That said, I think it still presents itself as if the fly is being controlled by the connectome, when (if I'm reading the source correctly) it's more accurate to say scripted behaviors have been hooked up to be triggered by the connectome.
Put another way, you might as well have the "escape" trigger open a YouTube video of a fly flying away. That would probably be less misleading too.
Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
If you do not think of fruit flies as moral patients, sure, yeah, who cares, they're like just fruit flies you know?
0) Subjecting fruitfly life to this kind of treatment is unethical.
1) Life is just physics in action.
2) Physics are just algorithm (or our physical world is a simulation)
It is not hard to understand why they think it is unethical.
My question are
1) is all life equal?
2) is all suffering unethical?
3) is this world materialistic or are there something out there?
4) should a list of items begin with 0 or 1?
Probably not. People have been coming up with ethical frameworks for thousands of years and we have yet to come to a consensus.
So it’s very unlikely that someone can say conclusively whether this is ethical or not, because that would require us to either 1) prove a single ethical framework is correct and then apply that framework to this software or 2) prove that under all possible ethical frameworks this software is either ethical or not ethical.
But "The Amazing Digital Circus" explores this concept relating to human brain scans, and how the 'simulated' brains would react under simulation.
It describes in part how some volunteer brain scans are actually quite agreeable to work with until they work for too many hours, and then they get fussy, but it's cool, you can always reboot them. But you need to hide from them the fact that it's been decades since they were scanned and uploaded, or they'll realize how long they've been slaves for.
> Honesty section:
I wouldn’t mind an human written README
This one gets to me. Not only is it useless (paragraph would have the same meaning if it was removed) but wdym "honesty section," Claude? The whole readme should be honest! One of the many causes of psychological damage when reading AI-generated technical writing is the reminder that one of its tics is that declares when it's being honest or real, casting doubt on the rest.
That hyphenated thing is always such a give. Clearly a thing discussed in the Claude conversation, made its way into the plan, then the readme. It always creates hyphenated phrases out of things it feels are core requirements.
I'm actually over caring about Claude's obsession with the concepts of "real", "honest", and "rather than". What annoys me the most now is how every single sentence, bullet, etc that even makes its way into the products it builds are advertisements for itself. Product settings pages now read like ads, or like something written by a student begging for extra credit from the teacher. You can't unsee it!
Honestly I think we're still discovering how powerful neural networks are and certainly they can do computations that sound very close to intelligence in some contexts, but I still find it hard to think that we can simplify the whole reality of an incredibly complex chemical machinery down to a bunch of matrices multiplications.
What these matrix multiplications are doing is approximately solving pretty high order differential equations.
The approximation is not very analog, sure. But neither is nature.
What detail level of reality would we have to emulate for an egg to grow into an adult animal?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
Compare this with a c elegens nematode: ~20000 protein coding genes and 959 cells, with all the extra machinery you'll find in a eukaryotic cell.
I'm reading this as both a question of raw simulation surface and combinatorics.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DMfi-9Vsl-u/
> Infinite Pain is a computer running a deterministic neural simulation of a microscopic nematode worm’s brain (c. elegans), subjected to regular pain stimuli.
I am asking Claude to port this to the browser and I'll host it, so you can try it without installing anything.
Some details about the port: Claude is able to do porting tasks like this. I'll put up a link when you can try it in your browser. I was able to get it to port the complete BitNet b1.58 2-billion parameter model several versions ago (in February, so this would have been Opus 4.5) to browser, so it can do so. This will run on the browser. I'll have it make it so that on mobile you can tap the fly or turn on the camera and it sees you, and same on desktop actually. Since the connectome is only 668 neurons, this will run super fast. Actually I'll make it allow for several flies, and let you drop food. I did something like this before here[1] but using the real connectome is something very different and very amazing. I'll have it add an experimental 3D mode with threejs, I'm not sure if that is also possible or not, we'll have to see it. This size of task usually takes Claude a few hours, so check my comment in the morning for the implementation, I'll reply here once it's done and hosted.
[1] https://stateofutopia.com/papers/1/evolving-brains-cull-long...
I was very excited the first time I saw a connectome as well. Years ago I managed to get most of openworm running and connected to some Lego Mindstorms to let the worm roll around my house. I'm not even sure the connectome was finished at that time.
Honestly, I barely had any idea what I was doing and we didn't have AI tools so I was never really sure what I wired to what. I did manage to hook... something to the ultrasound sensor and... another thing to the wheels so that when the sensor was triggered it would back up.
What blew my mind was the realization that these weird hybrid critters were probably the first true immortals. Now that we have a full connectome, who will bother with another? Students will probably just keep instantiating copies of this one to tinker with forever.