Are we sure that’s not just a weirdly angled picture of a chihuahua or muffin?
This is what you get with some further coaxing.
this guy coaxes
It has no mouth and it must scream
it can eat and grow though
I have no mouth but I must scream.
Tech venture capitalists for some reason:
Eldritch horrors beyond my comprehension
A horror movie where you suddenly gain consciousness just to realize you’re a light-sensitive brain blob.
It’s an honest job.
This could be exactly the scientific breakthrough we needed. Imagine a future where we all have one of these and it watches ads on your behalf. It can’t close its eyes. It can’t look away. it’s the perfect audience!
Its onky useful if it can interface and upvote/like things as well.
In face, just wire the eyes to the muscle for the like action.
This could mean the end of the great advertising war! The corporations want to stick their endless adverts in front of our eyeballs, we want to live without that crap. This gives us the possibility of a truce. They let us have internet and TV and operating systems and fridges with no adverts. In return, each of us sponsors one eyeball-equipped consciousness eternally trapped in the Torment Nexus. It’s a reasonable compromise!
Everybody wants science to cure cancer, but the moment someone does foundational research they lose their fuckin minds.
Guys, the alternative is cutting up mice and pigs.Yeah, this is pretty far below the level of a mouse even, typically
Iam not sspecifically talking about this example and I am not trying to imply this tissue has any sort of consciousness but if “foundational research” means “man made horrors beyond my comprehension” maybe we need to find another way, and if we cannot, maybe we just shouldn’t torture conscious beings in the name of science and progress.
-
Nature is full of horrors beyond your comprehension. If you want to make that less so, manmade horrors are the only way to do it.
-
This is by no means torture, quite the opposite in fact. Neurons are little prediction machines, and if you don’t give them stimuli, they either make their own of degrade. Particularly in small clumps of cells like this, you can’t be sure of whether they’re conscious, but if they are, they’re having an amazing time learning about the light signals.
-
That touches upon the actual issue here. We dont know if they’re conscious. We don’t have a solid idea of what consciousness is, where it comes from, what it consists of, or where the line is drawn. That’s the sort of knowledge you only get by performing these sorts of experiments.
-
All I want science to cure is billionaires, we’ll take it from there. Concentrations of wealth that enable making brains grow eyes are a bug, not feature. Ever read “Whitey’s on the Moon”?
That problem is very much one that’s beyond the domain of scientists. That’s like saying “All I want literature to do is decipher the genetic basis of cancer”. Trust me, if science were able to cure billionaires, it would.
Science gave us the guillotine, I choose to hold out hope. Pinpointing and publishing where all the wealth’s being concentrated would be an excellent Science Task
Science didn’t give us the guillotine, no matter which scientific method or forbear you’re using to determine scientific nature. At best, engineering gave us the guillotine, but I rather doubt there was any actual engineering design going on when they first made the Halifax Gibbet, except insofar as “I need a simpler and more consistent way to lazily kill petty criminals” was “defining a need”.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Simply put, to respond to light stimuli is not an unequivocal sign of consciousness.
I have no mouth and I must scream.
I’m sure they can work out a mouth next
Why?
So it can scream
Needs vocal cords and lungs for that.
Alright well then name your short story ‘I have no vocal cords or lungs and I must scream’
Science isn’t about WHY. It’s about WHY NOT. Why is so much of our science dangerous? Why not marry safe science if you love it so much. In fact, why not invent a special safety door that won’t hit you on the butt on the way out, because you are fired.
We out here building torment nexes faster than the SciFi writers can keep up.
I thought that wasn’t supposed to be an instruction manual
Nah, that’s the Torment Nexus. AM is free game.
I have no mouth and I must scream, 4k remake
This is how I feel on Sundays.
Me most mornings.
Ah yes, the Torment Nexus.
Looks like the Horrors in the Dark will be existential tonight folks!
I too look forward to horrors beyond human comprehensions!
Unless you go for Cartesian dualist theories about immaterial souls, consciousness of the sort we experience is an artefact of the structure of our brains and nervous systems, which are large in scale and complex. A small blob of human-derived brain tissue is not going to have consciousness, let alone self-awareness and a sense of horror at its predicament, any more than a 555 timer is capable of playing DOOM by virtue of being made of silicon.
Haha my first thought was “I wonder if it’s possible to build a general purpose CPU out of 555 timers, then get DOOM running on that sucker.”
Of course, someone has already taken the first steps towards such a monstrosity.
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/17/implementing-a-cpu-using-555-timers-and-logic-synthesis/
People build CPUs out of logic gates in Minecraft and Factorio.
Imagine the PCBA company’s response
I don’t think we can say that about consciousness for sure, but I agree with your broader point that it doesn’t have self-awareness or a sense of horror at its predicament.
This could actually host a very interesting rudimentary form of consciousness that is theorized by some theories of consciousness, especially idealist models like panpsychism or analytic idealism (though I do admit that analytic idealism would phrase it in terms of having a mental state instead of being conscious).
There’s also the question of why would it experience horror? It’s not exactly in pain, and they way they make the eyes grow is just to add the hormone signal that makes eyes grow when developing.
So from its perspective, it just got told to make eyes, so it has rudimentary eyes now. Hardly the most horrifying existence.
If you follow an integrated information theory derivation, consciousness is emergent from integrating and partitioning information, and with no immaterial soul the possible capability of awareness remains, even if not directly comparable to our own.
Give that brain some morphine as a treat to be on the safe side, most brains find that one relaxing.
Morphine is fine, but please do not put the brain into a robotic spider suit and especially do not add a machine gun to said robotic spider suit.
Best take here. When not otherwise engaged by an experiment, show that lil glob the best time it’s capable of experiencing
I get what you’re saying, but DOOM can run on anything.
So…step 2 is figuring out how many cells are needed to run DOOM on wetware?
Some people are already working on that: https://youtu.be/bEXefdbQDjw
At what point do brain cells develop the complexity for consciousness? Is there a specific number of brain cells which produces self-awareness?
I have a difficult time believing that consciousness is some artifact that arises from material “complexity and structure”, and tend towards the nondual view of reality.
But that is just my opinion, and what makes consciousness such a fascinating subject imo.
If you were to think of each of us as a bank of servers, that would be the equivalence of a nightlight with a light sensor
Researchers note that it was immediately given a Disney+Hulu trial subscription.
