Sigh.
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But I'm REALLY HAPPY right now because this kinda-sorta validates the key premise of the SF novel I just handed in last month (which involves serial reincarnation via destructive brain-slicing-and-imaging then imprinting onto an immature cortex, and then explores its disastrous societal failure modes).
... And it also hints that artificial consciousness might, eventually, be possible, if only via the hard path of doing it the same way we do it, only in simulation in silico.
/6 (ends)
@cstross my primary concern about uploaded consciousness, that is, why I consider it impossible as we understand it, is that our consciousness is VERY influenced by a cocktail of hormones released in response to environmental and social factors. If we uploaded our brains to a system that isn't feeding us those, what we'd have wouldn't be *us* in the same sense. Like yeah it would be great to not experience social anxiety anymore, but how do you replace a dopamine hit?
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@pwassonchat@eldritch.cafe @cstross@wandering.shop @mwl@io.mwl.io
I'm not surprised by this at all
after getting asked to "please do the needful" by some indian clients at an old job on a bunch of emails I had to figure the origin of the phrase
Turns out it is a remament of old UK English that fell out of use elsewhere but still survives in Indian-English, as opposed to any sort of English as a second language grammatical "error", there were a bunch of other examples as well@rachel @cstross @mwl @pwassonchat I actually wouldn't think that phrase especially odd (Uk boomer)
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@breathOfLife @petealexharris @cstross Plus, some genes can overlap, so you can get a lot more instructional data in the same length of base-4 values than it seems.
I don't think that helps, since where the genes have overlap, the bit that overlaps is the same for both genes, and so can't encode *more information*. It just cuts out some repetition.
Plus a gene is a protein that folds up to do a thing. The digits encode the shape, not a program for the protein to act on, so its action has less defining info.
How much info is a network of 127k neurons and their connections? I don't know. It feels, combinatorially, like a LOT.
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I don't think that helps, since where the genes have overlap, the bit that overlaps is the same for both genes, and so can't encode *more information*. It just cuts out some repetition.
Plus a gene is a protein that folds up to do a thing. The digits encode the shape, not a program for the protein to act on, so its action has less defining info.
How much info is a network of 127k neurons and their connections? I don't know. It feels, combinatorially, like a LOT.
@drwho @breathOfLife @cstross
It's a genuine and amazing mystery. Obviously it works. How it works will be pretty eye-opening when we find out. -
@cstross Kick a neuron out of place in the "Brain Scanning Transfer" and your Elon Musk digital clone becomes somebody else. Which, I mean, it could get you a worse person, but not a lot worse.
@Illuminatus @cstross I enjoy the thought of Dilbert Stark submitting to brain uploading only to find that due to lack of chemical modelling, he can no longer get high.
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@Illuminatus @cstross I enjoy the thought of Dilbert Stark submitting to brain uploading only to find that due to lack of chemical modelling, he can no longer get high.
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I don't think that helps, since where the genes have overlap, the bit that overlaps is the same for both genes, and so can't encode *more information*. It just cuts out some repetition.
Plus a gene is a protein that folds up to do a thing. The digits encode the shape, not a program for the protein to act on, so its action has less defining info.
How much info is a network of 127k neurons and their connections? I don't know. It feels, combinatorially, like a LOT.
@petealexharris @breathOfLife @cstross From a data compression perspective, I think it does. Re-using bits in the data dictionary to encode more means more data is represented.
A gene represents a protein, it is not a protein itself. That brings in some incorrect assumptions.
I really don't know. My intuition says "a fuckload." It would depends on what is captured and how it's represented.
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@drwho @breathOfLife @cstross
It's a genuine and amazing mystery. Obviously it works. How it works will be pretty eye-opening when we find out.@petealexharris @breathOfLife @cstross Indeed. It's amazing, no matter how you look at it.
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... The next step on from Drosophila, the mouse brain, is 560 times larger—never mind a vastly more complex human brain. And to get the murine connectome we'll have to chop up *a lot* of brains: a human upload won't pass any kind of medical ethics review at this point!
But near-term, it's expected to yield "fundamentally new architectural principles for AI systems that are more sample-efficient, more robust, and more capable of behavioral generalization than current approaches"
/5
@cstross
I expect TESCREAL types to dismiss the ethical concerns. If we can improve the lives of trillions of hypothetical future humans, it would justify murdering and dissecting millions of actual contemporary humans. -
... The next step on from Drosophila, the mouse brain, is 560 times larger—never mind a vastly more complex human brain. And to get the murine connectome we'll have to chop up *a lot* of brains: a human upload won't pass any kind of medical ethics review at this point!
But near-term, it's expected to yield "fundamentally new architectural principles for AI systems that are more sample-efficient, more robust, and more capable of behavioral generalization than current approaches"
/5
@cstross
I’ve been wondering about whether they will bother. Drey Dossier has a series that talks about human experimentation possibly already happening with Neuralink., using ICE detainees.
https://thedreydossier.substack.com/p/who-tf-is-in-my-head-part-1-the-neural -
Sigh.
So it turns out we've mapped the neural connectome of Drosophila *and simulated it in silico*.
Pop-sci explainer here:
Key quote: "The step from a complete connectome to a working computational brain model is not trivial." And there's an even more important finding in this screenshot (alt text via OCR):
"The wiring is the computation".
/1
@cstross why the sigh?
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@cstross why the sigh?
@elduvelle Because back in 1997 I started writing a story that ended up as the opening of "Accelerando" which began by exploring *exactly* this sort of process and asking questions about what it would lead to.
I've been waiting for reality to catch up with my imagination for a third of a century, and I'm not happy.
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@solitha @cstross I don't expect ethical guidelines to do very much, I suppose. Not ultimately, anyway. You can only prevent so much suffering by curing illness - after all, we all die eventually. I reckon we could prevent more suffering by having a humane and warm attitude to each other and to other creatures. I do accept that research in general has given us many good things. But.. well I think there's a limit to the benefits of certain paths of research, simply due to how we operate as humans
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@solitha @cstross I don't expect ethical guidelines to do very much, I suppose. Not ultimately, anyway. You can only prevent so much suffering by curing illness - after all, we all die eventually. I reckon we could prevent more suffering by having a humane and warm attitude to each other and to other creatures. I do accept that research in general has given us many good things. But.. well I think there's a limit to the benefits of certain paths of research, simply due to how we operate as humans
@solitha @cstross Like, I don't think that being able to work out how certain things work is necessarily good for *us humans* to understand, because I think we're not good at foreseeing complex consequences and have a strong tendency towards using powerful technology against ourselves. At least as our society is.
I know there are benefits of research in general, I'll not deny that!
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@solitha @cstross Like, I don't think that being able to work out how certain things work is necessarily good for *us humans* to understand, because I think we're not good at foreseeing complex consequences and have a strong tendency towards using powerful technology against ourselves. At least as our society is.
I know there are benefits of research in general, I'll not deny that!
@solitha @cstross But I'm reminded of a frankly disturbing project that used a cockroach like a robot by cutting off and replacing its antennae. Sometimes science is bad and leads to us doing bad things.
I dunno. Its probably genuinely interesting to think about these things but I struggle to handle the doomerism it awakens in me.
I'll keep rescuing the flies.
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@solitha @cstross But I'm reminded of a frankly disturbing project that used a cockroach like a robot by cutting off and replacing its antennae. Sometimes science is bad and leads to us doing bad things.
I dunno. Its probably genuinely interesting to think about these things but I struggle to handle the doomerism it awakens in me.
I'll keep rescuing the flies.
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@cstross To get to applied engineering, though, one has to do the study that shows how to apply it. In this case, cockroach anatomy and function.
@krnlg When I talk about ethical guidelines, it's not about the application so much. It's more about how we treat the creatures we study. Just in my lifetime we've improved ethics in that area immensely.
I disagree that kindness alone would be as good for suffering as medicine, but that is a matter of differing opinions.
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@krnlg @solitha You seem to have forgotten that actual mature engineering disciplines have codes of conduct, oversight bodies, and ethics exams. A lot of what passes for engineering in silicon valley, though, ignores all that. Software engineering in particular simply isn't a serious discipline yet.
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@cstross To get to applied engineering, though, one has to do the study that shows how to apply it. In this case, cockroach anatomy and function.
@krnlg When I talk about ethical guidelines, it's not about the application so much. It's more about how we treat the creatures we study. Just in my lifetime we've improved ethics in that area immensely.
I disagree that kindness alone would be as good for suffering as medicine, but that is a matter of differing opinions.
@solitha
We have the wrong balance, is all I'm saying. Not that science is wrong, far from it. Not that we should sit in caves loving each other while we die young either! 🙂We're an immature civilisation flailing around with power we don't know how to handle. Our philosophy is way behind our science, and we're ruled by bad people who take our science and use it to ruin everything.
Feels like we're already living in sci-fi but I guess that's the power and purpose of fiction!
@cstross
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Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Growing convinced we could and should ship new version cooldown in the Go modules ecosystem.
The subdb and MVP get us far, and supply chain attacks are not much of a thing in Go beyond typosquatting, but we want to stay ahead of them.
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/76485#issuecomment-4043378459
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@evan I'm not warping back to Xarkclanx IV, even if The Beatles are playing a reunion show there. It's just not worth dealing with the decade of spontaneous liquefaction after.
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@evan just today I flew x-country and part of this trip is a concert Friday night :)
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@jamesmarshall wow!
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@evan not for a whole season or anything. We did road trip from Houston to Colorado once to see 3 shows at Red Rocks and 2 at Telluride, all quite spectacular. Usually I would just fly from Houston to California for a run of 3-4 shows.
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@evan In typical Canadian style, I measure distance in hours. Depending on how much I like the artist, 3 to 6 hours. :D
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@jamesmarshall That's cool! Did you ever go fully "on tour"?
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@jimi OK but traveling farther usually costs more money
