It's just "Thou shalt not grow a brain in a test tube and force it to play a 1993 shooter" didn't make any sense to Moses and therefore didn't make the editors cut.

But I don’t think anyone “feeling uneasy” should be an argument once the ethical concerns have been considered and experiment has been approved.

I saw this article over the weekend and felt similarly: https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/the-first-multi-beha...

> Watch the video closely. What you are seeing is not an animation. It is not a reinforcement learning policy mimicking biology. It is a copy of a biological brain, wired neuron-to-neuron from electron microscopy data, running in simulation, making a body move.

And the simulated world they put it in is a sort of purgatory-like environment.

I read the sapiens book once and it had the concept of how humanity had paganism as a religion worshipping just the amalgamation of different animals for thousands of years.

I am writing the comment on what the book said below the image of one of the things humanity has made in recent years Now we have mouse on whose back scientists grew an ear made of cattle cartilage cells. It is an eerie echo of the lion-man statue from the stadel cave.

Thirty thousands years ago, Humans were already fantasising about combining different species. Today, they can actually produce such chimeras.

The image can only be described as an eldritch horror. (Pg 449, of mice and men, sapiens)

The last line of the book is: Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want.

I think this last line is something that you are resonating with. (I highly recommend reading Sapiens if someone hasn't. I have only had animal farm and 1984 hook me up to a book so much.)

And then are creeped by 200k neurons that barely find a target when they're told where it is.

You can probably train an ANN with only a few hundred neurons at most to do the same.

There's no way the technology to make and modify "life" including cloning humans hasn't been secretly used or attempted at least once ever since it was discovered.

As for being creepy, the things humans do to other actual sentient beings are exponentially more horrifying and creepy than making them play computer games. If the monkeys that Volkswagen tortured with their exhaust gases were made to play Doom, that would be a much better world. And they are much, much closer to human-level intelligence than this chip.

Ethically speaking, it got "questionable" way long ago; this is not a valid concern for this project imo.

It's awesome.

People's ick around bodies, which are machines, have always held us back.

It wasn't until we started cutting them open that modern medicine was developed.

We might have brain uploads already had we not been so averse to sticking brains with electrodes.

I'll go further: had we not been so scared of cloning, we'd probably have cured cancer and every major ailment if we'd begun cloning monoclonal human bodies in labs. Engineered out the antigens and did whole head transplants. You could grow them without consciousness or deencephalize them, rapidly grow them in factories, and have new blood / tissue / organ / body donors for everyone.

New young bodies means no more cancer, no more cardiac or pulmonary age. It's just brain diseases left as the final frontier once we cross that gap. And if we have bodies as computers and labs, we'd probably make quick work on that too.

Too tired to lay out the case / refute, so past discussions:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

this isn't getting close to human intelligence. They're using about as many cells as a fruit fly has (of course not actually functioning like an animal brain) processing signals to play Doom. The treatment of a single farm chicken is about a few magnitudes more worrying than this.

I'm sorry to tell you that you're made out of human cells and I don't think you got consent from each brain cell before firing up the old boomer shooters.

Yeah… That’s quite the smoking gun.

So it’s quite likely then that the neurons are just acting as a bad conductor. The electrodes read a noisy version of the signals that go into the neurons, and they just train a CNN with PPO to remove that noise, get the proper inputs, and learn a half-decent policy for playing the game.

If this worked as advertised they shouldn’t need a CNN decoder at all! The raw neuron readout should be interpreted as game inputs directly.

Besides, they are not streaming the video into the neurons at all. Just the horizontal position of the enemies and the distance, or some variant of that. In that sense it’s barely more than pong isn’t it? If enemy left, rotate left, if enemy right, rotate right, if enemy center shoot. At a stretch, if enemy far, go forward, if enemy close, go back. The rest of the time just move randomly. Indeed, the behavior in the video is essentially that…

While we are at it, the encoded input signal itself is already pretty close to a decent policy if mapped directly to the keys (how much enemy left, center, right), even without any CNN, PPO or neurons.

EDIT: It seems like the readme does address these concerns, and the described setup differs significantly from the description in the critical blogpost. Still not entirely convincing to me, a lot of weights being trained in silicon around the neurons, but it sounds better. I don’t have time right now to look deeper into it. They outline some interesting details though.

> Quote from: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron/mai...

Isn't the decoder/PPO doing all the learning?

No, this is precisely why there are ablations. The footage you see in the video was taken using a 0-bias full linear readout decoder, meaning that the action selected is a linear function of the output spikes from the CL1; the CL1 is doing the learning. There is a noticeable difference when using the ablation (both random and 0 spikes result in zero learning) versus actual CL1 spikes.

Isn't the encoder/PPO doing all the learning?

This question largely assumes that the cells are static, which is incorrect; it is not a memory-less feed X in get Y machine. Both the policy and the cells are dynamical systems; biological neurons have an internal state (membrane potential, synaptic weights, adaptation currents). The same stimulation delivered at different points in training will produce different spike patterns, because the neurons have been conditioned by prior feedback. During testing, we froze encoder weights and still observed improvements in the reward.

How is DOOM converted to electrical signals?

We train an encoder in our PPO policy that dictates the stimulation pattern (frequency, amplitude, pulses, and even which channels to stimulate). Because the CL1 spikes are non-differentiable, the encoder is trained through PPO policy gradients using the log-likelihood trick (REINFORCE-style), i.e., by including the encoder’s sampled stimulation log-probs in the PPO objective rather than backpropagating through spikes.

But yes, I agree that they're likely using human brain cells mainly because it's attention-getting.

It's "see this input signal, send these output signals", which seems consistent with the title.

It seems they grow the neural tissue on a chip the neurons can interface with and send out / receive electrical impulses. They let the neurons self assemble, and "train" via reward or punishment signals (unclear to me what those are).

Either way this makes me nauseous in a way I haven't experienced much with tech. The telling thing for me is, all these people are so excited to explain, but not once, ever, in the video speak of ethics or try to mitigate concerns.

We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience, awareness? Have we defined it? Can we, if we don't understand it ourselves? What are the plans to scale up?

It's legitimately horrifying to me.

We know that neurons can produce subjective experience.

This is the first time in my life that I've felt a scientific avenue of research should shut down.

Today there are several immortalized neuron cell lines used in research to model neuronal function, like HeLa but of neuron type obviously, that are also typically derived from tumours (e.g., SH-SY5Y, PC12) or immortalized via genetic modification (e.g., v-myc) like CTX0E03 [2] which was designed to allow for continuous growth in the presence of particular reagents.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks

2. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/reneuron-announces-...

If you're in the US, you can buy human neurons online at sciencellonline.com/en/human-neurons/

To my knowledge, we understand how an individual neuron works quite well. We just don’t really understand macro effects in large networks of neurons.

The video seems buzz wordy. Without looking into this too deeply, it seems like they’re using neurons individually or in small groups rather than creating a true “brain”. I would guess they’re using neurons or small groups of them sort of like transistors that do a single basic thing rather than a full “brain” that they just feed images to.

If you connected electrodes to two different fish, shocked them and interpreted twitching as intelligent output, fish could also play Doom. The interface is doing all the work.

It doesn't sound like the neurons have any concept of the game other than "left input means left output", which is a rather trivial result... It's effectively no different than the pong example.

They don't say anything on how much training is required for this to happen, or if there's any "learning" going on at all. The learning part is "next".

When someone makes a virtual girlfriend of it, is it really a disembodied person or just a smart answering machine?

A whole lot of ethical and psychological issues are to open up here.

If they can get Doom to run on a pregnancy test surely they could get it running on human brain cells?