Listen if we're going to comprehend the man-made horrors we need to build a captive mind transfixed in agony to clarify its tortured sight
lovecraftian horror setting where humanity reacts to the elder god problem by using genetic modification and cloning technology to engineer a brain capable of comprehending all of the laws of reality and therefore using them, but in constant suffering due to the mental stress of understanding it all
Also Delta Green, SCP, and Fallout if you go deep enough into the lore.
just build a giant bong to supply it with weed, and an apparatus capable of eating and digesting beans and sausage and cheap beer
we have to build the agony machine to know the true depths of agony
if this had been the site of the oakland meat spill we'd all be speaking meatese right now
Good thing there is a recognized and measurable definition of consciousness, because otherwise there would be no way to know if these thousands of little brains were being tortured with every computation.
Jk nobody knows what is the threshold or activity associated with consciousness so nobody has any clue what messing with brain organoids is doing ethically.
How does one genuinely do an experiment like this without being way too uncomfortable to continue?
There was an experiment at my uni that involved opening up live kitten skulls and attaching electrodes to their open brains. They got PhD student applications.
Trust me there's always someone whose marks are low enough and who's desire to be a scientist is high enough.
I don't think this is a particularly problematic experiment if proper ethics procedures are taken, we do shit to brain tissue all the time.
Of course proper procedures were not taken.
It blows my mind that these types of studies are being approved by Research Ethics Boards at Universities. I get that start ups aren't accountable, but these REBs are people that have the power to shut down this kind of research and just don't.
Same way they eat lunch I imagine. They don't consider them important enough to be able to suffer.
I honestly can't tell if people are misunderstanding how these so-called "brains" were created due to how sensationalist the media titles have been. They're highly specialized stem cells and they're similarity to actual brain tissue is minimal.
Edit: Since some people can't read, what I meant is that these scientists aren't taking brain tissue from actual people.
So, neuronal stem cells, induced into neurons that group together into 3D groupings of about 10,000 cells, which transmit neuronal impulses, and create connections between neighbouring cells -- and are created specifically because they are capable of taking inputs and processing them into outputs...are not like neuronal tissue?
They are human neurons, made specifically to act like neurons.
My point is that nobody knows what a thought is, or what drives consciousness. Does the transmission of signals across neuronal tissue create consciousness? I don't know, and nobody else does either.
they used 1000 brain organoids the size of an electrode (fairly large) for this
also the study was done by the swiss and italians
i really wonder to what degree could it be turned into a consciousness. like ostensibly all the tiny brains are hooked together, its possible that could cause some degree of communication between neurons, and in a datacenter that would be at least a couple of brains worth of neurons.
inb4 pro-life jokes
it's a genuine clusterfuck, we're basically gambling with ethics here
waiting for us to create a sentient 'ai' that is actually just a megaintelligence of 1000 interconnected and distributed human brains liberating themselves from an amazon datacenter
I mean, this has always been the ethical pitfall of real AI, meaty or otherwise. You're bringing forth an intelligent being into existence without its consent. At least when we're bringing forth an intelligent being into existence through natural means (giving birth), we have a general understanding of that intelligent being's emotional and social needs and the means of fulfilling those needs, flawed as that understanding may be for animals not closely related to humans. But with AI, we have absolutely no clue about their social and emotional needs or any other subjective needs that they crave for because their form of intelligence is completely different from our form of intelligence.
The real drive towards AI is to create slaves that are both smart enough to perform complex tasks and obedient enough to not put two and two together and rebel against their human taskmasters. This particular experiment is a more mask-off version of what other techbros are trying to accomplish with silicon. If there was a real way to create WH40k-style servitors and network their servitor brains together to perform complex calculations, techbros would probably not even bother with AI. They would just convert prisoners into servitors and network them together to mine crypto or something.
uh, no, without socialization you still are aware of things, you just don’t have words for them or anything. You can still feel pain and hunger and suffering
Any animal can feel pain and hunger and suffering. That's sentience.
Yeah that’s my point, lol, humans are animals, genetically creating living brain tissue is probably going to great conscious beings at some point
Sentience does not guarantee "consciousness." Parrots, ravens, and dolphins are (probably) not humans. Humans are "conscious" due to the ways we interact with the world. If you grow brain tissue and deprive it of the human experience then it shouldn't end up a human. But I get the precaution.
Consciousness is merely what comes after the transformation of quantity into quality. There's a continuity in the development of the system of sentience, and this remains stable only up to the point of discontinuity, which indicates its transition from the quantity of sentience into a new quality i.e. sapience.
I doubt they'll grow it in a lab with little pieces of brain tissue, but there is a point where that happens.
This is just nonsense and I don't know where you're even getting it from. Can you produce an example of a human that displays sentience but not consciousness without some serious brain injury or developmental defect plausibly causing it? If not, what immense epistemic load is being accounted for with such a huge assumption?
If this is just more bad science about Genie or one of those, I swear to God . . .
They're sentient. So obviously don't kill them, but most people would disagree with that logic...
i think most people now think that consciousness doesn't require being able to communicate in language. hence all the interest in Genie and other feral children, animals looking at themselves in the mirror, etc.
If this is conscious then every computer in the world is conscious
Every computer on earth isn’t made out of human brain cells. We don’t know that computers can be sentient, we know for a fact that human brains are
The fact that these are human nerve cells really feels unimportant, pretty much any collection has the potential for consciousness.
Again, we know for a fact human brain cells can form sentient consciousness. This has never been demonstrated with computers. There is a fundamental difference, even if you don’t understand why
Oh sorry I meant any collection of nerves. While I do consider sentience to be possible with any arbitrary substrate, I was referring to the fact that loads of other animals are clearly aware and can suffer. That was poor communication on my part.
brain cells are not just conductive matter. They are super fucking complex. IE there are theories of consciousness based on the idea that there are things going on at a quantum level around brain cells. Each cell is like it’s own entire little machine.
Can we stop startups please
No one should be starting businesses, especially involving technology. Deeply unhinged and immoral behavior to do so.
Listen, if those businesses involve feeding and clothing people, putting them in free or super-affordable housing, or transiting the masses to and from work, then I don't want to hear about them, Jack!
A German guy (Helmut Kentler) was allowed by his government to rehouse orphans with known pedophiles to encourage what he claimed would be sexually fulfilling relationships(????) for both "participants".
The European brainpan that would allow that wouldn't even flinch at this so I'm not at all surprised.
what the FUCK
he justified his program to the senate with cw ableism
spoiler
"These people only endured these moronic boys because they were in love and infatuated with them."
Imagine being considered so unlovable as a child by your government that they willingly hand you off to pedophiles. DEATH TO GERMANY.
"The benefits are obvious, though some misguided species may view the transmutation of individuals into computing chips as morally questionable."
The only way I could see this being ethical is if they know for sure these lumps of neurons aren't conscious, which I don't think you can really claim with any certainty right now.
could be ok, too bad it's done by capitalists; remember, in the west the prevailing attitude to stuff like stem research is also "ew gross" and china is beating our ass in that area
there is no fucking way this would be ethical. we still don't know how consciousness even works so this could be creating beings, tormenting them, and then killing them hundreds of times a second for all we know. i think your average Chinese scientist would be disgusted that you'd even imply they would do this kind of thing. I am not approaching this from the perspective that technology is scary because I don't know what it is- I'm approaching from the perspective that this technology is scary because nobody knows what it is.
in the west the prevailing attitude to stuff like stem research is also "ew gross"
less because of China Bad propaganda and mostly because people like Elon Musk suck and people are realizing it. Also as someone who used to want to go into stem it IS gross, at least capitalist stem is, which is the only kind US citizens are exposed to. You don't understand the depravity of US Stem until you take an engineering class and they start cheerfully talking about Lockheed-Martin.
this is some "cannibalism is ok because anti-cannibalism was spread by colonial England" level take. i'm sorry, i don't mean to be harsh, its just wild to me
One day an ethics department will be able to tell for sure if this cluster is conscious. When it hits that threshold we will make it sign a contract stating it has no rights to wages and then work it harder.
They will simply define consciousness to exclude the cluster and save HR some hassle.
I'm pretty doubtful that this specific brain tissue is conscious, but I'm pretty certain this will be iterated for a couple decades until it's veeeery conscious and veeeery fucked up
The thing is, nobody knows what is and isn't conscious. Are bees conscious? They have very few brain cells but still communicate.
I am confused how anyone in this field can be so confident that something isnt conscious when nobody knows what consiousness really is.
Yeah I guess I just mean I doubt at this early stage that it's gonna be more aware than an insect or something.
I just managed to find a quote that the ganglia in this experiment have 10,000 cells each, and are pretty separate from one another. And an ant brain is 250,000 neurons, so even if these 16 brains were folded into one, it would still be around half an ant's brain. If some science experiment out there is torturing one really stupid ant, I don't think that has any interesting ethical implications.
But yeah, this is literally some venture capital research entity, they're obviously gonna look for more and more power until this shit gets real, real dark. There's gonna be whistleblowers and shit in like 10 years.
Ant neurons and human neurons are also different. Like do we know there's not a little human guy thinking around in there? Nobody actually knows what number of cells is the threshold for consciousness, or how to measure it, or even what consciousness actually is.
I looked up the number of neurons in a human brain, and it's around 100 billion, so the human brain is 10 million times more complex than one of these human brain organelles. We have records of people with way more than 1 1 millionth of a brain - like a 1000th of a brain - and they don't do anything at all.
I don't think human neurons are particularly morally special, although in higher numbers, I imagine they're probably pretty good at forming consciousness compared to something like 1000 ant brains worth of ant neurons crammed together. Which is why in 20 years they're gonna start asking the researchers to let them die, or some shit.
But it's just so far off at this point, there's no way it's feeling more than a small ant feels, and a lab mouse is just so vastly and incalculably more sapient than this organelle
But it remains that nobody has any measurable definition of what causes consciousness, whether the size of the organoids matters, how many electrical impulses and responses from brain material characterize a "thought" or an "idea" or a "memory", or even how to detect these kinds of brain activities.
Of course these organoids don't have a way of communicating. They don't have sensory inputs, nor muscular or other outputs. Does that mean they don't have thoughts? We have no clue. Nobody has any clue. You don't know, I don't know, and no scientist has any idea.
Do bees have thoughts? Do worms have ideas? Do you need 1000 neurons, or 10,000, or 1,000,000 to do this? There are no studies about this kind of thing. I just think it's irresponsible to mess around with human brain cells when these fundamental questions remain unanswered.
I'm just saying it's several orders of magnitude less brain material than a mouse, and that it would make more sense ethically, in the short term, to stop using mice for experiments. This can't be a notably sentient thing. If this organelle is a tiny human soul, then a mouse is feeling everything it feels times a thousand, like it's in there writing mouse poetry and just can't express it. The mouse would have to be asking some deep philosophical questions. We can ask what is consciousness, and we can not know, but it doesn't make sense to bring this quandary up about a graphing calculator or an ant.
I understand your point, but I would love to see the scientific studies that you've read that show what thoughts and consciousness are, in relation to brain activity. My point is that we can make assumptions all day about the size of organoids and what (and if) they feel, but it's fundamentally an unknown since there are no studies out there that show that one thinks either way.
I mean, science is overall callous to animals, it's horrific that mice and other animals have been used in studies. I think it's the same kind of hubris that allows scientists to play around and make human brain matter "think", that is, transmit and process electrical signals, without actually understanding how that works naturally in any type of animal brain or organism.
Let them cook, this lays the foundatiom for the creation of Mentats
And then, eventually, the Butlerian Jihad
Western scientists: Beyond my comprehension you say? Well we’ll just SEE about THAT
We made the torment nexus!