Rat Brain in a dish flies F-22 sim!!

That experiment is disgusting and I can't believe that you see nothing wrong with this. You should be ashamed of your immoral and naturally grown human mind.

Each to his own I suppose, but ACTUAL rats are put through far worse to test the latest in Ladies Eyeliner, so I am not going to lose any sleep over a 20,000 rat brain cells pemanently playing Microsoft FlightSim 2005

I am not ashamed, mildly concerned as to its potential applications, but definately not ashamed! What makes me immoral? Why are you judging me, and what gives you the right to judge me?

And who said anything about my mind "naturally" growing at all, what is natural? A lifetime of living in an atmosphere poluted by god knows what, eating food coated in who knows and being subjected to the Institutional Education System leaves my mind, and probably those of billions around the world far from being natural.

Please define what you mean by this.

I assume the growth process of your brain was quite natural in reference to current standards on our planet and within our age. And no, I am not judging you in any sense, I am judging your ability to comprehend right from wrong, but not of societies scale. Society does not know right from wrong, after such things as this it is obvious.

I will not play God and condemn you for believing this is a non-issue, much unlike the scientists who contributed to this "study." They are obviously deciding how a lifeform should be and what it should be used for. I mean, could you imagine never seeing this world? Never being able to interact with or understand it at all? Could you imagine you brain being placed in a jar and hooked up to a computer so that you may play a game for the remainder of your pitiful, lonely, confused life? If you could call such a thing a life?

I could not imagine the pain which would be caused by such a thing, or even more terrible, a lack of pain. This is a horrible thing, something each of us should frown upon and object to withing hesitation. We should not applaud this act, we should fear it and we should do whatever we can to make it know that this is wrong, this should not be allowed to occur.

If humanity as a whole cannot see the problem here and cannot refrain from commiting such atrocities then it should not be sentient. It should not be given the ability to do such evil.

I imagine this is much worse than physical pain caused to an animal, this is a pain which cannot be conjured in our lives. This is emotional distress and we should make a stand against it, not stand by the project.

I feel so badly for this new life, I cannot believe it is being used in such a way. I cannot believe we even brought it into this world.

There is an EXCELLENT book by Ray Kurzweil on this very subject. You should read his book, which goes into great detail about what the future holds for us.

�Ray Kurzweil is the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era, an international authority on artificial intelligence, and one of our greatest living visionaries. �

...Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition...�

You really should read what this man has to say on this subject, it�s pretty cool.



Age of Spiritual Machines

Well, I typed out a joke about rats brains being an improvement on the average American fighter pilot, but I couldn't bring myself to post it

This is actually quite a scary topic.

There are two things that concern me here. First, the brain can only learn what it is taught. So why is this anything more than a non living AI which seems to me to have much less opportunity to develop beyond our expectations? We have no clue what this may develop into.

From a moral standpoint, admittedly overshadowed by my own Judeo/Christian beliefs (that I believe regardless of the feelings of many members here who have no respect for this viewpoint, it is still a majority issue), it raises some serious concerns.

In the big picture, the nutshell strikes me as this. The two most serious trangressions in Judeo/Christian beliefs were the fall of Satan, followed by the fall of man. In both instances the the transgression boiled down to the attempt to be God. It did not go unnoticed or unpunished. If there is a God, mankind just continues to "push the envelope" more and more everyday. Whether you believe in God or not, the difference remains the same. We aren't God, we do not have either the power or the knowledge of a god. We are blindly treading into territory that we can neither foresee the ultimate consequences of nor guarantee the final outcome. This case is merely one example of an ever increasing trend and series of events that fall into this category.

SkyFox, the "material" they are using is only a cultured set of brain cells, not an actual, whole, living brain... it is essentially a biological CPU, but using the brain cells to create a neural network, instead of using a silicon based one.

In no way shape or form is this "Brain" a living entity, it has no thought or feelings, that is why I do not regard it is "wrong".

Could you imagine you brain being placed in a jar and hooked up to a computer so that you may play a game for the remainder of your pitiful, lonely, confused life? If you could call such a thing a life?

You have no idea how much I wish for this to become reality...You really don't! I live for computer games, and would happily live IN one

I hope that this technology allows us to hook our brains into computers, the possibiltys would be endless!

If humanity as a whole cannot see the problem here and cannot refrain from commiting such atrocities then it should not be sentient. It should not be given the ability to do such evil.

Again, where are you drawing these ideas from? How can you judge humanity, based upon your own principles? Your principles are not essentially the same as the next person, and you cannot judge people on them?

What right have you got to decree that Humanity shouldn't be sentient, just because of this?

There are very probably sentient life forms out there with very different morals and ethics, would you deem them to be not worthy of intelligence, because you do not agree with them?

As stated, it isn't even a living creature. If we closed doors on every scientific discovery just because a mis-guided few thought it was wrong we would still be in the Dark Ages.

Imagine if the church won through and convinced us the Earth was flat for eternity? Where would we be?

The benefits for this could be limitless, but you want to ban it? Why is it humanities first reaction to that they do not understand (Which I believe you don't, fully) is to destroy it?

Bear in mind though is that all it does is keep the aircraft flying straight and level.....not that great a feat! What I do find impressive though is that it can do that in hurricane force winds, wish I could do that!

If the cells are capable of keeping an aircraft level and on a constant heading, then it is obviously capable of thought. Who is to say it's not capable of emotion? You? Were your brain cells once subjected to such an experiment and from experience, you know your cells felt nothing the entire time?

I have stated my case. If you believe that brain cells which are capable of doing ANYTHING are absolutly not self-aware and cannot possibly have emotion, you're a liar. If you think the possibility is so small that it is worth the risk to possibly gain whatever there is to gain from this, then I question your morality.

I can obviously do no more to change anyones mind so I rest my case. Think about this with your brain, not with your desire for technological advancment.

If the cells are capable of keeping an aircraft level and on a constant heading, then it is obviously capable of thought.

Why? Why is it any different to an autopilot programmed to respond to different situations? The way the system works is that cells, in their medium, are connected to a 60-channel electrode array. The cells are "taught" how to flow (programmed) by stimulating the neurons. These then create neural pathways which can the respond again to the same stimuli.

It is no different to constructing an AI, apart from the fact that it is alot easier to teach, as the cells will automatically connect, creating neural pathways, whereas an AI, you have to build from the ground up.

I have stated my case. If you believe that brain cells which are capable of doing ANYTHING are absolutly not self-aware and cannot possibly have emotion, you're a liar. If you think the possibility is so small that it is worth the risk to possibly gain whatever there is to gain from this, then I question your morality.

I find the above offensive. But never mind, you obvious lack of knowledge and religious dogma are getting in the way of clear, rational, independant thought.

Brain cells on their own are NOT self aware, even in a small bundle of 25,000, there is no self-awareness, no emotion. I could take a sample of your brain cells and culture them. They would not be self aware, they would not have emotion.

I would not have another human staring up at me from the petri dish, no matter how much you want there to be. I would have what is in essence a set of biological switches, similar in working to those in a CPU.

Don't be absurd!

I can obviously do no more to change anyones mind so I rest my case. Think about this with your brain, not with your desire for technological advancment.

I have/am/will think about this with my brain, as I obviously grasp what is actually involved in this better than you. I do not allow christian bible thumpers dictate to me what is right and wrong, when it is quite clear you have no understanding of this, the technology or in fact the biology behind it.

Ok this is the ultimate humilation but I can't keep a plane flying straight and level in MS Flight sim There goes the old ego lol

Okay I'm going to put what my enterpretation of this article is in my own terms, I can see this thread smouldering already, this is impartial information and just the way I enterpret the article.

As far as I can tell, they have cultivated 25000 rat neurons this forms the "brain" if you will, they refer to the "brain" in quote marks, they ave not actually constructed a replica of a rats brain. The quote marks get lost in places in the article and if you arent careful it can quickly twist the meaning into making you think they have a real working sentient brain.
They have then connected this neural network aka "brain" up to a series of electrodes to measure and record the signals produced by the neural network when it is connected to the flight sim. However if you read the article closely you will see that they state that they can stimulate these cells artificially using the electrode grid and then measure the response. It is my enterpretation that this neural network must first be stimulated by the electrode grid in order to produce a certain response when certain conditions are met. For example when the neural network or "brain" is connected to the pc running the simulation, it will be stimulated in someway by signals coming from the pc. The electrode grid can then be used to "teach" the neural network how to respond to the signals recieved from the flight simulation program.

As far as I can tell they are hoping that they can continue to develop this research in order that they can one day create some sort of biological computer in order for the use of it for more sophisticated applications. Prosthetic limbs could be controlled in a much more sphisticated way with these neural networks as they could be programmed to control the actuators in the limb in direct response to stimulus by the users own nerve impulses and also from sensor data recieved from the sensors in the limb, ie presseure, temperature etc.

What they want is something that can function much like a regular computer, only with much faster speeds and some kind of capacity for 'learning' how to do its job more effectively based on the results of its actions, or via the inputting of further data from external sources at a later date. This is a long way off from having sentient and self aware computational devices so I dont think we need to worry about potential consequences and ethical problems just yet.

Thats what I said .....

I think those of the more religious persuasion, or those who haven't actually thought about what the article is saying have jumped to conclusions, and accused the rest of us of being immoral/not thinking etc etc......

(You know who I am talking about! Bring back Fox Hunting !!))