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
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.
Did I die when I was hit by a car and lost three weeks of memory? I just woke up in rehab one day, not really remembering anything that had happened before that moment. I blinked from one day to the hospital. My relation to the universe and space and time were changed with a very severe continuity disruption, way beyond simply going to sleep in one place and waking up somewhere else.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Well, if Fleshlight® is to be believed, there’s no difference at all between meat and silicone!
But in all seriousness, no matter how good this simulation gets, you couldn’t really hook it up to an actual fly, and if you somehow found a way to do so, it would almost certainly just do either nothing or instantly kill the fly body. :( The way all computational neuroscience sims work is by connecting the wiring diagram of a brain up to a thing that AI bros call a “neuron” but is actually bunch of fancy math and transfer functions.
The math here kind of sort of resembles a biological neuron, just about as much as this emoji of a drawing of a bird resembles a real life airplane. You can imagine how they both have wings and could probably fly, but one of them is uhhhhh definitely not an airplane, it’s an emoji of a bird so why the fuck do researchers keep calling that emoji of a bird an airplane, and saying that their cool new bird emoji is literally an F-35? It’s just marketing hype. This fly simulation is no different. It’s just a bunch of bird emojis that share math outputs to other bird emojis. They don’t actually reflect anything happening in a real brain, the same way that an LLM doesn’t reflect thought.
What they’ve done here is basically putting Gemini in a 1:1 scale 3d model of a fruit fly. The impressive thing is that it can run at or close to real time on common hardware, where just a few years ago this was thoroughly in the realm of “1-2 neurons firing per minute” on the top research supercomputers on the planet.
There’s an entirely unrelated and far more upsetting field called Biocomputing, which actually does use real neurons to do computational work, and these same freaks are the ones who like sticking probes into bugs and trying to drive their bodies with electrical signals.
I mean, I think Data from TNG is a real conscious artificial person (or, you know, a TV show character played by a human actor that represents a real conscious artificial person) and I believe it’s possible that such a person could one day exist. However, the issue here is that the “neurons” they’re using for this just are not something that I or anyone else skeptical of the claims made by AI companies’ marketing departments believe could possess that divine spark that uniquely exists in conscious beings.
As an aside, I hate to admit it as a vegan but I genuinely don’t think that Drosophila spp. are what we would consider conscious. Obviously they are alive and deserving of respect, but that doesn’t really mean that everything alive is conscious. There are quite a number of very simple insects and things like roundworms that simply don’t have enough neurons to be more than biological automata that respond to basic stimuli. For example C. elegans has a mere 302 neurons in its body and is no more complex in its actions or behaviors than single celled organisms which I think we all agree aren’t conscious at all.
I guess what I’m saying is that consciousness is like pornography: I know it when I see it. I think consciousness is a gestalt and it’s definitely not stored in the connectome.
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
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?
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.
Did I die when I was hit by a car and lost three weeks of memory? I just woke up in rehab one day, not really remembering anything that had happened before that moment. I blinked from one day to the hospital. My relation to the universe and space and time were changed with a very severe continuity disruption, way beyond simply going to sleep in one place and waking up somewhere else.
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.
Well, if Fleshlight® is to be believed, there’s no difference at all between meat and silicone!
But in all seriousness, no matter how good this simulation gets, you couldn’t really hook it up to an actual fly, and if you somehow found a way to do so, it would almost certainly just do either nothing or instantly kill the fly body. :( The way all computational neuroscience sims work is by connecting the wiring diagram of a brain up to a thing that AI bros call a “neuron” but is actually bunch of fancy math and transfer functions.
The math here kind of sort of resembles a biological neuron, just about as much as this emoji of a drawing of a bird
resembles a real life airplane. You can imagine how they both have wings and could probably fly, but one of them is uhhhhh definitely not an airplane, it’s an emoji of a bird so why the fuck do researchers keep calling that emoji of a bird an airplane, and saying that their cool new bird emoji is literally an F-35? It’s just marketing hype. This fly simulation is no different. It’s just a bunch of bird emojis that share math outputs to other bird emojis. They don’t actually reflect anything happening in a real brain, the same way that an LLM doesn’t reflect thought.
What they’ve done here is basically putting Gemini in a 1:1 scale 3d model of a fruit fly. The impressive thing is that it can run at or close to real time on common hardware, where just a few years ago this was thoroughly in the realm of “1-2 neurons firing per minute” on the top research supercomputers on the planet.
There’s an entirely unrelated and far more upsetting field called Biocomputing, which actually does use real neurons to do computational work, and these same freaks are the ones who like sticking probes into bugs and trying to drive their bodies with electrical signals.
I mean, I think Data from TNG is a real conscious artificial person (or, you know, a TV show character played by a human actor that represents a real conscious artificial person) and I believe it’s possible that such a person could one day exist. However, the issue here is that the “neurons” they’re using for this just are not something that I or anyone else skeptical of the claims made by AI companies’ marketing departments believe could possess that divine spark that uniquely exists in conscious beings.
As an aside, I hate to admit it as a vegan but I genuinely don’t think that Drosophila spp. are what we would consider conscious. Obviously they are alive and deserving of respect, but that doesn’t really mean that everything alive is conscious. There are quite a number of very simple insects and things like roundworms that simply don’t have enough neurons to be more than biological automata that respond to basic stimuli. For example C. elegans has a mere 302 neurons in its body and is no more complex in its actions or behaviors than single celled organisms which I think we all agree aren’t conscious at all.
I guess what I’m saying is that consciousness is like pornography: I know it when I see it. I think consciousness is a gestalt and it’s definitely not stored in the connectome.