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?
Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
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Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#22Our 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 extreme…
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.
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#23Never thought the day that brain in a vat is no longer a philosophical question but a practical one would come so soon.
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....
Since they're both neural networks, what questions have changed? I don't see what that clarifies or confounds about the nature of consciousness.
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#24Their blog is one post per year at https://corticallabs.medium.com/
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#25Never thought the day that brain in a vat is no longer a philosophical question but a practical one would come so soon.
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.
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?
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#26Beautiful 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.
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
The latest article is "Critical dynamics arise during structured information presentation within embodied in vitro neuronal networks"
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#27So head cheese.
Or Bio-Neural Gel Packs.
Depending on your sci-fi of choice.
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#28No ethical considerations to be found anywhere. Typical.
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#29It'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?
Science does not need a business value.
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
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.