OpenWorm
github.com
github.com
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brai...
Apparently there are some signs that progress is being made again now, though...
C elegans is far more complicated than the connectome abstraction used in these projects. There are all kinds of ion channels, including new ones recently discovered (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34388373/ ), that are regulated by genes and other physical/biochemical factors in the body that are very poorly understood. We only have slightly better understanding of its brain development recently ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03778-8 ). The in vivo research on C. elegans neural system mostly uses the concentration of Ca+ as the neuron activity indicator, which lefts out other details.
According to the postdoc that I talked with, we are still very very far from even accurately understanding a single neuron, let alone simulating any neural network completely.
Edit: typo
It doesn't even have spiking neurons. Whole Brain Emulation of merely 302 neurons would not be that hard if we understood how worm brain and neurons work.
What do you mean ?
If I recall correctly there was one hobbyist who used Hodgkin-Huxley neurons to emulate movement of warm, it actually trivial task.
Replicating limited outward behaviour with simplified neuron model.
vs.
Fully simulating the functioning of the neuron so that it does not replicate some observed behaviors, but simulates the brain function accurately at the neuron level.
An elegant mind: Learning and memory in Caenorhabditis elegans http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/17/4/191.long
I don’t know which one is more difficult, though.
Lots of interesting ethical questions. In the future we might be able to simulate a human on that level. Is it really alive? Does it have rights? If we can “scan” someone and simulate them virtually, are they the same person? If the physical body dies but there’s still a digital copy, can we say they’re still alive?
Purely probabilistically, we are such humans. If any 'base' universe can easily simulate humans, for fun or research, such simulations will soon vastly outnumber the 'real' people. And because of that, we have to assume we are in an ancestor simulation.
I find it very difficult to believe that a base universe could ever simulate something of the complexity of our universe without massive and pointless expense, at best. And even if they could, I find it even more unlikely that simulated universes would ever even be dense in the subset of multiverses (whichever flavor your like) which contain something like humans.
On what grounds?
We have had examples of poor copies forever. We call them twins. If you have a twin, that twin isn't you, and you're not them.
The most interchangeable your copy could be with you would be that the copy might be able to log into and post from your online accounts and fool many of your followers, if you have any; or to withdraw your money from your bank account and buy the sort of things you might have bought if you still had the money.
And, in fact, we do that continuously. Every day you wake up believing yourself to be the person who went to bed the night before. It is close enough.
> While our ultimate goal is to simulate every [worm] cell in C. elegans, we are starting out by building a model of its body, its nervous system, and its environment. (...) To get a quick idea of what this looks like, check out the latest movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaovWiZJUWY
Source: https://docs.openworm.org/projects
Also: the “latest video” is seven years old now, does anyone have a newer demo?
Edit: the real website mentions a lot more like the neural connections
This is like simulating a computer by using a model of RAM and CPU, when you really need to model electricity & magnetism (and stray gamma rays) for a true simulation.
I still think it's impressive if we can get a decent-fidelity model of C. elegans behavior at the project's current level of abstraction.
I wonder how much behavioral difference we'd see from a lower level of simulation? After all, you can do a lot with a "RAM and CPU" level simulation of a computer...
More like trying to model the pixels on a screen without accessing the underlying program that's making decisions on what to show.
Pure nonsense of course.
It's foolish to pretend that it's a solved problem when it's not. At the present moment we don't actually have a solid idea either way.
That's how we know it's nonsense. When there's no evidence for something it doesn't mean that it's 50% Likely to be true.
If I told you there's a dragon in my garage you should immediately think that I'm lying because you've never seen any prior evidence of dragons anywhere.
Mathematically, things with no evidence for their existence don't exist.
Well, the analogy falls apart because whether there’s a dragon in the garage really is something physically verifiable, and it’s hard to know if where the there that’s there comes from is. But it’s a little like if you occasionally heard loud stomping noises or roars coming from your garage, and things in there were turning up with big bites taken out of them or singed with fire. No matter how much you look you can’t find the cause. Is that a dragon? Dragons don’t exist...but who knows?
EDIT: Also not sure what this bizarre statement is:
> Mathematically, things with no evidence for their existence don't exist.
1. How is that related to mathematics? Can you provide a theorem or some definitions here?
2. How is evidence related to mathematics?
3. Why is mathematics relevant when talking about whether or not our mind has non-physical aspects?
That's where we disagree. Can you give me an example of anything that doesn't exist within this physical universe? I'm not familiar with the concept of a "thing" that isn't physical.
Sorry about being confusing with the last sentence. I'll try and address your questions:
1. When we talk about the likelihood of something being true we are now discussing probabilities, which have a long and well proven track record of obeying the laws of statistics. Statistics are quite often counter-intuitive and our brains don't think in terms of the math that governs the actual outcomes
A good example is the birthday problem [1]. Imagine we had a room full of people and we wanted to know what the odds are that two of those people in the room had the same birthday. Obviously the more people we have, the more likely we are to have a match, but how many people do you need to get to that point?
It turns out that with just 23 people in the room there's a 50% chance of two people having the same birthday. Most people's intuition leads them to believe that for 50% you'd need 365/2 = 182.5 people, but once there's 70 people in a room, you're almost certain to have a match with a probability of 99.9%. This is a good example of a case where not knowing the math will lead your predictions of the world to be incorrect.
2. When we discuss evidence we are trying to figure out the probability of something, thus the rules of probabilities apply. One of the fundamental theorems of statistics is Bayes' Theorem [2], which at its core tells you how to calculate the probability of an event given another event.
To motivate that, here's a more realistic example: "A patient goes to see a doctor. The doctor performs a test with 99 percent reliability--that is, 99 percent of people who are sick test positive and 99 percent of the healthy people test negative. The doctor knows that only 1 percent of the people in the country are sick. Now the question is: if the patient tests positive, what are the chances the patient is sick?"
If you answered 99% then you'd not only be wrong, but you'd have misdiagnosed your patient. The correct answer here is 50% [3].
3. To bring it all together: to properly know things one must understand the laws of mathematics. This applies not just to problems that obviously involve probabilities, but everything in general.
At it's core, I think our disagreement revolves around this idea of non-physicality and the belief that there are things that aren't governed by mathematics. Everything is physical and obeys the laws of physics which themselves are governed by the laws of mathematics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem
[3] https://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/mph-modules/bs/bs704_probabi...
> Everything is physical and obeys the laws of physics which themselves are governed by the laws of mathematics.
If you define "physical" to mean "literally everything" then of course having something outside of Physics is logically impossible. That is a different definition to the work "physical" that we are working with in terms of the mind. In that case "physical" doesn't mean "literally everything" but rather more like "those things that correspond to an external, verifiable, objective reality". For you, ideas and concepts would be considered physical, but that is not the case for the definition of "physical" I mentioned, which is far more common in both religion and philosophy.
In this case we would say that ideas and concepts are not physical. So an easy answer to your question "Can you give me an example of anything that doesn't exist within this physical universe? I'm not familiar with the concept of a "thing" that isn't physical." would be literally any concept or idea. However since you have a universalist (and thus totally useless) definition of "physical", of course it is impossible for me to argue that there is anything outside of that.
PS. As a doctor in quantum physics myself, I can tell you that statistics and probability is certainly a way of modelling outcomes, and not in any way considered a fundamental element of reality.
On the QM side, I'm pretty sure that you're incorrect in your postscript. It was my understanding that certain physical processes can only be understood though probability and that talking in terms of wavefunctions is the most correct way to do that.
I don’t agree with that. I think there is an inseparable spiritual element that justifies the subjective experience.
For the QM part, that still does not mean that ontologically the probabilities have a physical reality. Google “interpretations of quantum mechanics”, we have very little idea of what quantum mechanics actually means yet. We can set up the problems and do the maths but no one even knows what exactly it means to do a measurement (again Google “measurement problem”). I am an expert in quantum mechanics (it is my job) so I would be happy to answer questions about it in the morning.
The soul is not obviously real. There's zero evidence for it. It's just some random hypothesis that doesn't even explain anything. It's like reincarnation. Just a nice idea that someone made up with zero evidence, no mechanism and no use. Clearly nonsense.
It's not an actual worm or virus, because that'd be a little silly, but from automated exploits and a good reverse shell that's a small epsilon away from what you're describing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY2-0-QsuTE&ab_channel=TEDxT...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8949408 - Jan 2015
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745251 - Dec 2014 (OpenWorm in Lego)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613732 - Apr 2014
This project is simulating an entire organism, including its neurology. To what extent does running this code create a "real" worm?
Sure, it's just C. elegans for now. But over time, we'll gradually see additional projects to simulate larger organisms...
Basically, while the structure of the network has been known for decades, they don't yet have the technology to figure out how the neurons behave (the weights of the neurons) nor how they learn (changes in the weights), so they can't "upload" data from a real worm.
But isn't referring to not knowing "the weights" (as the article and researchers do) making a rather large assumption about the nature of the problem? It sounds more like the researchers don't know "why the neurons fire when they do", which would leave open the question of whether "weights" is even a sufficient model.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-w...
I can't bring myself to care much about a C. elegans, but let's say we scale this up enough to simulate something the size of a dog plus its environment. Presumably it has subjective experience, like a real dog? What are the ethics of writing code that would result in its "suffering"?
Do you have the same concerns about other, perhaps much simpler but also virtual and pseudointelligent entities, such as computer-controlled players in games?
It does raise some deeply philosophical questions about life and what it means in general.
Nah, I'm not particularly worried about that. Because those are all currently based on models too simple to conceivably have anything like consciousness.
On the other hand, once we can simulate a human and its environment at OpenWorm's targeted level of abstraction, presumably we would have a conscious being there?
A chair serves, regardless of its consciousness, but the human (or mammal stand-in) may project a consciousness of its utility upon the object, thus elevating its stature in a shared conscious.
The closest I can think is a friend establishing rules around an heirloom coffee table that enforced coasters and denied foot rest.
But I think that more organic models should have that assumption baked in to their more humanistic appropriation.
Like we kill a cow for sustenance, but I respect that in purchase by eating it.
A table serves me infinitely. And thus it carries the consciousness of the human.
Destruction of a utility reflects the human qualities, and so an inanimate object might adopt those qualities independent of time.
Hence why I said this. There is nothing you can use to believe a human's claims over the text-to-speech's claims, so we choose what looks like suffering to us. However, my point is that it is an arbitrary choice.
Of course there is. The human facing me looks similar to me so I can interpolate its claims with my own experience of being an human.
I thinks it’s also for the same reason that we have variable degrees of empathy against animals : the more the animal looks like us (that can be size, number of members, physically, in terms of effective communication…), the more, on average, we have empathy for them.
This can go to the extent that people commonly feel « something » about their cars and their human-face-like designs combined with their single ability to move.
It does not have to be arbitrary though. We could go by the Turing test. If some text-to-speech could clear it i would believe what it said.
I doubt that code can suffer. We do not understand feelings enough and this might help to understand it eventually - but for now I see no reason to assume that they can recreated digitally.
And I am much more worried, about many real life beings that suffer in our food chain and co.
Inert "code" can't suffer, of course. But assuming we accept the materialistic view, what reason do we have to believe that a mind in a simulated body has any less subjective experience than a mind in a "real" body?
That reality is seemingly indefinitely complex and any simulation we have, very simplifying. I am pretty sure, for emotions and co, it takes a bit more sophisticated simulation - if it can be achieved digitally, at all.
I watched some protein folding stuff from the Comma AI guy I didn't even know what was going on there but it looked cool.
But we do have computation readily available, my 3060 is just sitting there while I sleep, I could do some things with it maybe. Granted it's not a super computer, lower end.
You have vastly overestimated the power of your 3060 if you think it can simulate all the Earth's atoms at the beginning of life here.
At some point I will get the time though and dive into it, learn new things. One time I didn't have a job for several months that was great.
Our computers are not more powerful than the "computer of the Universe", they are much _much_ less powerful.