there is a special place in hell for these scientists
1d 1h ago by lemmy.blahaj.zone/u/not_IO in lemmyshitpost from lemmy.blahaj.zone
Taking "will it run doom" one step too far.
We need to take it back a step and see if it'll run Linux.
Asking someone to compile the kernel with their mind sure is one way to give someone a headache
I wanna see Linus' reaction to that pull request.
I can imagine a new AI hellscape where LLMs are run on human brain cells in a test tube. So you're never quite sure if you're talking to a mere algorithm ... or an enslaved proto-human who might be conscious and whose entire existence revolves around answering your inane online queries.
oooo nice another method I hadn't considered of It Getting Worse!
Worst fucking sitcom ever
A closer example would be if it could use the console in linux since it's only playing dom not running it, I wonder if wetware would be any better as a coding assistant than ai
playing dom
I do not think we should train a bioengineered intelligence with guns to do that.
Don't kink shame
Hey human doms I'm 100% okay with, it's these things I'm worried about
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/doom/images/2/27/Meet_spider.png/revision/latest
Is anyone else really skeeved out by the term "wetware", or is that just me
Shadowrun used the term "bioware" instead, do you like that better?
Nah I prefer wetware. This should heebie your jeebies
Yeah now it's "will it speedrun DOOM?"
Can they run console commands?
It’s having more fun than I am.
Maybe the real hell is the life we've lived along the way.
Maybe this experience is just a higher being's analog of Doom and we're just cells in a petri dish running an MMORPG version it. Stupidest simulation theory ever, but hey man, we're sorta doing it so how stupid can it be?
This is the bad place!
Having worked with human neurons harvested from dead people, there are worse ways to extend your life. At least these ones get to play games instead of getting poked and zapped by me.
Could you poke and zap me?
Poke, yes. Zap is too weak to do much in live people but if I break out the old electrolytic brain lesion maker you'll feel it.
OwO
You know this isn't even the weirdest flirting I've seen online today. It's a notable thread, but not too bad.
Enjoy the shocks
What can I say, they saw a spark and went for it. May the odds forever be in their favor lol
Can I gulp down your arm to see what happens? Fairly sure I can fit it.
This happened in American Dad!
IIRC, there were consequences.
I have neurons, can you zap me?
*Unplugs spark plug wire with kinky intent*
I mean, I was thinking more like TENS ...
Sure you were, you fucking freak.
Very interested in what you’re doing to these dead meatballs.
This is my favorite comment thread I have experienced on Lemmy so far.
... Am I missing something, or is this not like, the practical, if not lore accurate first step toward actually creating a:
Next step, give it spider legs and a gattling gun!
I mean, Boston Dynamics figured out how to build essentially robot mules and cats like a decade ago, and they're actually currently building and improving on humanoid designs.
They got basically acquired by/folded into Hyundai, you know, an actual manufacturing company, unlike Elon's ongoing fradulent shitshows.
the only missing components are a minigun, robotic spyder legs and positive reinforcement coctail whenever it kills a person.
“We decided to leave those out of our first test, staring down the barrels of a minigun during neural training were putting our scientists off”
Why did hell have its own R&D department doing high tech cybernetics anyway?
What other advance industry does hell have. It’s obviously a highly capitalistic place, so I imagine banking/finance?
I mean, pick all your deadly sins, right?
Brothels, Restaurants, Blood Sports...
I'm not sure if it's the same scientists, but the YouTube channel The Thought Emporium has an ongoing series about growing neurons to play retro games (such as OG DOOM).
The playlist of this series is fittingly called Building the Torment Nexus.
It looks like their setup, but I don't see any recent videos. Jan 15th was their last one. I think they have a patreon with bonus clips and advance stuff.
Might be from that.
perhaps they did the experiment and are now working on a video about it
So no seems this is a different group, doing this more professionally and marketing themselves as an ai cloud startup.
Of course it has to be an AI startup...
The TE guys were from Canada, iirc?
Raises uncomfortable questions about consciousness. The only difference between these neurons and your own are the number of them and the structures they form. Of course it doesn't know what it's doing, but... Neither do our own neurons
Science and Ethics — the age old enmity between "I wanna know" and "I'm not allowed to find out"
Science and Ethics — the age old enmity between "I wanna know" and
"I'm not allowed to find out""Am I able to find out without doing something monstrously inhumane"
FTFY
I guess my point is that sometimes even if it's illegal you can get away with it if done correctly, with ruling party aligned stated goals....or you have access to a shit tonne of money and powerful friends.
I simplified for comedic effect. You're absolutely right that the "compromise" would be finding some humane and ethical solution, but "The most effective and direct way of finding out is cruel and callous" isn't quite as snappy.
I guess my point is that sometimes even if it's illegal you can get away with it if done correctly, with ruling party aligned stated goals....or you have access to a shit tonne of money and powerful friends.
That kinda dodges the conflict by not engaging with ethical concerns at all. I feel like calling it a solution would be morbid, but it does make the problem stop being a problem...
That kinda dodges the conflict by not engaging with ethical concerns at all.
I guess I...kinda lost the plot a bit when I wrote the second part, eh?
There's ethics...and then there's what the government in the country a scientist operates in views as "morally and ethically acceptable".
Stem cell research was banned in most places for a long time. The US is banning CRISPR, if I remember right, the OG Nazis, Soviets and Empire of Japan (and honestly basically everyone else too, just those are the three that were highlighted when I was in school) rubber-stamped and funded research that should warrant execution by vivisection...die by your own methods and all that.
You're right it's not really a solution. However the realities of modern society means that there's room within what is morally and ethically acceptable in any country to operate in both a humane and inhumane fashion. And if it doesn't then money and connections to those in power allow further leeway to be an example of humanity at it's best....or a monster in a human suit....
I guess I...kinda lost the plot a bit when I wrote the second part, eh?
I think I got where you were going, I was just saying that someone trying to find a way around the legal restrictions indicates they're not actually concerned about ethics, just about not getting in trouble for it. In that context, the problem "How do I do this in an ethically acceptable manner?" is "solved" with the answer "I don't care".
Generally, laws are the standard solution to ambiguities. Ethics are a murky and often subjective topic, so it makes sense to form some sort of common agreement on what is okay and what isn't. And where there are laws, there are gonna be cunts proving exactly why we had to write it down in the first place...
Do those neurons interact with hormones like mine do?
I mean it's the same question we've been asking all our lives about the animals, fetuses and now AI. When does it stop being a flowchart and start being a consciousness.
Nueralink did pretty much the same thing to monkeys that are actually conscious. So it this different only because those are human neurons? Is human consciousness different than animal consciousness?
i dont think op made a mutually exclusive statement?...
I'm not sure this is quite analagous to neuralink's monkey experiments. That said,
So is this different only because those are human neurons?
To my mind, a neuron is a neuron. The only difference between your brain and a monkey brain is, again, the number of neurons and the structures they form. I don't see this as any different from monkey or rat or ant or entirely digital neurons.
I’m not sure this is quite analagous to neuralink’s monkey experiments.
Why not? It's a chip reading inputs from neurons. This meme doesn't make it clear if the chip was also stimulation neurons but Neuralink has plans for neural stimulation and it's possible this was also tested on monkeys. So what's the difference?
You seem to be arguing against a point that no one has made.
You seem not to understand what is being discussed here.
Correct. That was basically my point -- I don't think anything is being discussed, people are talking past each other.
Sounds like those are uncomfortable questions being raised...
Yes. Because it's us. Anything not us is always going to be less valuable. You'd kill 100 lions if it means saving 1 human.
Lions are not conscious. And I'm not asking about value. Of course we value human consciousness more than monkey consciousness. We don't grant monkeys any rights. Hell, we assign more value to unconscious (brain dead) humans than to conscious monkeys. But how exactly is human consciousness different?
What leads you to assume that lions lack consciousness exactly?
Shit, turns out lions are conscious! They are just stupid. Stephen Hawking said it in 2012. I honestly didn't know that.
That was just to try and make the equipment work at all, it wasn't about doing anything with software. It's the opposite where you're only worried about the physical damage and infection.
I was focusing more on the "hooking up conscious brain to computer" part than about the damage and infection part.
Thought experiment: let's say we have a dead brain patient. You have verified that there is no neural activity in the brain beyond cerebellum. There's no consciousness in the brain. Legally it's still considered a person. You can't for example shoot them.
We also have a 5kg blob of lab grown human brain tissue. We have verified there is neural activity in the entire blob but we don't know what it's doing and we can't communicate with it.
Which one is more conscious? Which one should be considered more human and should have more rights?
Hooking up to a computer is just installing a software keyboard in your brain, that doesnt really mean or do anything. It's what software you load after that's relevant.
And now bring artificial neural networks, i.e., AI, into the picture to make it even more spicy.
Finally, I knew when I saved this to my phone there would be a perfect moment. (Humanity is too predictable)
Attribution: https://lemmy.world/post/43077529
OK but hear me out here, I think I have the beginnings of a business plan:
-
Create the Torment Nexus
-
?
-
Profit
Some components of the plan are still under development, but let's not lose momentum. We can advance with the initial phase while brainstorming to refine the plan in real time as we progress. It's an exciting opportunity and we mustn't forfeit our first-to-market advantage.
Scientists: "No, this isn't The Torment Nexus, this is 'The Nexus of Torment'! It's totally different!"
In other news, Torment (with the patches) was a really good game
Wait is it a real cover? Was it made before or after squid game? It uses the same font
I have no mouth and I must Doom.
Honestly? Sounds preferable to being stuck in the universe of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream..... I'll take a challenging power fantasy with some massively overpowered weapons over millennia of endless physical and psychological torture by an insane AI..... might just be me though...
I have no MOUSE and I must DOOM
The original DOOM is entirely playable on a keyboard, though. It's essentially a 2D game, as you can't look up or jump.
I just remembered, back in the day in russia we used to call keyboard players "tractor driver"
Computer Scientists: We can make Doom run on any device!
Bioscientists: Watch this!
Cosmologists: *cracks knuckles* Check this shit out.
*hell-spawned brain cell noises
We are old gods who punish life for fun.
Cortical Labs are the ones who pulled this off. They already have biological computers running on 800,000 lab-grown neurons available for ~$35,000 (just going on what a quick Google search told me) and are planning to open up a cloud computing service with its own API soon.
This makes me feel uneasy. Imagine if reincarnation were a thing and you get brought back into this world, and your purpose is to learn how to play DOOM.
Personally my worry really isn't reincarnation, there's no reason to believe that that's true. But if these are fundamentally the same neurons that make up our brains, then how much do you need to put together before they acquire some form of "sentience"? Does a clump of 800,000 human neurons experience pain, sadness, a sense of self? Where is the line between an emotionless biocomputer and torturing a living organism for its entire lifespan?
Despite the fact that I really hate "AI", that question was of course already sort of relevant for the latest AI models, even though we can generally conclude that they're not there yet at all. But real neurons are different, we know what they're capable of. How many do you need before a clump of neurons has rights?
Large language models are not intelligent. They are predictive text applications with massive dictionaries of circumstantial sentence structures to choose from. Nothing more. They do not feel and do not think for themselves. The only time they do anything is when the API calls them to produce more text with an updated context string.
It has to be a full fetus with a heartbeat to have rights. /s In all seriousness, the human brain is estimated to have 86 billion neurons.
Sure, but is the full human brain the minimum set necessary?
Sentience/sapience is probably an emergent property of a set of neurons needing to coordinate, plan, predict the future and oneself in relation to it.
I suspect that AI is capable of sentience with sufficient complexity and training, but it's not there yet. I also suspect we'll be well past the point where it is there before we realize it is, but not until we make some kind of fundamental change in how we do it - we know human level intelligence is possible in the volume and power consumption of, well, a brain so we're orders of magnitude off of efficiency limits.
It's estimated that mice have 70 million to 100 million neurons in their brains. They are capable of feeling pain and have social hierarchy. They also experience emotions like fear, pleasure, and anxiety. (We use them in pharmacology models of many mental illnesses.)
Have you ever heard the phrase, "the neurons that fire together, wire together" ? Our neurons are in a constant feedback loop with the environment we experience. Our experiences shape how our neurons make interconnected networks, which then impacts how we behave upon the environment.
If those neurons connected to the computer chip only ever experience playing the game "DOOM," how would they know about anything else? How could they know about pain without having limbs to innervate and experience the pain with? How could they have a social hierarchy without others to interact with? We may as well be god to those neurons on the PC chip, because we are controlling the entire world they have access to.
What I find sad is that our society is ok with hooking living cells up to a computer to make smarter computers, but has a problem with ethically harvesting stem cells to be used to treat diseases.
"Do lab grown neurons have a soul?"
I would say consciousness is required for that, so no.
People used to say animals were not concious.
Recent science suggest that some animals have what humans would consider to be language. This is a slippery slipe.
People used to say animals were not concious.
A lot of religious people still say that.
Ok, so maybe 200K brain cells would be sufficient to run for public office, but you can't really call that a complete brain, containing approximately 100 billion cells.
Public office might still be borderline, but we have a living proof that POTUS is within reach.
"hey you, glad you're awake....."
DO NOT give Todd any more ideas....please.
So, uh... is it any good at it?
IIRC, it doesn't actually pay the game itself. We prod the cells, they fire in a certain way and that response is read to convert it to an output for the game. The cells aren't a rudimentary Doom bot, they're the controller.
So no, then.
we grew a human brain
200'000 brian "brain cells" (so about 1/3 of it neurons) is the equivalent to a really simple microcontroller.
Edit: left the typo for funny
Yah but the visuals of "growing a human brain and trapping it in hell" gets a lot more clicks than "We made a very basic microcontroller out of organic chemistry to interact with an old video game poorly."
So they are growing doom guy.
Baby steps towards growing a Wolfenstein guy, we'll get there. Maybe around the time they put Trump in a life support mech.
It'll be good telly, I bet.
Ah I see, so we're adding the matrix to our dystopian horror show reality then.
So we’re just going full head of steam into a combo of the torment nexus and AM
Torment Nexus but with a win condition
What win condition? Once the brain defeats the last boss, it starts on all the WADs. You have any idea how many of these were created?
Is this how the Borg began? Suddenly makes more sense with the outfits.
I suppose anyone here who believes in reincarnation is slightly worried now.
I think they should have already been worried, basically every animals endures immense suffering in its life. Also you don't need to believe in literal reincarnation to believe in this, you just need empathy
That's fucked up though. What happened to bioethics and review boards?
We don't understand enough about human consciousness to say that those cells aren't sentient. We have no idea what sort of experience, if any, they're perceiving.
This is not okay...
thats not nearly enough cells to have an internal experience, they're fine.
We don't know enough about human consciousness to know that for sure. Plenty of animals have fewer braincells than humans, but we don't know enough about their consciousness to say whether they have an internal experience.
That's what I mean. It's hubris to assume we can culture human braincells in a petri dish just because there's a lack of evidence one way or the other whether it's aware.
There's a lack of evidence for anything not being conscious.
Neurons work by generating electrical signals in response to stimulus (either electrical inputs from other neurons or physical/sensory inputs activated by light or touch etc.) and they do this in a physical way.
If they're conscious, then there's a pretty good chance that power plants are conscious, computers are conscious and pretty much everything else in the world is conscious.
I'm not sure there's any requirement for consciousness to include "human-like reasoning" or "understanding" for it to have some kind of experience and perspective or awareness. Humans make a lot of assumptions about the world to make it fit the patterns we're used to.
A cluster of neurons trained to play doom might have consciousness but it's not likely to think like a human, just like a rock or a plant or an ant or an iPhone might have consciousness.
Whether it's ethical to squash an ant or turn off an iPhone or stimulate a lab-grown neuron depends on your ethical framework and your philosophical worldview.
I think there's a lower limit of complexity for sentience, based on memory-persistence, self-firing, and self-recognition. I think there's no need for moral concern for non-sentient things. (But, that's just my ethical framework and philosophical worldview; the only "evidence" I'm at all aware of is thin and vague.)
But, as far as having a subjective experience, I think that might go quite small and alien including fungi and plant or even certain sub-cellular structures. Probably anything that maintains a border and internal homeostasis including parts of the bodies of larger experiencers could be having an internal perspective -- and any human words applied so those experiences would tell you more about human bias than the experience.
In my view, although I am neither a neurologist nor a philosopher, things should absolutely scale with neuron blob complexity, and it should do so in a non-linear way. I dislike harming an animal with a complex brain like mammals, cephalopods etc. much more than I dislike harming the equivalent nerve mass in insects, for instance.
That's also the way I feel, but I think that's probably human bias and closely related to the evolutionary pressure behind my mirror neurons and how strongly they trigger correlates with outside sentient phenotype.
I think if I knew what it felt like (if anything) to be an ant colony, I might have different views around the causal use of boric acid (and related) to keep them out of human spaces.
We should teach ants to play Doom.
Nononono we don't want World War Ants
There's a lack of evidence for anything not being conscious.
So should we just assume that nothing is conscious? After all, I can't prove that you're conscious, nor you I. So should we relegate ourselves to an amoral solipsism?
Neurons work by generating electrical signals in response to stimulus and they do this in a physical way.
I know how neurons work. Nobody knows why they produce consciousness or what particular mechanism is responsible for human awareness.
I'm not sure there's any requirement for consciousness to include "human-like reasoning" or "understanding" for it to have some kind of experience and perspective or awareness.
That's... irrelevant. I never said they have "human-like reasoning" or "understanding." I said we don't understand enough, meaning humanity writ large, including the experts. There are too many unknowns about the nature of consciousness.
A cluster of neurons trained to play doom might have consciousness but it's not likely to think like a human
Again, it doesn't need to think like a human in order to be capable of experiencing suffering. Babies don't "think like humans," or at least we don't have any solid evidence that they do, but they're certainly capable of suffering.
Your mentality is the same one people have used for generations to justify circumcising infants without anaesthetics. How far are you willing to extend it? Do pets "think like humans"? Do uncontacted tribes "think like humans," in whatever vague way you define it in order to justify cultivating human braincells in a petri dish?
Do you not see how problematic this is? What if the technology grows and in a decade they're studying a clump of 2 billion neurons in a vat? Will it suddenly become human enough to deserve your consideration? What about when it becomes 20 billion?
Whether it's ethical to squash an ant or turn off an iPhone or stimulate a lab-grown neuron depends on your ethical framework and your philosophical worldview.
Whether it's ethical to murder an entire village of your enemies "depends on your ethical framework and philosophical worldview." See what a slippery slope moral relativism is? Amoral people exist, moral cynicism exists, nihilism exists, solipsism exists, hell even social darwinism exists.
Any of those frameworks and worldviews can be used to justify atrocities in the minds of those who hold them. And yes, an unethical or even anti-ethical persuasion is still an "ethical framework," in the strictest sense of the term.
Just because something can be seated in philosophical jargon doesn't mean we should grant it license to do whatever it wants.
I'd say they're experiencing being doom guy but that's just a guess
I'm no scientist but I'm pretty sure we know enough to say there's no consciousness at this level. Consciousness as we know it is pretty fragile.
There may be a point if this is scaled up that could be a concern....
We do not, in fact, know enough to say there's no consciousness at that level.
Anyone who tells you that is being intellectually dishonest.
this is fucked up beyond limits. i hope those that did it die a full of suffering death.
Sounds like something from a horror manga.
I'm seeing the chimera from FMAB saying "Edu...wardo... koroshite...kure... onegai..."
The goal is to grow brains in lab and prevent robot cops to tear off their own faces
The end goal is probably a vat that billionaires can hook their brains into at the end of their lives so they never die.
That probably has something to do with their push for virtual reality and the 'metaverse' (fuck zuck for appropriating the greek language for his pet project; I used to use that word to describe a sort of hypothetical hyperdimensional multiverse where "spirits" inhabit 4D/5D topologies).
Oh and why they're training AI agents in "environments" now (basically, 3D-scanned renderings of real life spaces).
If they can put all the pieces together before they die, then they can hook their brains into these computers and control a little avatar so they never have to die and can continue making our lives hell (at least as long as they maintain ownership of private capital, or until we seize the means of production and redistribute the wealth).
It would not know what hell is, just that humanoids are enemies.
And tomatos
Right in the cacussy.
"Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should"
Micheal on his fictional book about sex changing lizards in an unconventional zoo.
Didn't the thought emporium work on this?
Yeah they are working on this for sure. The video series is available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZLsjPxmF1BE1BAAeJgF2A17pKxeIBGm8
They are, the small difference is, that they are trying to do it with rat neurons if I remember correctly.
Maybe this will lead to San junipero for real
or at least Striking Vipers...
Training brain-chip to Rip&Tear, I'm sure this can never go wrong.
Iirc the study found that the neurons played "slightly better than buttons being pressed at random" or something like that, so it's hardly pro gamer brain chip.
Am I the only one who wonders why, in a world where there are already concerns about machines rebellion, when we train rats, robots and a bench of neurons to play a game, it HAS to be Doom, we can't think about another, non-violent, or let's be bold: non-destructive game??
They trained a tiny patch of neurons to respond to low-voltage electric impulses. The cells don't know they're playing Doom. They don't have any kind of social context or even video feedback.
Imagine if I stuck you in a sensory deprivation chamber, handed you an NES controller, and asked you to hit the buttons. Then, periodically, I said "Yes" or "No" based on the buttons you pressed. And when I pulled you out of the tube at the end of an hour, I told you "the yes and no messages were intended to encourage you to correctly navigate Mario through the first level of the original game." What if, instead of Mario, I'd been telling you how to play Street Fighter?
It doesn't matter if its Doom. They likely picked Doom because the I/O is so rudimentary that you can install the game on practically anything. The cellular matter has no idea what it's doing beyond the "Yes/No" signaling.
I know there is no real association between the game and real life. It's more a question on the mindset of the researchers. I'm sure there are other games that would fit their needs.
you can do the exact same thing with a cockroach. Organoids are not brains.
It’s not that deep, it’s a meme.
A 'digital rendition of Hell'... you even Doom bro?
Wasn't the original Doom a digital representation of Mars and its moons: Phobos and Deimos?
...for the original doom, the overarching narrative was that deimos disappeared after teleportation research inadvertently opened a portal to hell: episode 1 (knee-deep in the dead) was set on phobos; episode 2 (on the shores of hell) was set on deimos hovering in the skies of hell; and episode 3 (inferno) was set down on the surface of hell itself, not mars...
...episode 4 (thy flesh consumed) was set back on earth following the invasion of hell, but it was an add-on released a couple years after the original game; counterintuitively, back then the original game was downloadable shareware for episode 1 with episodes 2-3 available via mail-order directly from id, and episode 4 was finally distributed as a retail expansion only after the retail release of doom II (kind of an inter-quel?)...
Shareware Doom
Aka why most people thought Doom 1 was so short. Myself included.
...in `94, i mailed a handwritten check to id software and received a slim box of 3.5" diskettes a couple weeks later; the world was a different place...
Yes, but with a dimensional portal to Hell opened on them. Or where do you suppose the demons come from.
But you're the demons, John.
And then John was a zombie
Yes, but IIRC they just happened to be the location of the hell portal that humans disturbed, and hell started leaking out. The depiction of Phobos and Deimos as hell-like was after the leakage. The third part of original Doom was back on Earth when the leakage had spread there, and it looked exactly like the hell of the Mars moons.
I wouldn't bet money on that being exact, but that's how I remember it.
Only the first "episode" of levels. The rest of them are literally in Hell. If you only had the shareware version, you never got to see Hell.
something something torment nexus something something
How Republican brains are made...
Nah, you just take a normal brain and give it CTE or make it have a stroke.
Or indoctrinate it with the gospels of Supply Side Jesus.
If I imagine I am playing Doom accurately enough, does it count?
It used bullet spray to spell out "kill me". But the scientists missed it because there wasn't enough video memory to keep the writing on the wall. IYKYK
Is this the first step towards creating a simulation?
If you go by the AniMatrix canon, yes, basically.
The Machines win the war against the humans, and keep tens to hundreds of millions of them alive, and basically build an entire economy based around doing Mengele level expiriments on them, for... decades? centuries? ... to derive all possibly derivable information about our biology...
And then they take what they've learned, and bio-engineer us into livestock.
The canon explanation from the movies is that humans are somehow used as a heat source... but... you can have an alternate explanation, that I do not think actually conflicts with at least any of the first 3 movies.
Morpheus is wrong about the battery thing.
Zion doesn't understand what is actually happening.
(Its fairly well established, in that same scene and those near it in the first movie... Zion and Morpheus admit there is a whole lot they don't know.)
(They don't even know what year it actually is, and the 2nd and 3rd movies introduce ideas that strongly suggest their current best guess is very far off.)
What is actually happening could be that, like how a crypto miner hijacks your pc...
... the humans in the Matrix fundamentally constitute a massive network of processing power for the Machines.
The simulation of the Matrix is the illusion generated to keep the humans alive for as long as possible.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the humans... the actual important thing is that the Machines are using the other parts of the human brain, the parts not directly involved in experiencing the simulation... to 'run conpute' for ... all of the rest of the workings of their apparently planet covering ecumenopolis/mega-city and society....
... Similar to how we currently house scores and scores of GPUs, in warehouses, to mostly generate text and visual hallucinations for humans, but also do things like map out social networks, pinpoint the most psychologically effective marketing techniques, evaluate military kill chains, fold proteins, etc etc.
Just reversed.
Now, we are the processing units, doing work for the Machines.
IIRC, the battery notion was put into the movies because they didn't think the general public at the time would understand "processing power", so you're not far off.
Still, those movies are pretty pedestrian in their ideas. I came to the "brain in a jar" concept on my own when I was twelve, so I can't help but think the writers and the superfans are all pre-adolescents.
Can you be sure you're not already living in such a simulation?
Not 100% sure, but if we're able to create a sufficiently realistic one, then I can be 100% sure.
Next step: putting the cells into one of those Boston Dynamics robot dogs with a gun attached. What could go wrong?
Next step, Skyrim
Good call. I haven't seen anyone play doom in skyrim yet.
"I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took a BFG 9000 to the knee."
Does anyone have a link to the original scientific paper?
I don't think they've actually published this one? They have a bunch of related publications and they released the code on GitHub though.
Code here: https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron
Science here: https://corticallabs.com/research
can't wait for Netflix documentary miniseries!
Is it ThoughtEmporium or are other people doing it too?
Yah, anyone can buy the materials to do the same thing, this isn't arcane mad science, it's just using organic chemistry to make simple processors. We're as far from "growing a conscious brain in a jar" as we are from traveling to Alpha Centauri.
Heckin gamer.
How to tell when scientific research doesn't have to worry about oversight.
Funny just finished listening to John Romero audiobook DoomGuy wonder what he think of this?
Special place in hell
Playing DOOM
I see what you did there. Top marks, no notes
The filthy rich are already cloning organs for longevity so this seems like child's play. /s
fuck them. these scientists should be excuted for captial treason.
They just made a basic microcontroller out of organic chemistry, relax and learn even basic science before you get murderously bent out of shape by the next sensationalist clickbait headline.