Would we be able to have a "digital human" when we reach the level of creating this kind of brain mapping for the human brain?
Honestly I think we're still discovering how powerful neural networks are and certainly they can do computations that sound very close to intelligence in some contexts, but I still find it hard to think that we can simplify the whole reality of an incredibly complex chemical machinery down to a bunch of matrices multiplications.
I appreciate the open source approach over the startup's sensational claims. This is more transparent.
That said, I think it still presents itself as if the fly is being controlled by the connectome, when (if I'm reading the source correctly) it's more accurate to say scripted behaviors have been hooked up to be triggered by the connectome.
Put another way, you might as well have the "escape" trigger open a YouTube video of a fly flying away. That would probably be less misleading too.
I would argue that this is pretty disingenuous (as is most connectomics research I suppose) since its implying we have a fully wired connectome of the fly thats actually meaningful.
I have no exposure to connectomes - or really anything quite like this (as opposed to good ol’ fashioned perceptrons) - so forgive my following uninformed question:
> Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
Probably not. People have been coming up with ethical frameworks for thousands of years and we have yet to come to a consensus.
So it’s very unlikely that someone can say conclusively whether this is ethical or not, because that would require us to either 1) prove a single ethical framework is correct and then apply that framework to this software or 2) prove that under all possible ethical frameworks this software is either ethical or not ethical.
Honestly pretty funny that you gave a (fairly useless) metaethical answer instead of responding to the actual meaning, which was clearly soliciting ethical judgments about it.
Interesting work! There's NeuroMechFly (https://github.com/NeLy-EPFL/flygym/) available, you might try using that to simulate the fly body in real time as well.
At some point in the future would it be possible to simply download a DNA sequence of an entire animal as a "ROM" and boot it into a virtual "reality"?
What detail level of reality would we have to emulate for an egg to grow into an adult animal?
To give you a sense of the computation needed, a spatiotemporal physics simulation of a minimal (493 gene) bacterium's full 105 minute cellular cycle took 4-6 days of GPU hours on two A100s.
> Infinite Pain is a computer running a deterministic neural simulation of a microscopic nematode worm’s brain (c. elegans), subjected to regular pain stimuli.
This is absolutely astounding. What an implementation. A connectome is like a full brain scan!
I am asking Claude to port this to the browser and I'll host it, so you can try it without installing anything.
Some details about the port: Claude is able to do porting tasks like this. I'll put up a link when you can try it in your browser. I was able to get it to port the complete BitNet b1.58 2-billion parameter model several versions ago (in February, so this would have been Opus 4.5) to browser, so it can do so. This will run on the browser. I'll have it make it so that on mobile you can tap the fly or turn on the camera and it sees you, and same on desktop actually. Since the connectome is only 668 neurons, this will run super fast. Actually I'll make it allow for several flies, and let you drop food. I did something like this before here[1] but using the real connectome is something very different and very amazing. I'll have it add an experimental 3D mode with threejs, I'm not sure if that is also possible or not, we'll have to see it. This size of task usually takes Claude a few hours, so check my comment in the morning for the implementation, I'll reply here once it's done and hosted.
I was very excited the first time I saw a connectome as well. Years ago I managed to get most of openworm running and connected to some Lego Mindstorms to let the worm roll around my house. I'm not even sure the connectome was finished at that time.
Honestly, I barely had any idea what I was doing and we didn't have AI tools so I was never really sure what I wired to what. I did manage to hook... something to the ultrasound sensor and... another thing to the wheels so that when the sensor was triggered it would back up.
What blew my mind was the realization that these weird hybrid critters were probably the first true immortals. Now that we have a full connectome, who will bother with another? Students will probably just keep instantiating copies of this one to tinker with forever.
Would we be able to have a "digital human" when we reach the level of creating this kind of brain mapping for the human brain?
Honestly I think we're still discovering how powerful neural networks are and certainly they can do computations that sound very close to intelligence in some contexts, but I still find it hard to think that we can simplify the whole reality of an incredibly complex chemical machinery down to a bunch of matrices multiplications.
I appreciate the open source approach over the startup's sensational claims. This is more transparent.
That said, I think it still presents itself as if the fly is being controlled by the connectome, when (if I'm reading the source correctly) it's more accurate to say scripted behaviors have been hooked up to be triggered by the connectome.
Put another way, you might as well have the "escape" trigger open a YouTube video of a fly flying away. That would probably be less misleading too.
I would argue that this is pretty disingenuous (as is most connectomics research I suppose) since its implying we have a fully wired connectome of the fly thats actually meaningful.
Why isn't it and what do they have? I'm not really informed on this stuff.
I have no exposure to connectomes - or really anything quite like this (as opposed to good ol’ fashioned perceptrons) - so forgive my following uninformed question:
Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
> Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
Probably not. People have been coming up with ethical frameworks for thousands of years and we have yet to come to a consensus.
So it’s very unlikely that someone can say conclusively whether this is ethical or not, because that would require us to either 1) prove a single ethical framework is correct and then apply that framework to this software or 2) prove that under all possible ethical frameworks this software is either ethical or not ethical.
Genuinely curious, is there like a simple list of competing ethical frameworks?
There’s a list here, not sure if it’s the best one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics
Not to drop any spoilers (hide this comment before reading further ....)
But "The Amazing Digital Circus" explores this concept relating to human brain scans, and how the 'simulated' brains would react under simulation.
Honestly pretty funny that you gave a (fairly useless) metaethical answer instead of responding to the actual meaning, which was clearly soliciting ethical judgments about it.
How could this be anti-ethical? You're just running a very complex algorithm in your machine.
If your circle of empathy includes fruit flies, fuck no, we murdered so many of those guys to figure out how their tiny brains work.
If you do not think of fruit flies as moral patients, sure, yeah, who cares, they're like just fruit flies you know?
Why do you think it wont be?
Well, one obvious question is if the simulated brain experiences pain, or more generally can it suffer? And if so, how would we tell.
> What's modeled vs. measured
> Honesty section:
I wouldn’t mind an human written README
> live *spiking* simulation
Ah, Mr. Acevedo, nice to see you.
Interesting work! There's NeuroMechFly (https://github.com/NeLy-EPFL/flygym/) available, you might try using that to simulate the fly body in real time as well.
At some point in the future would it be possible to simply download a DNA sequence of an entire animal as a "ROM" and boot it into a virtual "reality"?
What detail level of reality would we have to emulate for an egg to grow into an adult animal?
To give you a sense of the computation needed, a spatiotemporal physics simulation of a minimal (493 gene) bacterium's full 105 minute cellular cycle took 4-6 days of GPU hours on two A100s.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
Compare this with a c elegens nematode: ~20000 protein coding genes and 959 cells, with all the extra machinery you'll find in a eukaryotic cell.
I'm reading this as both a question of raw simulation surface and combinatorics.
No demo video?
I just found this video on YouTube now:
https://youtu.be/A8fDr7Rr7yM?is=cHwOQVrli9oXLdqY
That doesn't show this project.
Open to see what it was about, stayed for the banger soundtrack
FYI it takes less than 30 seconds do clone, build, and run.
If you have a mac. I don't.
It's weird to write MacOS specific software in this era.
The unstoppable "rewrite it in Swift!" vs the insurmountable "where's the Windows version?"
next up: https://openworm.org/
Oh nice, might use this to create some art for my home.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DMfi-9Vsl-u/
> Infinite Pain is a computer running a deterministic neural simulation of a microscopic nematode worm’s brain (c. elegans), subjected to regular pain stimuli.
are you ok ?
Now this is real AI.
This is straight up ghost-dubbing.
This is absolutely astounding. What an implementation. A connectome is like a full brain scan!
I am asking Claude to port this to the browser and I'll host it, so you can try it without installing anything.
Some details about the port: Claude is able to do porting tasks like this. I'll put up a link when you can try it in your browser. I was able to get it to port the complete BitNet b1.58 2-billion parameter model several versions ago (in February, so this would have been Opus 4.5) to browser, so it can do so. This will run on the browser. I'll have it make it so that on mobile you can tap the fly or turn on the camera and it sees you, and same on desktop actually. Since the connectome is only 668 neurons, this will run super fast. Actually I'll make it allow for several flies, and let you drop food. I did something like this before here[1] but using the real connectome is something very different and very amazing. I'll have it add an experimental 3D mode with threejs, I'm not sure if that is also possible or not, we'll have to see it. This size of task usually takes Claude a few hours, so check my comment in the morning for the implementation, I'll reply here once it's done and hosted.
[1] https://stateofutopia.com/papers/1/evolving-brains-cull-long...
It's pretty amazing stuff!
I was very excited the first time I saw a connectome as well. Years ago I managed to get most of openworm running and connected to some Lego Mindstorms to let the worm roll around my house. I'm not even sure the connectome was finished at that time.
Honestly, I barely had any idea what I was doing and we didn't have AI tools so I was never really sure what I wired to what. I did manage to hook... something to the ultrasound sensor and... another thing to the wheels so that when the sensor was triggered it would back up.
What blew my mind was the realization that these weird hybrid critters were probably the first true immortals. Now that we have a full connectome, who will bother with another? Students will probably just keep instantiating copies of this one to tinker with forever.