged. A large portion of the brain basically serves as an operating system of sorts, just managing breathing, moving, detecting smells, producing language, decoding language, etc. Cut all of that out and we're left with thinking and emotions.
  - IshKebab 8mo ago
    I don't think it works like that. Most likely high intelligence & consciousness requires both a large number of neurons and wiring them up in a specific way. If you have a small number (200k is tiny) you aren't going to achieve consciousness.
    - withinboredom 8mo ago
      The problem is: you can’t prove it. We have no idea what “conscious” even means. It’s literally why the Turing Test exists.
- lambdaphagy 8mo ago
  Given that no one understands how the mental relates to the physical in the first place, I have no idea how you would reach such a confident conclusion about the phenomenological status of 200k human neurons in a petri dish playing Doom?
  - rixed 8mo ago
    But we do understand where overconfidence usually come from, don't we?
- nahuel0x 8mo ago
  You are confusing intelligence with consciousness (qualia). We simply don't know how qualia develops or how to measure it. We cannot discard, for example, than an ant has a greater qualia level than us. There are theories about qualia being connected to microtubules on neurons and quantum effects... the DOOM-playing neurons also have those microtubules. So you cannot say "definitely not".
  - Chris2048 8mo ago
    > consciousness (qualia) I've never heard the word qualia used as a synonym for consciousness, only as a related but distinct concept. > an ant has a greater qualia level than us What? where does this come from?
    - invalidusernam3 8mo ago
      Why do you quote only the end, the full sentence is: We cannot discard, for example, than an ant has a greater qualia level than They're saying that since we don't know how to "measure consciousness" we can't be certain that an ant doesn't have more "consciousness" than us. Obviously it seems very unlikely, but we can't be certain
      - Chris2048 8mo ago
        I don't share that interpretation, maybe they clarify what was meant themselves?
        arbitrary_name 8mo ago
        fwiw i share the same interpretation as the other commenter.
soco 8mo ago
I have no mouth, and I must scream (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...)
bondarchuk 8mo ago
Someone in the comments says it's not as bad (ethically speaking) as it appears: >This an impressive simulation. But it's just not honest to call this 'brain emulation', a 'brain upload' or to say that this is doing anything like 'sensorimotor loop in simulation'. Aside from the fact that a connectome is not a brain, and so we have no idea whether the parts that have been filled in by ML actually function like a brain, the motor control in this framework is not even driven by the brain simulation. The output from the 'brain' is not a sequence of motor commands. It is a steering mechanism, a 2-dimensional descending signal (essentially, turn left or right, speed up or slow down). That is then fed into a series of CPG oscillators, outside of the brain emulation, that model fly movement in response to that 2-dimensional descending signal. Since outputting a 2-dimensional descending signal is not what a fly brain does, the simulated brain is not operating as a fly's brain does. It's machine learning, clamped into the shape of a fly connectome, that has a resting state of 0Hz, being zapped with simple inputs, not virtual sensory data. Nevertheless a worrying direction.

IshKebab 8mo ago

It's 200k neurons. Less than an ant has. Somewhat creepy, but if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not. Still I don't understand why they would invite the extra creepy factor of using human brain cells rather than e.g. mouse brain cells. Surely it makes no difference biologically but it's going to lead to fewer comments like this.

ytoawwhra92 8mo ago
> if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not. I'm not imagining that (although one assumes their plan is to scale this up), but nonetheless there's something troubling to me about taking any living thing and wiring its senses up to a profoundly incomplete simulacrum of reality. Of course we (as a species) have a long history of doing horrible things to living creatures in the name of science and progress. These stories evoke a different feeling for me, though.
- fgfarben 8mo ago
  > there's something troubling to me about taking any living thing and wiring its senses up to a profoundly incomplete simulacrum of reality. How do we communicate this to the engineers at YouTube who refuse to make an offramp for children from the infinite baby shark AI video loop?
  - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
    > How do we communicate this to the engineers at YouTube who refuse to make an offramp for children from the infinite baby shark AI video loop? Actually I have a thought which I'd like to share. Why don't we upload good quality/human-curated children media to archive.org and create a more human curated platform instead of shark AI video and we can upload videos for free on archive.org right now. The issue seems to be the more human filter which seems to be the issue. Sharing this because Youtube Kids is absolutely not safe for kids and youtube is turning a blind eye to all of this because of their monopoly and also (profit? from having children watch a single thing on loop for so long) Also a minor reason why I don't trust corporations which say protect the kids or governments when they can try to regulate a public company like youtube much easier than trying to control every device but it feels like surveillance goals more than anything to me. I had watched some video on rabbithole/ "horrors on YT kids" video[0] sometime ago and I rewatched it again and there are even things like Animal Ai Abuse and so so much more vile things being shown to YT kids. There are comments on that video like: "My 7 year old younger brother came up to me asking if you can drink chlorine. I asked him where he heard this and he told me that he was watching a lego building video on youtube KIDS, where suddenly mid video they started saying stuff like this." [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3PtN-CmybE&t=64s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3PtN-CmybE&t=64s (Caution: The thumbnail is terrifying/horrifying and in general the video is not-safe-for-work while showing things are available on YT Kids so just take that into account on how horrifying the thumbnail/videos in YT kids can be)
    - jurgenburgen 8mo ago
      Children should simply not be on YouTube (Kids or not). We don’t need a “safer” alternative for damaging their cognitive development. Just because there’s demand for something doesn’t mean it should be legal to supply.
      - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
        > We don’t need a “safer” alternative for damaging their cognitive development. By Safer, I meant like some educational content or shows which are genuinely good fwiw. So I grew up watching Adventure Time on Cartoon Network. So curating shows like those and channels say veritasium or some Vsauce videos. My question was that, can there not be a human volunteer curated group effort to find some decent channels from Youtube which are nice/safe for kids. Calling the whole of youtube channels as bad might be unwise as well and mix some of it with cartoons and just having an archive/tag designed for it so that either an app or even you yourself could look at the archive tags and see which channels the videos are from and cartoons and just a more collective human effort into making a small library of things that are safe for kids? Because kids will watch Youtube someday and they will hear about it from their friends and feel left out. You then trust that something like YT kids might work only to realize that it doesn't. Even something like rss list of those channels with something like freetube could be good as well fwiw. What do you even recommend that people watch? I used to watch cartoon network for many hours growing up watching shows like beyblade and pokemon and Adventure Time etc. but it seems that cartoon network itself is nowadays struggling compared to Youtube kids :/ there definitely should be more to why/how Youtube kids is so prevalent. one can say bad parenting but I have seen good parents slip up in this case. They think its harmless. There's defintiely more to it (imho)
callmeal 8mo ago
>Somewhat creepy, but if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not. I don't know if it knows it's in doom - looks like all it knows is to shoot when startled. More than creepy imo.
perching_aix 8mo ago
> yeah definitely not I don't know about ants, but after a refresher on the people favorite fruit fly, I'd be hard pressed to be so dismissive - 200K seems to be plenty: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302051 I inspire you to look up what is known about fruit flies' behavior. The reason it's probably nevertheless not as messed up as people might assume it to be is specifically because it's an organoid, not an actual brain. Which is to say, it has the numbers but not the performance, not by a long shot. > Surely it makes no difference It absolutely should, though specifically with organoids, I guess it might not. Ironically, I would expect the ethics angle to be actually worse with small animals. The size of the organoid will be closer to the real thing comparatively, after all, so more chances of it gaining whatever level of sentience the actual organism has. But then this will be heavily muddled by what people believe consciousness is and whether or how humans are special, I suppose.
- IshKebab 8mo ago
  > so more chances of it gaining whatever level of sentience the actual organism has Yeah but people have no problems experimenting on actual fully working mice already.
  - perching_aix 8mo ago
    Yes *, and in the real world. The question then is if you rate that to be an equivalent existential horror to being a varyingly maldeveloped, malnutritioned, disembodied version of those mice, forced to live out life in a low fidelity version of the Matrix [0], potentially in constant or recurring agony. You get a potential match or approximate match in cognitive ability and operation, but with a lot different set of circumstances. * They kinda do have a problem with that too, that's why ethics committees exist, and why the term "animal testing" pops up in the news cycle every so often. [0] https://xcancel.com/alexwg/status/2030217301929132323 https://xcancel.com/alexwg/status/2030217301929132323
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
kdheiwns 8mo ago
Elephants have 3x the neurons of a human. Bees have about a million and they have complex relationships, emotions, and can remember the faces of humans. Neuron counts correspond more to body size than actual cognitive abilities. And brains are pretty complicated in how they're arranged. A large portion of the brain basically serves as an operating system of sorts, just managing breathing, moving, detecting smells, producing language, decoding language, etc. Cut all of that out and we're left with thinking and emotions.
- IshKebab 8mo ago
  I don't think it works like that. Most likely high intelligence & consciousness requires both a large number of neurons and wiring them up in a specific way. If you have a small number (200k is tiny) you aren't going to achieve consciousness.
  - withinboredom 8mo ago
    The problem is: you can’t prove it. We have no idea what “conscious” even means. It’s literally why the Turing Test exists.
lambdaphagy 8mo ago
Given that no one understands how the mental relates to the physical in the first place, I have no idea how you would reach such a confident conclusion about the phenomenological status of 200k human neurons in a petri dish playing Doom?
- rixed 8mo ago
  But we do understand where overconfidence usually come from, don't we?
nahuel0x 8mo ago
You are confusing intelligence with consciousness (qualia). We simply don't know how qualia develops or how to measure it. We cannot discard, for example, than an ant has a greater qualia level than us. There are theories about qualia being connected to microtubules on neurons and quantum effects... the DOOM-playing neurons also have those microtubules. So you cannot say "definitely not".
- Chris2048 8mo ago
  > consciousness (qualia) I've never heard the word qualia used as a synonym for consciousness, only as a related but distinct concept. > an ant has a greater qualia level than us What? where does this come from?
  - invalidusernam3 8mo ago
    Why do you quote only the end, the full sentence is: We cannot discard, for example, than an ant has a greater qualia level than They're saying that since we don't know how to "measure consciousness" we can't be certain that an ant doesn't have more "consciousness" than us. Obviously it seems very unlikely, but we can't be certain
    - Chris2048 8mo ago
      I don't share that interpretation, maybe they clarify what was meant themselves?
      - arbitrary_name 8mo ago
        fwiw i share the same interpretation as the other commenter.

soco 8mo ago

I have no mouth, and I must scream (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...)

bondarchuk 8mo ago

Someone in the comments says it's not as bad (ethically speaking) as it appears: >This an impressive simulation. But it's just not honest to call this 'brain emulation', a 'brain upload' or to say that this is doing anything like 'sensorimotor loop in simulation'. Aside from the fact that a connectome is not a brain, and so we have no idea whether the parts that have been filled in by ML actually function like a brain, the motor control in this framework is not even driven by the brain simulation. The output from the 'brain' is not a sequence of motor commands. It is a steering mechanism, a 2-dimensional descending signal (essentially, turn left or right, speed up or slow down). That is then fed into a series of CPG oscillators, outside of the brain emulation, that model fly movement in response to that 2-dimensional descending signal. Since outputting a 2-dimensional descending signal is not what a fly brain does, the simulated brain is not operating as a fly's brain does. It's machine learning, clamped into the shape of a fly connectome, that has a resting state of 0Hz, being zapped with simple inputs, not virtual sensory data. Nevertheless a worrying direction.