Mostly from this post on linked in that had a petri dish of human brain cells learning to play doom. Part of me has seriously concerns about this because it raises some VERY uncomfortable questions about ourselves and what it means to be human, whether we really just reduce to nothing more than neurons and whether the person we take ourselves to be is just something “taught” and learning and nothing more meaningful or solid. I literally felt an existential crisis coming on by reading that.
I mean…what does it say about consciousness then?
The other thought is that I cannot see this leading anywhere good. This seems to be treading eerily close to slavery.
I’m sure many people have irrational reactions to news like this and start asking wild questions without even looking up what the thing actually is. Here is what the lab says
However, it’s not useful to compare the chips with human brains, he says. “Yes, it’s alive, and yes, it’s biological, but really what it is being used as is a material that can process information in very special ways that we can’t recreate in silicon.”
This wasn’t a peer reviewed experiment. It’s not science. It’s some programmers playing around with biology. It adds nothing to our understanding of consciousness.