this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
39 points (100.0% liked)
Games
21262 readers
261 users here now
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
- No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or transphobia. Don't care if it's ironic don't post comments or content like that here.
- Mark spoilers
- No bad mouthing sonic games here :no-copyright:
- No gamers allowed :soviet-huff:
- No squabbling or petty arguments here. Remember to disengage and respect others choice to do so when an argument gets too much
- Anti-Edelgard von Hresvelg trolling will result in an immediate ban from c/games and submitted to the site administrators for review. :silly-liberator:
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is exactly my point though. You think these aren't conscious, yet nobody can define what consciousness is in a brain. Is a single thought consciousness? Is a thought created by the movement of signals in the brain? Does a thought require the storage of memories - and what structures or thresholds does that require? Nobody can measure a thought (if they can I'd love to see the study).
Nobody knows what the threshold is from a group of brain cells having electrical inputs and providing outputs (these organoids) to what we experience as thinking. But there is a threshold.
You have a good point about a fetus, actually. When does a developing fetus actually produce thinking and thoughts. This is something that we can't measure either, because we can't ask a fetus. But, fetuses move around in tummies and respond to sounds and movement. Do they have thoughts? Almost certainly, right? As much as a frog or a mouse or a worm. (Note: this is not a pro-life argument, I am certainly pro-choice).
We can measure brain activity, but looking at electrical and magnetic fields on a brain doesn't mean we understand what consciousness or a thought is.
Anyway, I guess my point is that if you "think" it's not thinking because it doesn't seem like it could be, that's my point. The ethics of this work is vibes based.
I don't think they're conscious, and you can't just say they're conscious because we can't prove they aren't. This is a great platform for studying neural pathway degredation though and I hope it bears fruit.
As some sort of torment nexus type tool, this is pointless, incredibly expensive, and impossible to train. It's hard enough to train regular humans to do simple tasks and they have the benefit of 15+ years of social education and constant interfacing with the real world.
Well it looks like we're at an impasse. And in that position I'd rather err on the side of caution. You talk about this like some kind of piece of technology, and ignore the fact that this is thousands of human brain cells working together to take inputs and provide outputs. You don't think they're conscious, I agree, but there's a wide gap between having a single thought or awareness and being conscious of its own existence. But without the knowledge of what a thought is, I really don't know how to be so sure of where we're at on this journey.
And about training, what are you talking about? It's hard to train people? Does this mean that people who can't learn a new skill are not as good as other people? I hope you're not, but I don't think it's a good example.
I never said that, I said that even in the absolute best case where it is a literal human brain in a jar, it's still a human brain. Humans already exist, and are already exploited for much less money than it would cost to maintain and train a jar brain.
I'm just saying there's no economic incentive for it. They want "AGI" because they read stories about "ASI" which is much more enticing to them than something that learns just as fast or slower than a normal human.