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Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly

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Re: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly

#91

Post by shawnz »

akomtu wrote: post #90
shawnz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any reason why determinism should have anything to do with conscious experience. Can't you conceive of a deterministic universe in which you have internal experience just like you do now? What specifically makes those two things mutually exclusive in your opinion?

That's the crux of the matter. Conscious experience cannot exist in determinstic worlds. In finite sized worlds, such as calculators, any deterministic algorithm is equivalent to a giant lookup table: (input, memory) -> (output, memory), all four entities have a finite fixed size. For infinitely expanding deyerministic worlds it's more complicated, but it's obvious that such worlds have to expand at the expense of so…

But what's the deficiency?

Re: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly

#92

Post by soderfoo »

ChrisClark wrote: post #44
soderfoo wrote: post #35

Visual processing requires an astounding amount of brain power. Over 50% of a fruit flies brain cells are dedicated to their rudimentary visual system. Comparatively, the human visual processing system is truly astonishing and I am grateful for it.

Our visual system is basically a 3D game engine beyond anything we can currently program. Takes raw input and builds up a 3D world of objects and color. We're not looking through a window into reality, but building up a version of it inside our heads.

As I age, it feels like the level of detail algorithm and optimization code are due for some updates.

Skimming a text varies from high to moderate fidelity some days.

Re: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly

#93

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

ranting-moth wrote: post #17

This is very interesting. Any wild guesses how far (in years) away from building a synthetic fruit fly? 10 years? By synthetic I mean a fly that doesn't die and that can be reproduced again.

There's already been "synthetic organisms" built ... Start with the DNA of a simple organism, edit the genetic code, then synthesize this new DNA and insert into a host cell who's DNA has been removed.

I think we're still a long way from designing an organism from scratch though, as opposed to "editing" an existing one.

Re: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly

#94

Post by Footnote7341 »

drdeca wrote: post #81
akomtu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly so. A bunch of matrix multipliers is a fully deterministic system, a mechanism in other words. There is nothing in it that can experience pain. Using a truly random RNG device will simply "shake" this mechanism randomly. However with a feedback loop from the mechanism back to the RNG device things become murky, for now we can say that the radioactive rock behind the RNG might experience something, it may even…

What? Why would randomness matter to this? If, hypothetically, it were possible to do a QFT simulation of an entire human, but where no true randomness was used in the simulation program, only a cryptographically secure (relative to an adversary with even more compute than the beyond-astronomical amount of compute used by the simulation) random number generator (and therefore fully deterministic), you think that that…

The real answer is that the scientific method is based on observation so it is incapable of examining what lies behind those observations, consciousness. We do not have the scientific tools to know if a simulated brain experiences things. We dont know if protons experience things, or rocks, or monkeys, or even individual people.

Re: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly

#95

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Dig1t wrote: post #64
mhb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whole Brain Emulation: No Progress on C. elegans After 10 Years https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brai...

Wow very interesting. They say the holdup is that they lack a way to read the weights and thresholds of the neurons. So they have the network structure, but not the weights. It says that there isn’t enough interest in funding research on a method to read the weights either. That’s really surprising. This method could unlock some crazy cool science.

It seems like with the current fire around AI, that making a worm or fly brain function in a simulated environment would be a hot bed of research. I wonder if the research is hot, but private, like at OpenAI, or Neuralink.

Re: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly

#96

Post by nickisnoble »

comfypotato wrote: post #74
mhb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whole Brain Emulation: No Progress on C. elegans After 10 Years https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brai...

They started publishing again this year! They’ve isolated the neural net and published it as a “liquid neural network”. Check it out, it outperforms CNNs for niche tasks with a fraction of the resources.

Sources?

Re: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly

#97

Post by comfypotato »

nickisnoble wrote: post #96
comfypotato wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They started publishing again this year! They’ve isolated the neural net and published it as a “liquid neural network”. Check it out, it outperforms CNNs for niche tasks with a fraction of the resources.

Sources?

https://hackernoon.com/an-introduction-to-liquid-neural-netw...

Re: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly

#98

Post by kbelder »

ramraj07 wrote: post #27
ranting-moth wrote: post #17

This is very interesting. Any wild guesses how far (in years) away from building a synthetic fruit fly? 10 years? By synthetic I mean a fly that doesn't die and that can be reproduced again.

I’d estimate We are 5 to 10 years away from somewhat deciding the effective connectome and “algorithms” of the roundworm which just has a few hundred neurons. We know every neuron in it by name and know how they all connect to each other, yet we have very little clue how they all end up creating the behavior we see in the worm. We are quite far away from truly mapping every neurons connection and functional effect in…

I'll ask this here, because I'm curious, and it seems that you've read at least a little on this subject...

Is it known how much individual variation there is between different roundworm brains? If you grow two roundworms, even from the same DNA, does the resulting brain have all the same wiring, or is it different based on environmental factors?

I ask because I thought that brain growth involves a feedback loop, where individual experiences during maturation influence the actual physical structure of the brain to some degree.

Re: Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly

#99

Post by ramraj07 »

kbelder wrote: post #98
ramraj07 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d estimate We are 5 to 10 years away from somewhat deciding the effective connectome and “algorithms” of the roundworm which just has a few hundred neurons. We know every neuron in it by name and know how they all connect to each other, yet we have very little clue how they all end up creating the behavior we see in the worm. We are quite far away from truly mapping every neurons connection and functional effect in…

I'll ask this here, because I'm curious, and it seems that you've read at least a little on this subject... Is it known how much individual variation there is between different roundworm brains? If you grow two roundworms, even from the same DNA, does the resulting brain have all the same wiring, or is it different based on environmental factors? I ask because I thought that brain growth involves a feedback loop, whe…

In a round worm, the neural structure is remarkably constant. The exact same number of neurons emerge and form the exact same network in every worm! But in each worm they might move a bit around slightly especially in their head region which makes quick identification a little hard!

But you can see why this makes the worm the best first organism to decipher the full neural network in. In my opinion not enough people are working on this. There are maybe 5 labs that are working on this topic at this moment!

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