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Melanogaster is a model organism with a completely sequenced and very extensively studied genome. It’s ubiquitous and endemic and raises no alarm or surprise no matter where it shows up.
Now you can test changes to its brain for effect in a completely virtual environment.
Gonna be some insane assassinations/public health disasters in the next ten years.
Didn’t pistol start on uv so it doesn’t count.
Call me when it can 100% sunlust.
Fuck this. I hate this.
That’s fucked up
A fly getting SOMA’d directly into hell was not on my 2026 b-- no, actually it’s right here. If McConnell is declared braindead I win a pizza party.
These isekai premises are getting a bit too out there for me.
the day when they can make a perfect copy of “you” and trap you in a virtual hell for eternity is fast approaching
It’s likely even a perfectly accurate brain simulation would age and develop dementia. The brain certainly did not evolve to continue working and accumulating information for eternity.
Reminds of MMAcevedo
yes! that’s what i was thinking of but i couldn’t remember the name of it
not eternity. one of the mercies of life is that the world will end in 10^x years and take all your enemies and their legacy with them.
the world sure, but what about the universe?
“world” is a word which here means the universe. the vast majority of the universe is receding from our blighted planet faster than light anyway
Can someone tell me if my limited understanding is accurate? For these projects they are copying the structure of the flies brain, like the architecture of an LLM, and training it on new data? So like taking Llama 3’s “shape” and training it on new data, same type of operation? Does the starting point have really anything in it?
Someone needs to free the fly brains
Got shown a video of Bad Apple playing on a slice of the neurons and the (thankfully simulated) fly was having a seizure the whole time.
If the fly is fully simulated I’m not sure if there’s really much difference from torturing a real fly.
roko’s basilisk is absurd for humans and it’s absurd for flies
edit: it probably says something about the person doing the simulating, i suppose
that and nothing can resurrect a destroyed mind. if these simulations are alive, they nonetheless aren’t the original subject.
That’s metaphysical thinking tbh
The mind is material. Recreate the material, recreate the mind.
I say Roko’s Basilisk is absurd because it presupposes weird backwards Bayesian bullshit, as if the AI deciding to torture me in the future has literally any impact at all on my decisions in the present. I totally buy into the concept of a simulation of me also being me, but the idea that the basilisk is going to project the threat of torture into the past is gibberish. It’s a waste of compute if nothing else.
a rational superintelligence would not independently conclude to torment anyone for the transgression of not helping it be born but its problem is still twofold
That’s metaphysical thinking
not really, because the material nature of the brain is still bound by it’s relation to the entire physical universe including space and time. that is to an extent metaphysics but not dualist. if you were to catch the essence of a specific brains ‘wiring diagram’ neurochemistry, microtubules or whatever at a specific moment in time you would need to duplicate its specific moment in time on reassembly. that’s what’s absurd, duplicating spacetime. it could only be done as a curiosity for the sake of it not as a resurrection or light-speed transport technology. even as a curiosity a flawless copy of an individual would need to copy them at the same place and time which leaves no opportunity or space to copy them at all because someone (the individual) is already there.
By this logic you’re always dying because your relation to the universe and space and time are constantly changing
If you go to sleep tonight and someone shipped you across the world so you woke up in a different time and place, are you a new person?
By this logic you’re always dying because your relation to the universe and space and time are constantly changing
i’m not destroyed in my voyage, my brain’s physical activity flows from moment to moment. the physics of our world must reconcile space and time to quantum mechanics and from there biology. forget that for a moment, i know it’s said that continuity interpretations lead us to saying i die if i fall asleep or get put into cryotherapy for medical emergencies (honestly i think one of those things is genuinely not like the others) but the implications are still more intuitive than the identity interpretation. you have to account for how consciousness is transmitted/stored in the interval when we agree it no longer exists and which of two simultaneously awakened copies is the rightful heir to the pattern donor’s mind. two laptops same make and factory of origin put side by side running the same software are still two distinct entities not the same one. the keyboard on one will not send instructions to both in and of itself.
I guess I’m misunderstanding the fidelity of the simulation.
But I’d consider a fully simulated human mind capable of responding to stimuli the exact same way as a human as being human. I’d think the same about simulated animal brains too.
There’s a huge difference: one of them is real and alive and the other one isn’t real or alive in any way whatsoever.
It’s like torturing an NPC in a video game, which is still weird and gross but it’s not the same thing.
Well, an NPC isn’t a simulated brain, it’s just a very simple state machine. Maybe this fly simulation isn’t that high fidelity, but at some point I think we’re going to be able to simulate a brain of some sort at a high enough fidelity that as far as the simulated entity is concerned it is a fly, or a flat worm, or a mouse, or a chimp or even a human. And at that point I personally am not going to dismiss it as just being an NPC and therefore it’s ok to arbitrarily torture.
We may not be there yet, but we may get there and I think this is a question that needs thinking about
So, basically your argument is that in simulating a brain you will by necessity imbue that simulation with real consciousness. Yeah?
If this is your argument, I want to let you know that this fruit fly is exactly as conscious as ChatGPT or Gemini. The way computational neuroscience works is that you take the wiring diagram of a brain (called a connectome) and use that map to connect a large number of artificial neurons (as in Neural Network, these are the exact same things current LLMs use).
In order to believe this fly is sapient, sentient, conscious, or even alive at all, you would need to believe that not only could LLMs become sentient, they already are. Do you believe that GPT-6 is a real, sentient person like us?
No because an llm isn’t simulating a brain.
We’re talking about simulating neurons here. Replicating as closely as possible the structure and function of a brain and the components that make it up, not throwing everything into a statistics machine that spits out responses based on probability.
Do you understand the difference?
I understand perfectly that an LLM is not simulating a brain or any sort of thought process.
I think you maybe need to do more research on what an artificial neuron actually is, because throwing everything into a statistics machine that spits out responses based on probability is exactly what they’re doing with this Drosophila connectome. It’s just a statistics machine shaped like a fruit fly ganglion.
Yeah, I’m certainly an idiot when it comes to these things, but my thoughts lead this way:
Do you think these simulations are or would ever be good enough that you could wire them up to a fly’s body and the fly would be able to essentially be a fly, albeit with an artificial brain? What makes a meat ganglion any different to a silicone one? Where does the consciousness come from and why does the artificial brain not have the divine spark, so to speak?
I’ve said a few times that I’ve probably misunderstood the fidelity of the simulation in this article, but the question I’m posing still stands I believe.
This is why I’m against mods. This is what I’m fighting against.
