I'm scared about biological computing
Ethical analogies with animals and veganism
- Many comments compare biocomputing ethics to factory farming, breeding animals to want to be eaten, or decerebrated animals.
- Disagreement over whether vegan ethics are directly relevant: some see the core issue as sentience and suffering; others as “rigging” preferences (e.g., dogs bred to love work, hypothetical pigs bred to want to be eaten).
- Several note everyone “draws a line” (plants vs animals vs specific animals), and accuse some arguments of being inconsistent or relativistic.
- Some argue lab-grown or non-sentient substrates would largely dissolve vegan objections; others say the underlying moral questions would persist.
Consciousness and moral status
- Large subthread on whether silicon AIs and biological computers can be conscious.
- Thought experiments invoked: “China brain,” Chinese room, split-brain patients, philosophical zombies.
- Positions range from:
- Strong materialism (“consciousness emerges from physical processes; in principle anything could be conscious”),
- To hard skepticism (“consciousness is an incoherent or religiously inherited concept”),
- To views centering consciousness on emotion/brainstem and “felt homeostasis,” implying petri-dish networks are likely non-conscious.
- Debate on free will and whether humans themselves are just prediction engines / LLM-like.
Doom-playing neuron experiments
- Multiple commenters stress the neurons are not receiving raw visual input; a conventional neural network encodes game state into electrode signals and decodes outputs.
- Skepticism that the neurons are truly “seeing” or “playing Doom” versus adding structured noise; some call popular descriptions misleading or “ghost stories.”
- Others emphasize that, despite hype, there is substantive neuroscience and interesting proof-of-concept learning, especially in simpler “pong” setups without heavy preprocessing.
- A researcher-like voice explains electrode-count limitations and defends the use of autoencoders.
Prospects and fears of biological computing
- Some argue biocomputers are inevitable and vastly more energy-efficient, potentially enabling “brains in jars” and new intelligence substrates.
- Others dismiss strong extrapolations (e.g., rapid “Claude’s law” scaling, live-animal networks) as speculative or ethically horrific.
- Concern that, absent clear theories of consciousness, we risk creating suffering systems (biological or AI) without knowing where to draw ethical lines.
Media, hype, and epistemic quality
- Frustration that YouTube-driven narratives and superficial reading distort public understanding of these experiments.
- Counterpoint: books and other media can mislead too; the real issue is critical thinking and algorithmic amplification of bad ideas.