In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a game-world(2022)
cell.comThe fact that the perceptron is modeled after the neuron should make this an unsurprising find, but the question of active sentience starting as early as in vitro should give everyone pause for where personhood begins. That zinc spark.
>That zinc spark.
it's not a literal spark. it was a florescence caused by an expulsion of zinc ions during egg cortical reaction in the midst of FluoZin-3, a dye that binds to zinc and fluoresces.
I think that experiment does a bad job at explaining that, because every damn person in the world is using that as some kind of 'spark of life' analogy when really there is no easier way to prevent triploidy than to force everything away for a moment.
Describing the chemistry doesn't invalidate the metaphor. It's still the moment fertilization initiates embryonic development. Explaining the gears of a watch doesn't make "the moment it starts keeping time" any less real, nor does it explain time.
You have to squint really hard.
I was doing some modelling over Christmas, and was digging in to the papers. It turns out that bioneurons are not very much like perceptrons at all. Depending on type, they are more like a small microcontroller of some sort.
Sentience as defined in the paper is a really low bar. Personhood probably requires consciousness, if we could define and test for that.
at present, it's just a fun discussion
the complexity of advanced connectomes is so far beyond our imaging capabilities that we have no way of knowing how far away from understanding intelligence we are
Prior art: https://research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/extract2...
( "Brain" In A Dish Acts As Autopilot Living Computer, 2005 )
Good on them for defining what they mean by 'sentience'. I think it is the definition where my thermostat exhibits sentience.