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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Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
61–70 of 132 posts
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#62This is kind of the plot of the third season of Sword Art Online.
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#63It'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?
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.
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#64So head cheese. Or Bio-Neural Gel Packs. Depending on your sci-fi of choice.
Don't forget to feed your PC every day otherwise it gets grumpy and will drop all your tables.
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#65Eww, what is up with their website? Just scrolling down lags my entire computer.
Yeah it's pretty unusable site. Clearly designed more for marketing than science.
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.
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#66This 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:
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#67Ah, 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.
May I ask if you have a mouth, and/or a commitment to screaming?
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. N…
> 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. What makes you think that this relationship is bidirectional? AFAIK and experience, the relationship is entirely unidirectional. I literally have no idea what…
brain-to-???: certain flows of information within our brains (somehow) trigger the creation of conscious experience
???-to-brain: our brains keep records of conscious experiences and these records are why we're able to have such conversations as these
where ??? = Consciousness, the Universe, God, your spirit, your soul, or however you want to conceptualise it (I don't know or claim to know, although I would tend to argue that your spirit/soul isn't a thing (and neither mine of course), but that's another story)
You might naturally question how we could possibly store records of conscious experiences in our brains if these are indeed not things of the realm of computation. I think we can make an analogy with a camera here. A camera captures photons, but ultimately it does not store the photon but only some numbers (pixels, bits) which represent how to restore the original photons (although with a lot of loss). Now when these bits are fed into an appropriate device, e.g. a screen, some photons vaguely resembling the originals can be reproduced.
I see the brain as similar in that qualia cause excitation in our brain which are recorded in our memory and can be replayed in some dulled down form later, at least sometimes. But our brain doesn't store actual qualia but just records of them or perhaps just of having experienced them. If this were not the case, we would not be able to have this conversation.
To avoid further confusion, it might be worth pointing out that our brain might well store records of qualia and of physical/informational stimuli simultaneously, or sometimes perhaps just of one of these. So I'm not saying our brain reconstructs images from records of conscious experiences of those images for instance (but maybe, I don't know).
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. N…
> 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. Applying…
I'm not sure what you're getting at. There's a fundamental difference between such physical concepts, which I can ultimately describe mathematically (at various scales and levels of accuracy), and conscious experiences.
For instance, I can sensibly ask "what's it like to be a cat?". But "what's it like to be a rock?", or "to be a hot rock?", or "a cold rock?" doesn't make much sense since there's presumably nothing that it's like to be a rock regardless of its temperature.
Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you weren’t conscious when asleep, how do you explain dreams and memories? I’ve read about high level meditators who were “aware” they were asleep too. Not sure why they’d make this up.
yeah normal sleep is a bad example of rebooting. heavy general anaesthetic is a better example