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I'm scared about biological computing

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Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#241

Post by kjkjadksj »

jakkos wrote: post #197
kjkjadksj wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day vegans play the same game as meat eaters where some line is drawn. For meat eaters it is with livestock meats and for pescatarians that is no go, but fish are alright. And for vegans that is all off limits. Except of course the life we deem base enough to not care it is being eaten alive. Slaughter all the lettuce you want. There are no lettuce advocates. All this to say the moral arguments are…

> play the same game .. where some line is drawn > Things could be better but they also could be worse > the moral arguments are sort of silly and illogical You can use these to justify literally anything > Slaughter all the lettuce you want Yeah because we don't have compelling evidence that lettuce experiences anything comparable to conscious suffering, and the only alternative to not eating plants is dying

Yet, we don’t, is the key qualifier. The idea that babies feel pain is only somewhat recently accepted for example. What happens in a future if we determine plants also have pain signals? Would you feel some way, or would you chew that lettuce with the indifference a carnivore has towards its prey?

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#243

Post by butlike »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #122
philips wrote: post #2

I think this is the same ethical questions of veganism and our use/abuse of biological systems. This is an excerpt from "The Pig that Wants to be Eaten" by Julian Baggini > After forty years of vegetarianism, Max Berger was about to sit down to a feast of pork sausages, crispy bacon and pan-fried chicken breast. Max had always missed the taste of meat, but his principles were stronger than his culinary cravings. But…

At the end of the day vegans play the same game as meat eaters where some line is drawn. For meat eaters it is with livestock meats and for pescatarians that is no go, but fish are alright. And for vegans that is all off limits. Except of course the life we deem base enough to not care it is being eaten alive. Slaughter all the lettuce you want. There are no lettuce advocates. All this to say the moral arguments are…

To your last point, I still think slaughtering with a knife is more humane. You slit the animals throat, it's traumatizing, it's painful, but you've started the "bleed-out timer." The bodily processes know that's NOT GOOD, and plan accordingly. If it's anything like humans, perhaps the animal's body will dump large amounts of feel good chemicals near the end.

Juxtapose that against the airgun, a sudden impulse to the central processing unit of the animal. Chemicals and neuron activity get disrupted immediately, the animal may be comatose but not necessarily dead for some amount of time as the signal processing is just obliterated. Chaotic disruption of the system seems more unpleasant/inhumane than the more outwardly barbaric but ostensibly better slicing of the throat.

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#244

Post by butlike »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #136
kjkjadksj wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day vegans play the same game as meat eaters where some line is drawn. For meat eaters it is with livestock meats and for pescatarians that is no go, but fish are alright. And for vegans that is all off limits. Except of course the life we deem base enough to not care it is being eaten alive. Slaughter all the lettuce you want. There are no lettuce advocates. All this to say the moral arguments are…

This is not a good argument. Vegans base their line on a very easily defensible ability on behalf of the victim - sentience. If there’s no sentience, there’s nobody within to experience the pain and fear, and there is no victim. That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as ani…

What if everything's sentient, just not operating on a level that's understandable by us?

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#245

Post by catigula »

noosphr wrote: post #127
pjs_ wrote: post #25

Be careful about how you interpret that paper. It looks really impressive -- real neurons in a petri dish seem to successfully (if amateurishly) murk a few imps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE But there's more to the setup than you might assume from a casual reading. Here's the code used for that demo: https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron So there is an entire pytorch stack wrapped around the myster…

All opinions are my own: The whole point of the CNNs is to act like a auto encoder for input and an auto decoder for output. The only reason why this is done in the first place is because the number of electrodes in the dish is pitiful and has no chance of describing something as complex as Doom. They are there to create a latent space that can be fed through 60 odd electrodes and decode the neuron latent space into…

>What I wanted to do after dish brain pong, but never had the budget for, was using live animals as the computational substrate. Use the visual cortex of one as the input, send the neural spikes to a second animals frontal lobe for computation and finally send those signals to a third animals motor cortex to physically press buttons. It's a shame we never raised enough

It's amazing that someone would feel comfortable sharing this.

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#246

Post by catigula »

noosphr wrote: post #222
constantius wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I wanted to do after dish brain pong, but never had the budget for, was using live animals Torture, so casually mentioned. For what, I wonder.

When we can turn off distress and pain in farm animals we would have done more to improve well-being in the world than anyone alive today. Factory farms stop being an efficient evil and become the only moral way to produce meat. And as a side effect we also get super intelligence on a substrate that is 10 orders of magnitude more energy efficient than silicon.

This is literal supervillian wire-heading type stuff. Poorly thought out ideas of a madman with no regard for the consequences; just vague claims about the definite super-good idea of direct brain state manipulation.

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#247

Post by redrecpeng »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #139
noosphr wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have been quite happy to use my own brain as the computational substrate and I had more than a few other people keen to be the input and output parts of the system. It's rather unfortunate that in the West it is impossible to get elective brain surgery. The countries that will do it have at best a spotty record. I talked to someone who had it done in Brazil and their electrodes became dislodged after a few mo…

I'm totally fine with consensual human experimentation that somehow threads the needle around exploitation of the poor - just not sure how we do the latter part short of requiring experimentees to pass a minimum net-worth threshold?

Make sure subjects actually pay, instead of getting paid for being a subject?

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#248

Post by catigula »

cinntaile wrote: post #225
noosphr wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we can turn off distress and pain in farm animals we would have done more to improve well-being in the world than anyone alive today. Factory farms stop being an efficient evil and become the only moral way to produce meat. And as a side effect we also get super intelligence on a substrate that is 10 orders of magnitude more energy efficient than silicon.

Do you mean we'll input their brains with an alternate reality or just removing their pain and distress signals? Regardless of the answer. Lab meat still seems more ethical, it was never a sentient being in the first place.

That person has no idea or even care for what is or isn't ethical outside of other people maybe being upset about it and trying to stop them.

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#249

Post by joquarky »

akomtu wrote: post #105
mrweasel wrote: post #50

In the same line of thinking: I'm a little concerned that humans are, to some extend, just LLMs in a meat suit.

They aren't. However there is a coordinated effort to push this pseudo-philosophy on masses. On the one hand it degrades the idea of human consciousness or soul, calling it a fiction. On the other hand it props the AI, calling its pile of transistors almost brain-like.

How can something inexplicable like consciousness be considered "degraded"?

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#250

Post by hgoel »

noworriesnate wrote: post #208
hgoel wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the closest would be: if anyone involved ever complains to authorities at all, everyone involved gets in trouble. If no one ever complains, no trouble. Everyone involved is forever at the mercy of everyone else involved.

Complaining to the authorities needs to come with a cost, otherwise people who don’t believe in the research or are looking for a payday will join just to complain

I consider that a feature in this idea, you have to believe in whatever you want to human experimentation for, enough to select who you include very carefully, and ultimately still take that risk.
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