What a fascinating article! I have so many questions and tangents I want to ask about. Apologies in advance.
Have you read Scalzi's Lock In series? I ask because of your focus on Autism. I understand that these are different things, but the most severe cases of Autism seem to share traits of the disease in Scalzi's book. I ask because I'm curious about your take on the series.
Switching to non-fiction. Have you read Jeff Hawkins' book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence? The basic premise of the book/theory is that many parts of the cortex are running partial models in parallel. So the different parts of the cortex kind of 'vote' as a way to settle into agreement and create these map-like frames of reference that allows us to understand the world around us. This *could* have implications for how we build AI in that it may affect the strategies used by people like Demis Hassabis or Yann LeCun in how they build world models for AIs... if the industry ever switches from LLMs.
Back to fiction. Have you read David Brin's Uplift series? As a scientist what's your ethical take on the concept of raising the intelligence of various animals or species? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
What are your thoughts about studies done by Cortical Labs where they have cultivated lab-grown neurons as a substrate on a microchip and then had those neurons play games: Pong and Doom. Is this proof of concept for a future of biological computing?
Well, answering any of my questions will probably involve a mini-essay. So, I'll stop machine-gunning questions at you. Thanks for taking the time to introduce me to chemogenetics. It really is an interesting concept.
Thank you for all your questions! Admittedly, I don't think my answers would be as great as I'd like, but at the very least it looks like I'm updating my tbr!
I haven't read the Lock In series, but that sounds interesting! It'll definitely be something I'll be looking into!
I've not read Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, but that hypothesis makes sense and feeds into something really interesting discovered in recent years! One of my favorite brain regions is a region called the Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis and recent research has been considering this part of the brain is important for interpreting information and then passing along significant parts of that information to other regions. So the BNST receives inputs from your sensory system, your memory regions, and other significant emotion parts of your brain. Researchers are hypothesizing that it receives all this input to act as sort of a security measure to determine what's going on. This is specifically important because the BNST links to your adrenal gland through the HPA axis which can basically trigger your fight or flight when releasing stress hormones. So in a way, the BNST is receiving different 'opinions' from different parts of the brain and your sensory system and then 'deciding' how to use that information in the periphery of your nervous system! So I do think that hypothesis has a lot of merit, but the important part of our brains is different regions can act as integration systems as well!
Okay I also haven't read the Uplift series, BUT I'm not entirely sure what I think of that from an ethical stance. I guess my ultimate question would be why would we do it? When I think of how we as humans scale intelligence, I think of it from a more evolutionary perspective. When people think of 'fitness' they think of the strongest animal, but fitness in an evolutionary sense is really about being well adapted to our environments, so in regards to raising animals intelligence, I wonder are we raising their intelligence by human standards- making their brains more human like? Or are we raising the intelligence in relation to their survivability within their environments? I'm assuming the book focuses more on a human scale of intelligence rather than a species fitness within their environmental niche but still... I think that's an interesting difference to discuss too!
I am familiar with those studies! I do think to some degree this could be baby steps towards a sort biomechnical fusing! It reminds me of something I've been thinking about (for fiction purposes) about how a prosthetic could fuse to a nervous system to make an amputees prosthetic more responsive and improved upon. I think this could be the beginnings of developing an interface, especially if we could get IPSCs develop in dish and specialize to a cell that interfaces best with different electrical/mechanical pieces... it's something worth thinking about (at least for me)
Thank you for these questions! Feel free to ask more if you'd like!
What a fascinating article! I have so many questions and tangents I want to ask about. Apologies in advance.
Have you read Scalzi's Lock In series? I ask because of your focus on Autism. I understand that these are different things, but the most severe cases of Autism seem to share traits of the disease in Scalzi's book. I ask because I'm curious about your take on the series.
Switching to non-fiction. Have you read Jeff Hawkins' book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence? The basic premise of the book/theory is that many parts of the cortex are running partial models in parallel. So the different parts of the cortex kind of 'vote' as a way to settle into agreement and create these map-like frames of reference that allows us to understand the world around us. This *could* have implications for how we build AI in that it may affect the strategies used by people like Demis Hassabis or Yann LeCun in how they build world models for AIs... if the industry ever switches from LLMs.
Back to fiction. Have you read David Brin's Uplift series? As a scientist what's your ethical take on the concept of raising the intelligence of various animals or species? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
What are your thoughts about studies done by Cortical Labs where they have cultivated lab-grown neurons as a substrate on a microchip and then had those neurons play games: Pong and Doom. Is this proof of concept for a future of biological computing?
Well, answering any of my questions will probably involve a mini-essay. So, I'll stop machine-gunning questions at you. Thanks for taking the time to introduce me to chemogenetics. It really is an interesting concept.
Thank you for all your questions! Admittedly, I don't think my answers would be as great as I'd like, but at the very least it looks like I'm updating my tbr!
I haven't read the Lock In series, but that sounds interesting! It'll definitely be something I'll be looking into!
I've not read Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, but that hypothesis makes sense and feeds into something really interesting discovered in recent years! One of my favorite brain regions is a region called the Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis and recent research has been considering this part of the brain is important for interpreting information and then passing along significant parts of that information to other regions. So the BNST receives inputs from your sensory system, your memory regions, and other significant emotion parts of your brain. Researchers are hypothesizing that it receives all this input to act as sort of a security measure to determine what's going on. This is specifically important because the BNST links to your adrenal gland through the HPA axis which can basically trigger your fight or flight when releasing stress hormones. So in a way, the BNST is receiving different 'opinions' from different parts of the brain and your sensory system and then 'deciding' how to use that information in the periphery of your nervous system! So I do think that hypothesis has a lot of merit, but the important part of our brains is different regions can act as integration systems as well!
Okay I also haven't read the Uplift series, BUT I'm not entirely sure what I think of that from an ethical stance. I guess my ultimate question would be why would we do it? When I think of how we as humans scale intelligence, I think of it from a more evolutionary perspective. When people think of 'fitness' they think of the strongest animal, but fitness in an evolutionary sense is really about being well adapted to our environments, so in regards to raising animals intelligence, I wonder are we raising their intelligence by human standards- making their brains more human like? Or are we raising the intelligence in relation to their survivability within their environments? I'm assuming the book focuses more on a human scale of intelligence rather than a species fitness within their environmental niche but still... I think that's an interesting difference to discuss too!
I am familiar with those studies! I do think to some degree this could be baby steps towards a sort biomechnical fusing! It reminds me of something I've been thinking about (for fiction purposes) about how a prosthetic could fuse to a nervous system to make an amputees prosthetic more responsive and improved upon. I think this could be the beginnings of developing an interface, especially if we could get IPSCs develop in dish and specialize to a cell that interfaces best with different electrical/mechanical pieces... it's something worth thinking about (at least for me)
Thank you for these questions! Feel free to ask more if you'd like!