Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your circle of empathy includes fruit flies, shrink and prune until it no longer does.
How small should my circle of empathy be? Obviously humans are included, or ...?
Only shareholder bank accounts and your own.
A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
131–140 of 208 posts
Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because lice are also living creatures. And I have no empathy for them, and hopefully never will.
Lice have no choice in their lot in the universe. Do you think if they had intelligence the ability to choose their lot that they would choose their current one again? I doubt it personally. You can detest their mode of existence whilst still having empathy for them I think
Counterexample: Humans are lice to the ecosystem of Earth, and we choose to be that way.
Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
#133I have no exposure to connectomes - or really anything quite like this (as opposed to good ol’ fashioned perceptrons) - so forgive my following uninformed question: Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
Is ethics another tool in a power play game (religion being another) that people use to exert dominance over other people? No one expects of cat or pigeon to be ethical. But somehow humans sometimes get overloaded by external demand to think of gazillion things that might offend someone (sometimes unreasonable demands, or how it might get interpreted (sometimes incorrectly)) before acting. Im not saying ethics is bad…
Ethics aren't created as a power play but are certainly manipulated as one. The origin of ethics is probably natural selection.
Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
#134I have no exposure to connectomes - or really anything quite like this (as opposed to good ol’ fashioned perceptrons) - so forgive my following uninformed question: Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
Yes. Because it’s a simulation of a living thing. It’s still electrons moving around silicon. It deserves the respect your MacBook does. Which is not nothing. But certainly not what’s due to a life.
Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
#135I have no exposure to connectomes - or really anything quite like this (as opposed to good ol’ fashioned perceptrons) - so forgive my following uninformed question: Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
How could this be anti-ethical? You're just running a very complex algorithm in your machine.
Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
#136This is absolutely astounding. What an implementation. A connectome is like a full brain scan! I am asking Claude to port this to the browser and I'll host it, so you can try it without installing anything. Some details about the port: Claude is able to do porting tasks like this. I'll put up a link when you can try it in your browser. I was able to get it to port the complete BitNet b1.58 2-billion parameter model s…
Just send me the prompt
Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can someone explain if this software is ethical? Probably not. People have been coming up with ethical frameworks for thousands of years and we have yet to come to a consensus. So it’s very unlikely that someone can say conclusively whether this is ethical or not, because that would require us to either 1) prove a single ethical framework is correct and then apply that framework to this software or 2) prove that un…
Genuinely curious, is there like a simple list of competing ethical frameworks?
Virtue ethics, Deontology and Consequentialism are the "big three".
A very TLDR version is:
- Virtue ethics: instead of judging actions as good and bad, you should strive to become a good person (as defined by some specific set of virtues, like kindness, honesty, etc).
- Deontology: actions should be judged by a set of some fixed moral rules, for example "lying is always bad", even if you had good intentions.
- Consequentialism: actions should be judged by their consequences, for example by how much total happiness they create (utilitarianism). Doing something bad if it would make life of many people better is ethical, because the created happiness is more than the created harm.
In reality of course there are many other branches of them and the distinction is often not as obvious, and your personal views are probably somewhere in between. https://plato.stanford.edu is an amazing resource if you want more in depth explanation of philosophical theories.
Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
#138[flagged]
Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
#139> What's modeled vs. measured > Honesty section: I wouldn’t mind an human written README
The other day the system prompts for Claude (chat not code) hit the frontpage and they included a bit that something along the lines of "Claude should avoid saying honestly, because Claude is always honest". So how come that these Claudisms still are so frequent in LLM output? Do the system prompts just not work? Don't the postprocess the output to deal with such policy violations?
Some other day here HN someone posted a blog post that was like a long nonsense text of claudisms like load bearing smoking gun and other things, it was beautiful. I wanted to have a link for it to show to others but it disappeared when I got back to look for it and I lost the link. :/
Re: A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK, Jains consume diary products.
You tell me where the consumption of dairy products must result in harm to the cow. I grew up around small-scale, subsistence-level dairy farming, it doesn’t inherently require any more suffering than either egg-harvesting or apple-growing inherently do. A Jain doesn’t have to purchase milk from a factory farmer. And AFAIK even the most stringent vegans don’t brush insects from their path with every step, or avoid on…
> avoid onions and carrots because it causes death
onions and carrots do not experience suffering. even if they did, most plants are grown for non-human animal feed. so the best way to reduce "plant suffering" would be to stop exploiting non-human animals.