'Hold that thought'
A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place
121–130 of 186 posts
Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place
#122A thought experiment: One by one your neurons are replaced by their digital counterpart as a nano-scale computer in-place, with equivalent functionality. After which neuron number are you no longer you? You remain conscious throughout the process, the process may last however long with pauses for sleep. After the replacement is complete, one by one these neurons are switched off with their functionality offloaded to…
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Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you the same "you" that went to sleep last night? (Thought experiment: what if we die every night we go to bed? Seriously consider this for a moment.) Are "you" a "you" at all? What if "you" is just a prediction machine linked to prediction capability + history + planning + objectives + online learning? Your memories are just seasoning for the weights? Personality, nostalgia and frisson are just hallucinations of…
RE the first question I'm sure someone hasn't seen this yet: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1 Subjectively though, sleep 'feels' like it maintains continuity in a way. But of course that could just be a rationalization.
That was fantastic! Thank you for sharing.
Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows ... is still the cheapest way to run many workloads. It's an absolute nightmare scenario, but luckily it has become completely implausible since 2023. We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Not saying this would make me comfortable with brain cloning, but at least the simple econ…
>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.
No I don't think so. We can already create LLMs that are highly efficient and infinitely more knowledgeable than any single human being, completely tuned to the task, without ego or distractions, and they are cheap enough that you can run tens of them in parallel for a few hundred dollars per month. They are also way faster than any human being. And we're three/ four years in this. Imagine 50 years from now.
Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place
#125A thought experiment: One by one your neurons are replaced by their digital counterpart as a nano-scale computer in-place, with equivalent functionality. After which neuron number are you no longer you? You remain conscious throughout the process, the process may last however long with pauses for sleep. After the replacement is complete, one by one these neurons are switched off with their functionality offloaded to…
Permutation city, by Greg Egan. You don't even need the computer once instantiated!
That book was like a matryoshka doll but instead stacked dolls there were stacked mindfucks
Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that I think this is anywhere close in actuality, but It's reminding me of MMAcevedo. ( https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ) What server will I wake up on? Who is running the infrastructure? What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? Given our current societal trends, I can't imagine I would enjoy any existence where a copy of me is spun back up. And of course, my original thread of consc…
You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life. I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, dep…
I don't get the complete certainty with which people post this opinion.
You have no special access to data or insight that anyone else does, nor new evidence and the argument itself is always pretty specious (those patterns over there are different because like, they're not here).
Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place
#127A thought experiment: One by one your neurons are replaced by their digital counterpart as a nano-scale computer in-place, with equivalent functionality. After which neuron number are you no longer you? You remain conscious throughout the process, the process may last however long with pauses for sleep. After the replacement is complete, one by one these neurons are switched off with their functionality offloaded to…
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Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.
We can already grow brain organoids cheaply and easily enough to be a YouTuber's long-running series, so even if biological somehow gets cheaper than silicon, it still isn't going to be a revived complete human brain from someone who died 50 years earlier and probably retired 20 years before that. I mean, imagine someone who got themselves cryonically preserved in 1976 getting either revived or uploaded today: what j…
It reminds me of this, which talks about this exact scenario:
Tldr is that for some very limited tasks it might still be preferable to use a human mind, especially if you can run it at 1000x cognitive speed. Or.....it might not. It's sci-fi at this point.
Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.
No I don't think so. We can already create LLMs that are highly efficient and infinitely more knowledgeable than any single human being, completely tuned to the task, without ego or distractions, and they are cheap enough that you can run tens of them in parallel for a few hundred dollars per month. They are also way faster than any human being. And we're three/ four years in this. Imagine 50 years from now.
>>Imagine 50 years from now.
That's the whole point though - I can't, and I don't think anyone can. Right now the LLMs are just getting bigger and bigger, we're bruteforcing the way out of their stupidity by giving them bigger and bigger datasets - unless something fundamental changes soon that tech has an actual dead end. Hence my (joke-ish) prediction that you'll eventually need a 16PB GPU to run a basic gemini model, and such a thing will always be very expensive no matter how much our tech advances(especially since we are already hitting some technical limits). Human brains won't get any more expensive with time - they already contain all the hardware they are ever going to get - but what might get cheaper is the plumbing to make them "run" and interact with other systems.
Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place
#130Recently rewatched Demolition Man (1993) where criminals are frozen in cryostasis and then reanimated – a very prescient film. All I could think of was Demolition Pig