Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation" • Hacker News Board

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#111

Post by slowmovintarget » Mon, Oct 23, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

anon-3988 wrote: post #52

anonymouszx wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

Heat is not at all "fundamentally mysterious." We know exactly what it is, how and why it occurs, and how it will change over time.

We don't know any of those things with regard to consciousness.

Granted, the answer to your last question is a resounding "no," but we can say that because we know exactly what "heat" is.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#112

Post by bergen » Mon, Oct 23, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

Kon5ole wrote: post #106

bergen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it. What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for? Considering production is worker owned, there would be no necessity for billionaires. This is basically a statement on the concentration of wealth, and that theoretically no one should have 20 Billion more "moneys" then any other person, with the linked fact that thi…

>What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for? Nobody has to actually pay a billion to make someone a billionaire. If you and three of your friends create a website that someone wants to buy one percent of for 40 million dollars, you are all billionaires whether you want to sell or not. It doesn't even matter if nobody else wants to buy the other 99% for the same price, in the eyes of the w…

>Any society that allows 1) ownership and 2) freedom

No, this is highly dependend on the definition of "freedom". A huge market freedom, and freedom for money? Yes. The freedom from shakles, from one being a billion times better than another, from people living lives somehow on the same plane? No. Billionares are not a direct result of whatever you define as "freedom" which is a very murky concept, there can be freedom in societies without billionaires.

And yes, the whole system of buying stock and then valuing something at 1 billion is broken, but does not change the fact, in fact enforces it because cleary the system is broken.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#113

Post by soco » Mon, Oct 23, 2023, 2:51 PM UTC

superb_dev wrote: post #33

komali2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since they're both neural networks, what questions have changed? I don't see what that clarifies or confounds about the nature of consciousness.

“neural nets” may mimic organic neurons but they are not comparable in that way

It's even a bit disturbing to see this confusion in a presumably tech forum. If we started eating our own propaganda...

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#114

Post by rokkitmensch » Mon, Oct 23, 2023, 3:02 PM UTC

Version467 wrote: post #25

sparrowInHand wrote: post #3

Earlier 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?

The Altered Carbon books explore this line of thinking decently.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#115

Post by slowmovintarget » Mon, Oct 23, 2023, 3:04 PM UTC

api wrote: post #80

In the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts this technology is referred to as “head cheese”. It’s used as a form of AI as it turns out silicon can never beat biology at analog reasoning. It ends up playing a role in the plot. IRL If the masses of neurons start getting large this starts to be ethically questionable… in direct proportion to how large.

From the paper:

> Under this theory, BNNs [biological neural networks] hold “beliefs” about the state of the world, where learning involves updating these beliefs to minimize their VFE [variational free energy] or actively change the world to make it less. If true, this implies that it should be possible to shape BNN behavior by simply presenting unpredictable feedback following “incorrect” behavior.

Incorrect behavior is punished by pushing static, simulating an "unpredictable" environment, so that the BNN (biological neural network) acts differently. I really hope that if they continue this line of development that they find something other than "chaos overrides" to sensory input because at a certain level of intelligence, that would lead to insanity.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#116

Post by slowmovintarget » Mon, Oct 23, 2023, 3:10 PM UTC

The actual paper: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6

Of note: This is an active test of the "Free Energy Principle" [1] with seemingly supportive results.

Their definition, in the paper, of sentience is as follows:

> It is proposed that these neural cultures would meet the formal definition of sentience as being “responsive to sensory impressions” through adaptive internal processes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#117

Post by Kon5ole » Mon, Oct 23, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

bergen wrote: post #112

Kon5ole wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for? Nobody has to actually pay a billion to make someone a billionaire. If you and three of your friends create a website that someone wants to buy one percent of for 40 million dollars, you are all billionaires whether you want to sell or not. It doesn't even matter if nobody else wants to buy the other 99% for the same price, in the eyes of the w…

>Any society that allows 1) ownership and 2) freedom No, this is highly dependend on the definition of "freedom". A huge market freedom, and freedom for money? Yes. The freedom from shakles, from one being a billion times better than another, from people living lives somehow on the same plane? No. Billionares are not a direct result of whatever you define as "freedom" which is a very murky concept, there can be freed…

>No, this is highly dependend on the definition of "freedom".

I'm talking about the freedom you, (as in you personally, not the billionaires) have today to buy things you want. Let's say it's a book. Should you be allowed to buy a book for say, 20 dollars?

If a 100 million other people enjoy that same freedom to buy the same book, you have a billionaire author. How do you prevent that from happening? Honest question, I don't see any way to prevent it.

"Billionaires shouldn't exist" is thought number 1 that people get when they see what some of them are up to, and I certainly sympathize, but the only chain of reasoning I've seen that goes beyond thought 2 is the writings of Karl Marx. And where his thoughts end, thoughts from Stalin, Mao and the like always always follow. They are billionaires too btw, just way worse than the ones we have.

I think the solution is strong laws and vigilant control to prevent corruption. If for example the punishment for corruption was confiscation of all your assets and it was actually enforced, I think we'd come a long way. It would almost certainly get rid of a lot of billionaires too, so maybe we have some common ground there after all. ;-)

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#118

Post by PrimeMcFly » Mon, Oct 23, 2023, 3:54 PM UTC

Dave3of5 wrote: post #75

jagrsw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you will be subjugating a possibly conscious mind into servitude. Is the distinction between a protein-and-salt-water model versus an electronic-gates-and-memory model meaningful? From a computational standpoint, they both manipulate states and store data. Does substrate matter unless we're invoking metaphysical claims? Regarding the video ( https://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/1716312250422796590 ), the device se…

> From a computational standpoint, they both manipulate states and store data. Ignoring the metaphysical question is really frustrates me when people treat the brain as just a more complex version of a computer. The human brain and a silicon based computer are two vastly different things you can't and should not compare them.

If we can simulate the same software as in the brain, then the hardware is less relevant.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#119

Post by PrimeMcFly » Mon, Oct 23, 2023, 3:55 PM UTC

Tistron wrote: post #53

jagrsw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you will be subjugating a possibly conscious mind into servitude. Is the distinction between a protein-and-salt-water model versus an electronic-gates-and-memory model meaningful? From a computational standpoint, they both manipulate states and store data. Does substrate matter unless we're invoking metaphysical claims? Regarding the video ( https://twitter.com/Scobleizer/status/1716312250422796590 ), the device se…

"Substrate matters" and "substrate doesn't matter" seem to me to both be metaphysical claims.

Only the latter is.

Re: Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation"

#120

Post by Kon5ole » Mon, Oct 23, 2023, 4:15 PM UTC

analognoise wrote: post #109

Kon5ole wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for? Nobody has to actually pay a billion to make someone a billionaire. If you and three of your friends create a website that someone wants to buy one percent of for 40 million dollars, you are all billionaires whether you want to sell or not. It doesn't even matter if nobody else wants to buy the other 99% for the same price, in the eyes of the w…

You know the difference between 40 million and a billion dollars? A billion dollars. We have a dystopia now with billionaires and their private space companies, buying newspapers, tracking our every move. We'd have LESS of a dystopia if we prevented them in the first place.

>We have a dystopia now with billionaires and their private space companies, buying newspapers, tracking our every move. We'd have LESS of a dystopia if we prevented them in the first place.

History teaches us the opposite. The worst dystopias are the ones where you have only one billionaire who also controls the military, and that is inevitably what happens when you try to limit the number of billionaires.

The best countries to live in tend to have a high number of billionaires per capita, which is natural since freedom and prosperity will generate billionaires. Tax havens twist this statistic of course but look at countries like Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, they are all up there and certainly no tax havens.