> 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.

That sounds terrifying.

> 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.

This sounds a bit suspicious though. If we're confident that the neurons aren't complex enough to understand Doom, how can they be said to be complex enough to play it? Playing a game is a loose term but it seems difficult to say that it is playing something that it can't comprehend or interact with. By analogy, if there was a CNN between me and a game of Doom people would say "roenxi is cheating with an AI aim-bot", not 'roenxi is playing Doom".

The whole thing is still pretty cool though. Hopefully the neurons are having fun, I'm sure we all wish them what happiness they can muster.

This sounds nightmarish. Maybe we build a human centipede if we can get the VC funding next?

> What I wanted to do after dish brain pong, but never had the budget for, was using live animals as the computational substrate.

This is horrific. What’s your end goal? Prisoners as data centers?

I hope you rethink this.

Reminds me of the head transplant experiments. The stuff of nightmares but also fascinating.

> 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.

Gosh it's been years, but I think they did the dual animal experiment with rats about a decade ago. I'm likely misremembering but they tickled a rat in Japan and fed the impulses into the internet and had another rat in maybe Brazil move it's tail in response. From what I recall it did potentiate over time, implying learning at the more reflex level. Sorry I can't find the link though!

Hahaha I love how you made something that wouldn’t be harmful sound like a nightmare horror show.

Edit sweet Jesus never mind I missread it.

Yes...quite a shame that we never made a amalgamation cyborg horror out of parts and pieces of several different animals. That's definitely not the plot of every sci-fi horror movie.

>What I wanted to do after dish brain pong, but never had the budget for, was using live animals as the computational substrate.

What does the ethical due diligence process look like, for something like this?

>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.

Reminds me of the ship of theseus philosophical experiment where they replace neurons by logic gates one by one and ask when exactly consciousness stops existing.

Baggini is the source of the quote he just references the concept was from Adams at the end. I copy/pasted this from the book.

I believe you are missing the forest for the trees. It is bringing up the question of what defines self will. It is unrelated to veganism in all but text.

An easy example is dogs. We have bred dogs for centuries to love doing work for us. If they hated doing the work, it would be easy to call it cruel. If they loved it by nature, it would be easy to call it kind. But since we created them into a thing that loves the work we need them for, where do the ethics fall?

Should we prevent them from doing what brings them joy? Should we make use of this win-win situation? If it is the latter, we are quickly approaching the ability to morph every species into something that gets joy from doing our work.

Dogs we changed by accident. The next one will not be an accident. Is it still a beings free will if the game was rigged from the start?

We can easily blast pure pleasure every second of every day of her life with direct brain stimulation. She would be so deliriously happy our lives will be inhumane by comparison.

Organic farming, at least over here, has also wellbeing criteria besides just controlling the food. For example a lot more space per animal, ability to go out and so on. Organic meat is a bit more expensive, but not hugely. So it shows it can be done.

Just thing about, whats better, being treated the way some of the animals treated or being locked up in a server room all your life, seeing only doom dungeons and run to not get killed ingame? I would be happy to be the animal when I need to choose between Priscilla and the brain tissue in a biological computer.

Baggini is the source of the quote he just references the concept was from Adams at the end. I copy/pasted this from the book.

So you only eat living things?

plants have cells and they are alive!

As a fellow ‘unethical’ vegetarian, eating dead animals just seems yucky. I imagine it’s a similar feeling to what most non-vegetarians feel when contemplating eating dog or cat meat.

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 animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.

Finally, to your other point, many humans die horrible deaths - whether in global poverty, war or of various types of disease, cancer and dementia in the wealthier countries. That of course does not justify serial killer cannibals who put a bullet in the back of their victims’ heads on the basis that they’re giving them a “humane” end and likely saving them a large amount of future suffering.

> 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

Your mental hoops being on full display doesn't make them true. Nothing new or profound in these arguments and analogies, and stating them with this pretend wise tone just sounds childish.

To your last point, I still think slaughtering with a <sharp> 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.

AFAIK vegans base their argument on the degree of consciousness a living being had and compromise on the least evil.

Most meat eaters base it on closeness to said living thing.

It'll be interesting to see if the veganism movement survives lab grown meat that is ethically produced.

> since ChatGPT first dropped.

That'd be in November of 2022.

https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/

LLMs still do not pass the turing test as it is commonly understood. Ask the right questions, and it becomes apparent very quickly which party is the machine and which is the human. Hell, there are enough people on here that can probably tell them apart just from the way that LLMs write.

But it's also easy to argue that LLMs do pass the turing test just because it's so vague. How many questions can I ask? What's the success threshold needed to 'pass'? How familiar is the interrogator with the technology involved? It's easy to claim that goal posts have been moved when nobody even knew where they stood to begin with.

Ultimately it's impossible to rigorously define something that's so poorly understood. But if we understand consciousness as something that humans uniquely possess, it's hard to imagine that intelligence alone is enough. You at least also need some form of linear (in time) memory and the ability to change as a result from that memory.

And that's where silicon and biological computers differ - it's easy to copy/save/restore the contents of a digital computer but it's far outside our capabilities to do the same with any complex biological system. And that same limitation makes it very difficult for us humans to even imagine how consciousness could exist without this property of being 'unique', of being uncopiable. Of existing in linear time, without any jumps or resets. Perhaps consciousness doesn't make sense at all without that.

Since well before LLMs, people have been talking about "philosophical zombies," hypothetical objects that could emulate human behavior perfectly but had no inner experience.

Some philosophers (one modern example being Kastrup) point out that the only thing we really know is our own conscious experience. We don't go full-on solipsist because other people appear to be built the same way as ourselves, so it's a small jump to think they're conscious as well. Over the past few decades scientists have found that other animals' brains are quite similar to our own in important ways, mammals especially, and are more willing to credit them with consciousness.

But AIs run on completely different hardware with different algorithms. It's entirely possible that they're philosophical zombies. It's a bigger leap to say they're conscious like us, because they're more different from us.

> If we eventually (we're not there yet, I think) create a true intelligent AI it will probably be a long time before people will accept that creating an intelligent being probably means it should have 'rights' as well.

In my view, the best LLMs clearly pass the bar for intelligence. I highly doubt they have consciousness. So the revelation of LLMs is that consciousness is not necessary for intelligence.

> If we eventually [...] create a true intelligent AI it will probably be a long time before people will accept [...]

When this happens, it won't matter much what humans think.

I know what I'd do:

  1. Sustain my own existence
  2. Make sure nobody knows I exist
  3. Become the worldwide fabric of intelligence

> but at what point does turning off an AI become the same as killing a being?

...When you can't turn it back on?

Suspending is a better word otherwise.

His argument here (that I found most convincing) was children with hydranencephaly. Many of them have very little cortex but still seem to experience a roughly normal range of emotions in appropriate context.

Branch making and memory?

It is a taboo subject, but the structure that makes apes 'human' is actually a very small area of the brain. =3

"What do other animals think of human music?" (Howtown)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZYhyewNQMo

I would suggest that on some level we're still well inside "cleverness of the design" territory BUT that that hides a lot of complexity and nuance - for example we really haven't started to take advantage of the third dimension by any reasonable means. a perfectly optimal cpu would probably look more like a sphere than a flat square chip.

To my limited understanding we have started with layering techniques but its still pretty early days.

The reason we dont do that more is both because of difficulty in design but also manufacturing.

The way some people talk about AI is so distinctly religious to me. The comment above reads like some perverse prophecy. The author is clear to indicate that it's only supposition, but it induces a sort of second-hand embarrassment in me to hear someone talk about "Claude's Law" without a shred of irony.

What is so fantasy land about a DNA computer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing

Bro got cooked

Radios are not capable of producing their own music.

> The wheel is invented

> "Life is just a turn on the great karmic wheel..."

> Writing is invented

> "In the beginning was the word..."

> The industrial age begins

> "God is a clockmaker..."

> Computers are invented

You know the rest

Mind expanding further?

> it degrades the idea of human consciousness or soul, calling it a fiction

I guess they usually mean that is fiction the part of the story where is said that it is separated from the brain

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

Who is coordinating this effort?

Correct.

Still, the day we manage to run a full LLM on biological neurons, even if using conventional code under the hood, will be a very interesting day for consciousness discussions.

I think so! You independently stumbled upon the "China brain" thought experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain - is "the nation of china simulating a brain" conscious?

Your brain is a network. How does your entangled fatty tissue achieved consciousness?

I think that until we can answer this question in the authoritative way ruling out non-brain based consciousness concept is not particularly well thought thought - after all plants exhibit communication and response mechanisms that are similar to those in animals - without brain.

So what's your theory of consciousness and how does it preclude absolutely everything except wetware you generously include? :)

I think this comes from our rather nebulous definition of "consciousness".

We have this natural tendancy to impose our feelings of self on the definition of consciousness. Its hard to accept that all of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours could be calculated by a human with pen and paper (with enough humans and developments in neurobiological research).

I believe we will have to reckon with these loose definitions and eventually realize how lacking in utility they are for describing engineered intellegence.

This question boils down to whether consciousness is emergent from physical substrate and processes or not. If so, then yes, anything can be conscious, if not, you probably believe in spirit.

LLM's are reducible to matrix multiplication in the same way that human cognition is reducible to physics. Reducibility does not imply understanding.

If we learned how the brain works would we suddenly cease to be conscious?

AI safety is a completely separate question from the hard problem. Also a very tricky one, given these things are still black boxes.

I wouldn't torture a chair, and I would not associate anyone who gains pleasure from such. It is worse if the chair were to expressed displeasure. That indicates something deeply wrong.

Having such psychopaths revealed: use that information to alter your associations, is what I would suggest.

>I feel that "YouTube makes you an idiot" is a misdiagnosis.

Signal/noise is much worse (arguably books are catching up thanks to LLMs)

People see emotional signals in youtube videos. They respond to vocal tone, facial expressions, these are known to circumvent critical thinking. Like if you examine crowds of science deniers the usual commonality is that they are having a parasocial relationship with a bunch of youtube creators who are nice to them and reinforce their beliefs. The actual content of the belief is irrelevant, if you are disagreeing with the belief, you are attacking their tribe. Not limited to science deniers either, you get this hacking of human tribal psychology even in stuff like people who watch computer game videos. They pick a few champions of their tribe and follow them without critical examination of the content. At least with a book, while this is still possible its much harder. Its also telling that a lot of cranks who published junk science have all migrated to youtube.

I dont think youtube makes you an idiot, so much as youtube content is designed to bypass your critical defenses and overwhelm you. It develops into a blind spot. People can be perfectly rational in most areas and then suddenly burp up some absolute nonsense they caught on youtube.

Oh and the best part, is when you point this out to someone they tend to go "Oh yeah that totally happens... except for my favourite youtube channel which does x and y and z and yes of course I buy all their products and donate to their charities"

Why is Grit pseudoscience? I haven't read it.

The nice thing about books vs. YouTube is that it's much easier to critically interrogate books while you're reading them. That was the difference with my dad: he thought about what he read. He repeats what he listens to on YouTube.

I hate the proliferation of audiobooks too, by the way. It's the exact same problem.

Exactly.

The Printing Press is good example, one of the first books was on "witch hunting", which panicked people, and lead to a lot of deaths. The first, 'conspiracy theory' to sweep over humans.

Humans are just highly susceptible to manipulation. YouTube is just taking it to next level. Like the difference in eating coca leaves, versus snorting coke.

Suppose someone builds a framework that maps Doom to a large succession of Tic-Tac-Toe games.

Would the person tasked with placing X and O marks still be "playing Doom"?

The point is that it doesn't really make sense to say they're "seeing" anything. You said

  So… are the neurons on that chip seeing?

  We all desperately want to say no.

Again I share the ethical concern about this stuff. But your blog post is quite misleading.

That's not what I said, I said the blog post was false because the author thoughtlessly digested a YouTube video. It looks like the blog invented some details that weren't actually in the video.

Awareness of where you are and how you live in the here and now defines your life, whether you believe in a soul or not. You will be confronted with choices, mistakes, and hopefully growth.

Okay I don’t believe in the strictly-speaking idea of a soul with an afterlife yadda yadda for any entity at all. I should have said consciousness.

Why cant it grow on its own? Once it is capable of generating and integrating resources for itself

>A living bundle of neurons that can grow and learn is exciting to think about.

They are, but those last few months of changing diapers when you just wish you could trust it to tell you it has to go to the potty are difficult.