/siberia/ - Off-topic

Why isnt this considered animal cruelty?

>>826328
the fly consented to the brain scan

>>826335
Would you consent to such brain scans?

>>826341
No but probably already have by pressing "accept terms and conditions" I didn't read

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Someone can make a version of this based on the fly

I feel like the whole thing is probably mostly bullshit though, I doubt they've actually captured anything about fly cognition

>>826328
because there literally isnt anything that simulates consciousness, its just neural synapses and pathways you gotta assign meaning to them to get them to do stuff
kind of like how an electrical circuit doesnt have ability to think but you can still do shit with it

humans have done everything we could to find someone to talk to us. deep down we are desperate for companionship, we try to communicate with apes, dolphins, cats, dogs, all to no avail, we have searched meticulously through the entire known universe just for a chance to meet another intelligent species

this world is so intolerably lonely

>>826376
>because there literally isnt anything that simulates consciousness,
Neurons do it just fine in our brains.

>its just neural synapses and pathways
Ok so these neurons are imperfectly simulated?

>>826384
>Neurons do it just fine in our brains.
No they don't. They produce consciousness, they don't simulate it. And there's no particular reason to believe they do so solely as a consequence of their computational properties. Humans always think the world naturally works just like the hottest tech.

>>826345
Yeah it's just the connecome, so it's like they captured it's reflexes. There's still a lot more parts that move around in the brain than that, some likely not discovered yet.

Still very impressive how fly-like the behavior of just the connectome is.

>>826386
consciousness isn't some spooky substance existing outside of matter, it's just what neurons collectively do. If you get a computer to perform the same function as a brain, it is for all intents and purposes conscious. DO NOT misconstrue me as saying I think LLMs or current day simulations are alive. However, we are getting closer. If you have a computer simulating everything the neurons in a fruit fly brain does, then that computer has achieved a fruit fly's level of consciousness.

Cockshott has a slightly different take on whether "consciousness" is real at all.

>>826401
>it's just what neurons collectively do
>If you have a computer simulating everything the neurons in a fruit fly brain does, then that computer has achieved a fruit fly's level of consciousness.
He doesn't know about the bodybrain

>>826401
If you have a computer perfectly simulate a hurricane, the lab gets wet.

>>826409
meaningless objection. might as well object that artificial consciousness is impossible because you would need to simulate the brain's relationship with the entire universe outside of it.
>>826411
terrible analogy. also I never said "perfectly simulate" because it's impossible to "perfectly simulate" anything.

>>826401
>it's just what neurons collectively do. If you get a computer to perform the same function as a brain, it is for all intents and purposes conscious
This has literally never been proven, not even close, but people love to just treat it as true for no reason, entirely because the current zeitgeist is one of "everything is computer".
By the way, an implication of pure computationalism is that you should be theoretically able to create a fly's consciousness inside your own head by just performing the same calculations your computer is performing in the fly program. Tell me what that would look like. Tell me what the fuck it would even mean.

>>826419

do you believe in souls? or that the brain is a "radio" that picks up "consciousness" from "somewhere else?" because if you don't, then you understand that the brain performs consciousness. the brain computes.

>the current zeitgeist is one of "everything is computer".

the word computer originally referred to humans who did math for a living, before calculators were invented. So yes. brains do computation. information is physical. certain arrangements of matter are capable of self-correcting feedback loops, stimulus response, memory storage, memory retrieval, memory updates. the human brain is one such arrangement of matter.

>>826422
>the word computer originally referred to humans who did math for a living, before calculators were invented. So yes. brains do computation. information is physical. certain arrangements of matter are capable of self-correcting feedback loops, stimulus response, memory storage, memory retrieval, memory updates. the human brain is one such arrangement of matter.
to follow up we know this is the case because if you damage a brain, you damage its capacity to perform these actions. If you sever an optic nerve, the eye can no longer see, even if the eyeball itself is perfectly fine. this is because "seeing" is performed by the brain, while the eye is merely an organ for retrieving light.

>>826422
"Brains do computation" (which no one is denying) does not mean that "computation is/explains everything brains do". This is obvious.
And for the love of god spare me the condescending bullshit when it's clear you're the one who hasn't studied this subject past the seemingly "obvious" conclusion to be drawn from pop sci. There are many, many excellent objections to the naive computationalism you're presenting and you're clearly not aware of any of them.

>>826401
>Cockshott has a slightly different take on whether "consciousness" is real at all.
No one cares what that reactionary has to say on the matter. He doesn't know basic math. He can only concieve of the world by what gives him catharsis.

Teaching the fly to draw lines like a coding tutorial turtle has potential tho. Like normally AI image generation just collepses all pixels into what they're gonna be like a shader, but I bet you could get interesting results if you had a fly trained to sketch, a fly trained to lineart, a fly trained to shade, color, etc…

So is the AI fly sentient or not?

>>827102
Not yet, it's just a connectome, so it just has reflexes, but once they fill in the rest of the parts it will be as close as is reasonable to assume possible.

I'm just talking out of my ass so it's likely I got a bunch of stuff wrong, and correct me if I'm wrong, but from my understanding we are not simulating a "brain" at all. We still hardly even know how the brain works. We have a crude mapping of the neurons and connections in a fly's brain and we just plug a neural network into it (something we've had for many years) and train it to do tasks. People just love Frankenstein ideas "oh we're le heckin torturing an artificial consciousness just like my favorite creepypastas" and they overlay their fantasies into something that's not really that impressive. It makes me think that human beings are actually just sadistic freaks who are salivating at the chance to actually torture lesser beings more than anything else.

>>827121
>but from my understanding we are not simulating a "brain" at all. We still hardly even know how the brain works. We have a crude mapping of the neurons and connections in a fly's brain and we just plug a neural network into it (something we've had for many years) and train it to do tasks.
This is by no means the limit of what we understand of the brain, but yeah it's just a connectome. No horomones or anything yet. From what I understand this takes slicing a fly brain layer by later on a tiny deli slicer. I assume getting more of the nuances of the brain required a more complex scanner.
>It makes me think that human beings are actually just sadistic freaks who are salivating at the chance to actually torture lesser beings more than anything else.
That's far too cathartic of a conclusion. To jump right to it being a humans thing rather than attempting to narrow it to a cultural phenomena makes me think you to some degree feel this yourself, and want to feel normal about it by attributing it to your humanity.