This is how I feel on Sundays.
Me most mornings.
I have no mouth and I must scream, 4k remake
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
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”.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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 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.
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
More qualified for the White House than anyone working there today.
Hey now, don’t be rude. There are still some really good groundskeepers working there.
They’ve all been deported. That’s a “Black Job” now.
… Are you suggesting black people would be worse groundskeepers?
Tech venture capitalists for some reason:
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
The next thing they form is a rudimentary finger for doom scrolling.
A horror movie where you suddenly gain consciousness just to realize you’re a light-sensitive brain blob.
It’s an honest job.
Am scientist.
Dear science, please stop. Just…
Don’t.Why? It’s better than mice in every way.
This can’t possibly go wrong.
If we’re lucky, in billions of years this one will decide NOT to create “AI”.
It’s pretty difficult for it to go wrong in a way that isn’t just nothing happening.
The eyes don’t just grow randomly, you need to give the brain blob a chemical signal that grows eyes in-utero to make the eyes grow.
Researchers note that it was immediately given a Disney+Hulu trial subscription.
I’m really curious, has anyone here not seen this image before? Not playing internet gatekeeper, I’m curious about Lemmy demographics. This image was everywhere like 5-7 years ago.
Maybe you overestimate the popularity of the places you frequented? Or maybe people’s memory simply isn’t that good
It’s not about raw numbers, more like subgroups, if that makes sense?
Lemmy is a niche place, yes? Skews techie, nerdie, someone very internet heavy. At least that often seems to be an assumption I see about the place. But I don’t think it’s true, so I would just like to test that assumption, this is just an observation in that test.
I think Lemmy’s audience is actually fairly diverse, I also think it skews very young comparatively, for the latter in particular I think this is a good test.
It’s also of course possible that the techie, nerdy internet heavy crowd subgroup is big enough that even isolated to that sample, the chance of encountering someone who has seen the image before is actually that small, but nonetheless it’s a worthwhile observation.
I think Lemmy’s audience is actually fairly diverse
That’s interesting to see your perception of it being fairly diverse. My perception is quite the opposite. It feels like there’s only a very specific demographic in here, and sometimes I even feel like leaving,due to being out from that group
How would you define the demographic and yourself? I guess I am far away from that demographic too, but still like it. Having spent ages on Reddit and left when the api crap happened.
It feels like people are mostly from usa, a few from europe and a minority from other places. Most users give the impression of being economically above the average. Being tech-savvy doesn’t even need to be mentioned >.< but people tend to be a bit elitist about it. In fact, elitist it a word that describes much of what I observe around. It’s tricky to talk about it, because no one likes to be pointed on such things, but it’s something clearly observable from anyone from outside, like me
I’ve not seen it before. But then… I don’t keep up with either science or memes. So it has to break containment or just be a lucky moment when I’m chuckle-scrolling at the right time and place.
Thank you for replying! That’s cool to know.
Obligatory XKCD lucky 10000 link…
Actually no. My account is 2 years 7 months and before I have been on reddit for ages. But I cannot remember ever having seen this.
Hurry up, make ads for that thing.
