Melbourne startup launches 'biological computer' made of human brain cells
abc.net.auI understand it's early days, but that is horrifying.
At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
Arggg sounded like it was about to be a killer book, alas a good meme though
This is how the Daleks come about.
OI mate! You got a loicense to exterminate?
Just think… if we can get it up to a few million cells and provide it with a blood supply, maybe even lungs and a heart, we might be able to model a mouse!
Really hoping human brain cells don't necessarily create consciousness, in this case.
> hundreds of thousands of live human brain cells
A human brain has like six orders of magnitude more cells than that chip. A single ant has 250,000 neurons. A crow brain has 1,500,000,000. I don't think we have to worry yet.
But how would you know? With a patient who has locked-in syndrome they can sense and think but have no ability to move or communicate. How could you tell if your fish brain (or future AI model) has the capacity to think or suffer?
To answer the rhetorical: We don't know (and possibly can't know).
You’re worried about a “brain” that has orders of magnitude fewer neurons than an ant but in the meanwhile we birth, enslave, sexually abuse, torture and kill over 80 billion land animals that definitely have conscience, sentience and a capacity to suffer.
I do appreciate the concern. It’s very valid but unfortunately pales relative to awful atrocities we humans are enacting everyday in the billions.
Emphasis in "yet"
someone doesn't remember y2k.
Imagine that every individual cell is conscious, and that consciousness is a binary quality.
Ok. So the brain cell is individually conscious. Won't be conscious of much, it has no sense organs. Just lost in its own thoughts?
Perhaps nerve endings within "sense organs" offer a level of abstraction in propagating information to a consciousness somewhere else.
Consider happiness. Possibly a cell feels happy when there's plenty of energy and its cellular processes are working well. Possibly it feels something else leading up to apoptosis.
That's pretty much how it felt when I experienced an ego death on mushrooms. My sense of self shattered and I could feel that I was emerging from a deep resonance in the consciousness of my cells.
Imagine that it isn't. What use is imagining something without the slightest shred of evidence?
Panpsychism in various forms has historically held sway with many philosophers. It’s really the Occam’s razor for consciousness.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
This reminds me of Minds Beneath Us. Mankind really has no limits, and who decides where to stop anyway?
What I really found interesting was that you could create neurons from blood & connect them together ?
I am not a biologist but I am wondering , can we create something like an immortal neuron ? I know that there are these water pigs / tardigrades which are very small and they look cute , can such tardigrades like organic matter be used for things like neuron , and also I am wondering. Can we really take a exact copy of these biological computers in terms of storage / data ? That way biological computers can still be conserved forever ?
I just found out starfish don't have a brain .... This is so fascinating
Starfish, also known as sea stars, do not have a brain in the traditional sense. Instead, they possess a nerve net that allows them to function and respond to stimuli. This nerve net is a distributed system of slow neurons that operate more like a simple computer program rather than a complex brain
So starfish are also like this.
Also out of topic but
I had also seen this muscle robot the other day combine this here with this and it can be absolutely nuts
Similar to the brain cheese in rifters that betrays humanity because it koves simple patterns
I imagine training time would be an issue with biological computers. Waiting for chemicals means a very low clock speed. And you can't run a 100 training jobs in parallel and merge them.
I think it only has to learn how to interface with DeepSeek.
What kind of problems can it solve better than traditional software and hardware?
this is very good news. does it change the ethical concerns if we are using them to transport consciousness to other planets instead of just using them in a lab? I think it does. nature is pretty savage. extending consciousness off world as best we can seems like a natural imperative. I have the sense that programs for organic machines may ultimately resemble music as well.
"current systems are too primitive to feel or understand."
Is there evidence to suggest that if it can feel or understand, that would actually be an issue?
Every day millions of sentient beings are killed for human consumption and millions more wait in torturous conditions.
It would be odd if there was outrage over a bio computer, but not over, say, the practice of using cows and pigs for food, which feel pain, have rich emotional lives, and have the inteligence of at least small children.
It would not be odd. Outrage is emotion, and logic has little impact. Especially dealing with groups rather than individuals. But even individuals will rationalize their boiled-alive lobster dinner, which is normal in their worldview, while decrying something new they impulsively dislike. And then forget the rationalization entirely, because that is how brains work. Getting the untrained to adjust their worldview, the model of the world their minds use to make decisions, is really difficult as the brain actively defends the model that has worked well so far.
Well said.
Agreed. It unfortunately wouldn't be odd at all.
I was able help with Christpiracy.com which has some wild mental gymnastics on display.
this does seem like it would skip a lot of the questions about whether it’s even possible to make a machine intelligence
Naively, isn’t this the obvious first step?
The only known thing to have produced general intelligence is biological. Why would the first artificial general intelligence be a computer? We don’t even know what the brain does.
What’s the chances we stumble upon a hardware and software combination that was sufficient first go?
I think it would have more questions than answers. When he learns what we've done he is going to be so mad. lol
Pretty sure Doctor Who destroyed that lab in Genesis of the Daleks.
Maybe that's in the future, not sure.