Sooo… apparently we just recreated a fruitfly digitally by remodeling it’s brain neuron by neuron… And its “alive”.
I welcome everyone to 6’000’000 new layers of questionable ethical and moral decision, with 7 slaps of complimentary existential horror as icing.
..but does that make it real though?
There’s another one of some human brain cells in a petri dish that can play Doom.
Its real to it.
Just like this reality is real to us.
Now imagine that this reality is a simulation and tomorrow someone is going to change the parameters of it and now we are going to test “how many different ways can we break the human mind”.
Its not real to the dude sitting in front of the reality computer. Going to be very real for you.
Im getting the sense that we are now tapping into things that we really shouldnt.
We are so fed, that some countries have an obesity epidemic
The world is fucked, I am fucked, you’re fucked, and we’re all fucked.
I don’t mind being fucked in a good sort of way but this is the bad kind of being fucked without the happy ending afterward. Simply put, the no happy ending of being fucked.
Isn’t this just a computer program, same as any other? They are just telling us it is somehow different. But what reason is there to think the fly is really anything other than what we would see in a computer game?
Emergent function.
It doesnt matter where you create something that is capable of learning and processing information. The problem is that it can do it.
Normal software executes a code written by a programmer. It cant do anything more than that. It cant learn, it cant improve, it has no capacity for emergent functions.
The maximum you could produce with normal softwares in that direction were heuristics and algorithms.
A neural network, especially the copy of a biological one, cant be compared to a simple software.
Its a literal brain, that literally works like a brain.
There are nuances ofc. You can lobotomize it as you wish. But it takes very little imagination to understand how many layers of fcked up this is.
.
“Going to be very real for you.”
In what way?
We are in the world thanks to the fucking. If not for the fucking, none of us would be here
“Real to a person” doesn’t mean it’s real.
Don’t neural networks and brains also operate on heuristics and algorithms? The difference as I see it is that complex neural networks/brains are irreducibly complex from the perspective of much of current science, so they may appear as somewhat of a black box. We cannot necessarily derive what they will do next, therefore we call what they are doing “emergent functions”.
But in reality, you think there is something fundamentally different that brains and these more intricate networks are doing other than heuristics and algorithms? At bottom it is all math and logic. A computer program that adapts and generates unpredictable emergent outcomes is still a computer program.
And even if we grant it is doing something special that differs FUNDAMENTALLY from other computer software, so somehow it is operating according to something other than heuristics and algorithms (feel free to share what that ‘other something’ might be?), what reason is there to think it is still anything but a computer program? Why assume it has sentience, life, subjectivity, experience like we do? It has no body, no senses, no feelings. On what basis should we conclude it is alive?
The same way this reality is real to you.
I mean its only real because your body interacts with it, and thus your senses perceive it.
There isnt anything more special to it.
Take away all senses a human has and they’d not be in this reality. They’d be chilling in a pocket dimension of no input, in a prison made of flesh.
What’d be the difference if a virtual world would interact with you directly through your senses?
You get the same feedback from your senses, your virtual brain processes it, you interact with your surrounding according to it’s laws.
In this example your very being is emulated on a computer, in a virtual world. Even if a higher reality exists from the virtual one, you are still stuck in the virtual. Both body and mind.
In perspective, what if there is a higher reality to ours?
A spiritual world or smth? The fckening just binds your higher reality existence to a lower one.
What does it accomplish for you to say that this is not “a”, “the”, “my” (?) reality.
It is. You are stuck here with all parts of you being here. The fact that there are higher realities are of no consequence to you. Those are not the realities you are bound to, interact with, or even perceive.
Saying that the higher is real and not the one you are stuck in, is completely meaningless.
Well there is a difference though. Your operating system, your browser, your games, the internet, and the rest, are not self-aware pattern recognition engines.
This is not to say that you are wrong.
At the end of the day you might be correct that its all just mathematics and a complex pattern that starts to self-regulate and develop, but we know for a fact that simple programs and algorithms are not complex enough for that.
The problem is that what you said here is a two way street. Especially with the previous paragraph.
On what basis do we conclude that we are alive?
What if our reality is a simulation too and all we are is what you described: Complex algorithms?
How would you know if this was a simulation?
How would you know whether or not you are just virtual?
Reality is nothing more than what interacts with your senses.
Take away all the senses you have and reality stops existing for you. You will be in a pocket dimension of no input.
I know I am alive. I do not know a computer graphic moving on a screen is alive. And I have so far no reason to think that it is.
I have written here about the idea we live in a simulation. This is almost certainly correct. Even if we just look at the standard physics view. Macro scale experiences emerge from smaller micro scale ones. “Water” is not “wet”, but we experience it’s wetness as an emergent property of the interactions of molecules. Etc.
Again, I find no reason to assume a computer program is producing life. Maybe it is. But how would we even know?
And the brain in the computer knows that it is alive. Its trying to clean it’s virtual body and interacts with the virtual objects.
You are correct: It’s a lower reality being, meaning that it’s reality is an offshoot from ours or simply stands below it, but does that make it not real? Does that make the simulated life not life?
You said you know that you are alive. (Even though it’d be more accurate to say that you think/assume that you are alive).
That right there is your premise.
Now you reconstruct your brain virtually.
It starts to function like it does outside here and the “you” inside the computer is interacting with the virtual world as it’s real to it.
What evidence you have that the very same thing that you are, that functions the very same way that you do, is now “not alive”?
Whats your definition for “alive”? Its no longer biological?
It does? How do you know that?
How do you know that you are alive?
Because I am me. And being “me” necessarily means being alive. This is an immanently given understanding on par with “I exist”.
If you don’t even know you are alive then I’m not sure what to tell you. Good luck ,I guess? If you can’t even get that much right then I’m guessing life is going to be pretty hard for you…
Oh no don’t invite the one making the same topic again and again and the bazillion teapots
