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Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

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Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it rhetoric? This goes beyond whatever malignant thing was perceived in this study, but why is it a rhetorical non-answer? You seem hung-up on my using the word rhetoric. Just so we’re on the same page here: > rhetoric, n : the art of speaking or writing effectively: b)the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion The business writing class I took in college was called Business R…

> It’s not a bad word. When used in the negative sense it is, per https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rhetoric "disapproving -> clever language that sounds good but is not sincere or has no real meaning" Are you implying you mean something other than this sense of the word?

"Implying" seems kind of weak, the person you're responding to shared the definition they are using.

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#232
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a group of cells on a plate? What is there here that would be illegal? This isn't any different than growing some rat intestinal lining cells in a petri dish.

How do you source living human brain cells? (Not necessarily trying to make a point, I'm genuinely interested)

You buy them from a supplier.

but to answer your question honestly the supplier keeps stock of them by growing them and storing them. The original cells came from donations.

You could always extract some cells from a biopsy as well, but these guys likely just bought them from sigma or whatever the Australian lab-supply monopoly is.

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we force-breed, torture and kill animals and their children in the millions every day just for the pleasure of consuming meat, eggs and dairy products We do the same thing to plants. Why do you have no qualms about killing plants to eat the food they accumulated for their young? A grain of wheat and a chicken egg are evolutionarily and nutritionally, maybe even ontologically, indistinguishable from one another.

I am not aware of any plants that show signs of consciousness or feelings. This would even by disadvantageous to many plants because they "want" parts of them to be eaten to disperse seeds, pollen, etc. Even if you accept that plants might be conscious and their suffering has to be reduced, you would still harm way fewer plants by eating them directly instead of eating other animals that consume them. https://en.wiki…

Perhaps you are not looking that closely? Plants have memory and demonstrate directed action through time and space. They can respond to touch, light, sound, and chemical signalling from other plants, insects, and fungi. What are the fingerprints of consciousness and feelings that you are looking for?

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confusing intelligence with consciousness (qualia). We simply don't know how qualia develops or how to measure it. We cannot discard, for example, than an ant has a greater qualia level than us. There are theories about qualia being connected to microtubules on neurons and quantum effects... the DOOM-playing neurons also have those microtubules. So you cannot say "definitely not".

> consciousness (qualia) I've never heard the word qualia used as a synonym for consciousness, only as a related but distinct concept. > an ant has a greater qualia level than us What? where does this come from?

Why do you quote only the end, the full sentence is: We cannot discard, for example, than an ant has a greater qualia level than

They're saying that since we don't know how to "measure consciousness" we can't be certain that an ant doesn't have more "consciousness" than us. Obviously it seems very unlikely, but we can't be certain

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are lab-grown biological neurons. Why are they any more problematic than Nvidia's silicon neurons?

Speaking for myself : it's a bit creepy and unsettling. Using brain cells is probably inching closer to consciousness than today's silicon is, and consciousness isn't well understood so I'd fear this line of research could eventually lead to the "I have no mouth and I must scream" the other commenter referenced. Many decades from now we might be wondering how much of a human brain needs to be grown in a lab before it…

Is that an issue only because these neurons are biological (still artificial because they are lab grown)? Silicon neurons could also become more powerful and lead to the "I have no mouth and I must scream". In fact, top tech companies are investing 100s of billions of dollars they year to make their silicon neurons more powerful.

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> consciousness (qualia) I've never heard the word qualia used as a synonym for consciousness, only as a related but distinct concept. > an ant has a greater qualia level than us What? where does this come from?

Why do you quote only the end, the full sentence is: We cannot discard, for example, than an ant has a greater qualia level than They're saying that since we don't know how to "measure consciousness" we can't be certain that an ant doesn't have more "consciousness" than us. Obviously it seems very unlikely, but we can't be certain

I don't share that interpretation, maybe they clarify what was meant themselves?

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#238

The amount of people that seam to react negatively to living brain cells doing the computation is unexpected to me. I do understand where it comes from to some extent.. some idea that human cells are special i guess, but it seams very naive to me. We spawn, use and kill far more complex AI agents millions if not billions of times every second in this society. No one gives a shit, as those intelligences are not "real"…

It's easy to imagine that scaling up a neural network made up of actual human neurons will quickly achieve something resembling "intelligence" and "qualia" since it's made of the same parts that presumably produce those phenomenon in us. The ethical implications are much harder to deny. Though I am sure it could be attributed to some failure of empathy as you've implied.

Perhaps people fear this leads to a future where we have technology that interacts meaningfully with existing wetware (cybernetically enhanced animals, including people).

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#239
post #102

If this can be taken at face value... it's creepy. I get that they're doing it for the meme. But perhaps something getting close to human intelligence, made out of human cells, shouldn't be forced to play a violent video game without any alternative options? Does 'the meme' justify that? I dunno. Nothing against violent games myself. Just feels like it's starting to get quite questionable, ethically speaking.

It is creepy, I agree. I saw this article over the weekend and felt similarly: https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/the-first-multi-beha... > Watch the video closely. What you are seeing is not an animation. It is not a reinforcement learning policy mimicking biology. It is a copy of a biological brain, wired neuron-to-neuron from electron microscopy data, running in simulation, making a body move. And the simulat…

Someone in the comments says it's not as bad (ethically speaking) as it appears:

>This an impressive simulation. But it's just not honest to call this 'brain emulation', a 'brain upload' or to say that this is doing anything like 'sensorimotor loop in simulation'. Aside from the fact that a connectome is not a brain, and so we have no idea whether the parts that have been filled in by ML actually function like a brain, the motor control in this framework is not even driven by the brain simulation. The output from the 'brain' is not a sequence of motor commands. It is a steering mechanism, a 2-dimensional descending signal (essentially, turn left or right, speed up or slow down). That is then fed into a series of CPG oscillators, outside of the brain emulation, that model fly movement in response to that 2-dimensional descending signal. Since outputting a 2-dimensional descending signal is not what a fly brain does, the simulated brain is not operating as a fly's brain does. It's machine learning, clamped into the shape of a fly connectome, that has a resting state of 0Hz, being zapped with simple inputs, not virtual sensory data.

Nevertheless a worrying direction.

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#240
post #102

If this can be taken at face value... it's creepy. I get that they're doing it for the meme. But perhaps something getting close to human intelligence, made out of human cells, shouldn't be forced to play a violent video game without any alternative options? Does 'the meme' justify that? I dunno. Nothing against violent games myself. Just feels like it's starting to get quite questionable, ethically speaking.

> something getting close to human intelligence

This seems very very far fetched. If I understand correctly, these cell brains just respond to some stimuli, it does not seem more intelligent than any automat to me, just creepier.

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