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Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

if you map every single neuron, at what point is it no longer just a 'model' of reality, and is reality. How do we know that the computer model of neurons does not have the same internal awareness as the real neurons?

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In this case the "map" is simply a set of high-res images, not a computer model. I don't think an image can be aware.

Guess I need to find source study. This high level article makes it sound like an actual map, not an image. Based on same type of map that has been made of nematode

From article Now, researchers have constructed a detailed map of the neurons and the connections between them in the brain of a larval fruit fly. With 3,016 neurons and 548,000 connections, called synapses

There's no citation, but I am assuming it's this:

"A searchable image resource of Drosophila GAL4-driver expression patterns with single neuron resolution. eLife, 2023; 12 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.80660"

That's a different paper announcing a large repository of genetic expression patterns. This is the link for the connectome announcement: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add9330

It's just a graph of connections with neurons as nodes and synapses as the connections. Poorly translated as a "map" in reference to the historical studies that have tried to "map out" the brain wiring.

This article overstates it. This mapping is not as detailed as what was done with The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Where they did entire nervous system.

> if you map every single neuron, at what point is it no longer just a 'model' of reality, and is reality

If you map position of every fish in the sea will you have a model of a living sea with living fish and all their interactions (electrical/physics/chemical etc)? Or just the positions of fish in a sea at certain point of time?

Similarly: if you model a black hole in enough detail, do you have an actual black hole? If you model a storm in enough detail, is it wet?

I think with all of these examples the difference is if it executes. A computer model can be encoded and put on a loop and execute. So what is difference between biology where neurons are firing based on electrical potential of calcium atoms, versus in a computer loop processing math, both fire. So does the computer model while executing have an internal subjective experience, the same as a human with its electrical signals firing. Where in the brains is our own awareness, and if its just the 'firing' of neurons, then the computer that is a model of that firing can have same awareness. You can't come up with any argument that computers don't have awareness that doesn't also exclude humans. It is arguable that human awareness is just a byproduct of our processing.

Neurons have a huge internal complexity and diversity, and this connectome doesn’t tell you much about those internals.

If you map every single class in UML, at what point is it no longer just a 'model' of the software, and is the software.

That would require knowledge of how detailed you have to get before going deeper stops altering the performance. I suspect there is no magic line that becomes sapience once you cross it; there's just a smooth slope upwards. Someday we'll have to decide standards of measurement that separate the living from the dead.

Is there convincing evidence actual insects have "awareness"?

What is "awareness"?

The only objective, measurable quantity is information complexity. (And yes, insects have it.)

Subjective experience of the world around us. The one thing I'm 100% sure I do have, and it would require very special pleading (or solipsism) to insist other humans are anything other than almost certain to share that trait. My suspicion is that there is some threshold of cerebral complexity required for it to occur, and is pretty unlikely to apply to all animals with central nervous systems. Whether insect brains are sufficiently complex I really couldn't say, nor am I sure what test could be done to determine it (though one day we may have enough understanding to do such a test).

Information complexity is a physical quantity and we have many well-established methods of measuring it.

There isn't convincing evidence that humans have 'awareness'.

My awareness is the only thing I have 100% convincing evidence for the existence of!

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