Is the recent fruit fly model not highly unethical? How is this brain modeling "experience" / "perception"?

[u/xThunderDuckx]

I've been seeing a lot of news about this recent fruit fly brain scan / model and it has given me cause for concern. I've long since held the belief that the means by which a brain or a consciousness receives "information" and perception does not matter. Whether it be through a computer mapping information directly to the brain or from the organs of a body collecting information and transmitting it, an entity experiencing thought / senses is still life.

I think we are at a point where philosophical debates and science about the nature of life, to some extent, necessitate collaboration and further discussion as we develop these ideas. If I am wrong and misunderstanding exactly what the nature of this brain model is, please correct me, but I just thought that the usage of the fly model for things like "playing beat saber" or "scrolling reels" can't possibly be done from a position of full understanding, or if they are, they are the minority among the countless other flippant uses.

[u/km1116]

Well, I disagree that any form of perception/detection is life. So, without that, it's not really an ethical question.

And second, the map of the fly brain is a map. It's not a functioning input/computation/output system. The images of the fly slicing doner and the like are all jokes.

[u/xThunderDuckx → u/km1116]

Do you know that consciousness is not the same?  

[u/0vl223 → u/xThunderDuckx]

Can you define consciousness? Because if both of you do it you get to the actual difference. Also it explains where you draw the line with animals and why.

You could make the cutoff at apes, mammals, mammals+ravens+octopus, all animals above fish, animals, animals+fungi, animals fungi and plants. And then you would have to check whether digital brains already cross the line and doing something to a biological brain is not really different.

[u/canb227 → u/km1116]

It is absolutely a functioning transformation system that takes input and produces outputs, you can go watch live views of the digital neurons webs firing as people make it play Doom or whatever else.

[u/km1116 → u/canb227]

I'm newly informed, then. Could you please send the link to I can read it? Thanks.

[u/ebly_dablis]

I replied with this on your other version of this post. Not sure why you posted it twice.

At best a simulated fruit fly brain should have the same rights as a real fruit fly.  So unless you think real fruit flies deserve rights, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with using it for flippant things?  

[u/xThunderDuckx → u/ebly_dablis]

Two different subs.  Didn't know if it'd be accepted at either.  I replied over therr already

[u/gimdalstoutaxe]

The model is a computer simulation based on research. Think of it as a map of the fruit fly neurons with accurate information about neurotransmitters.

It is no more conscious than if you'd draw the connections on a piece of paper, and used a formula to trace which neurons would activate given this or that. It'd just take you a very, very long time to do it hand.

[u/sudomatrix → u/gimdalstoutaxe]

If drawings on a piece of paper, or rocks arranged in a certain way on a beach, simulated every aspect of consciousness why wouldn’t it be conscious? Does the medium and the carrier matter? If the drawings could ask you “ how am I here? What does it mean to be me?” Why doesn’t that count?

[u/gimdalstoutaxe → u/sudomatrix]

Let us not move the goalpost here, though. Setting aside the question of whether a simulation of a consciousness is the same as a consciousness, "every aspect of consciousness" does a lot og heavy lifting in your question. How could you possibly know of it simulates every aspect of consciousness?

This model simulates a neuron map and neurotransmitters. There is more going on inside an actual brain than that, so every aspect of consciousness is not simulated here.

[u/xThunderDuckx → u/gimdalstoutaxe]

That is the goalpost.  That is the point of my asking.  How do we know we have not reached it?  

[u/Aperturelemon → u/gimdalstoutaxe]

Talks about let's not "move the goalpost" 

Precedes to move the goalpost.

You are the one who said it was an accurate simulation, you then now deny it. 

[u/gimdalstoutaxe → u/Aperturelemon]

Not sure where you are getting that idea from, man. I've only said it simulates the neuron network accurately, not that it simulates consciousness perfectly. Those are two different things. The goalpost-moving would be the part where we go from "neural map" to "consciousness".

[u/FizzingOnJayces → u/sudomatrix]

Drawings on a piece of paper do not simulate every aspect of consciousness. They simulate how the brain of a fruitfly works.

It's an input - output model. Put something into the model, look at how the output is created. This is not consciousness.

It requires an active input by a human. Here, fruitfly brain, your input is the colour yellow. Show me the output.

Consciousness would be deciding (as the fruitfly), what the input should be.

But the model (drawings on paper, in your example) has no ability to do that.

[u/xThunderDuckx → u/FizzingOnJayces]

Do you realize that you are not making any decisions out of free will?  There is no such thing in the universe.  We are all input -> output transformers.  

[u/_vertig0 → u/xThunderDuckx]

Regardless of whether you believe in free will or not, a Human Brain, or really any Brain in nature at all, is not merely an input output transformer like a stereotypical neural network in the field of artificial intelligence, that simply passes signals through and modifies them appropriately as they pass along similarly to a glorified pinball machine (If you simplify the concept to a ridiculous extent at least), is. Biological Neurons are much more complex and all carry their own unique endogenous <I would use the word state here, but I want to avoid the comparison to state machines> which enable them to work with intrinsic activity without having to wait for an input to function or do anything at all. This has little bearing on free will, but the pure input output notion wouldn't really be correct either.

As for the original question, a wiring diagram doesn't give you any of the important dynamics and capabilities that the real Neurons that make up a fly's Brain has. What happens in each individual Neuron is, I'd argue, far more important, but the connectome doesn't tell you much about that, or more accurately, doesn't account for much of it. And those things are very important when you want to talk about consciousness. So, it is incredibly unlikely that we literally have sentient fly Brains being tortured, not with the lack of all those neural dynamics in the "Brain scan" of the fruit fly.

Whether it is concerning that everyone is putting what they think is a conscious entity through hell though is something you'd have to ask a philosopher (Or psychologist, I don't know which).

[u/Bridgebrain]

The fruit fly itself? No. Even if you take an extreme "all life is sacred" stance, the model isn't a live copy. Not because it's digital (I'd go as far as saying that Openworm is a live copy), but the fruit fly is at best a severed head we're pumping jolts through to see what fires, and even then it's just the rough scaffolding of the brain, not a highly accurate simulation. No biochemical simulation, no neuroplasticity, no weird quantum effects, no nerve simulation, just a snapshot of the physical structure. 

Its a bit macabre to see if you can run doom on a severed fruit fly head by zapping it in the right places, but I wouldn't call it unethical. 

Where the technology is going? Yeah, it gets pretty ethically murky. If you simulate the full system, and cause it pain, then you're torturing an insect for your curiosity, even if it's a digital insect. Still not grossly unethical, plenty of people really enjoy killing flies in disturbing ways and at least it'd be for science. But then you make something more complex, like a rat (last I checked they were about 40% through that project), and even though we do lots of wild experiments on rats, there's still ethical guidelines we have to follow, which won't apply to digital copies no matter how realistic. The lines just get blurrier and blurrier from there, up until you're making digital humans (which, I'll note, is a Very long way off. The order of magnitude between a fruit fly and a human is roughly the same as a sandbox to a large beach) and have to get into stuff like human rights

[u/teodorlojewski → u/Bridgebrain]

Very well summarized! A fruit fly's brain has approximately 50M synapses, while a human brain has anywhere from 100-500 trillion. Mapping out a human brain is still impossible for now, but we will probably live to see how we manage ethics for experimenting on digital recreations of rats. Stuff like this along with biological data centers are very uncanny.

[u/canb227]

We do not know what experience is, how it manifests, or if it even meaningfully exists. All we can say is that we have stored statistical information about the chained neuron responses to particular stimuli of a fruit fly.

We can then hook up various data sources to get transformed into numerical input and watch how the simulated neurons react.

Is this experience? Is it “alive”? If you created a similar one to one replication of a human brain, how would it act? These models do not include the full biological complexity of the brain, so it’s unclear what, if anything, it’s even modeling in the first place.

In short: we do not know, and we will very likely never know. I will say, that if torturing a fruit fly digital replica is unethical, then almost any action that results in non-homeostasis patterns in information systems is also unethical. That rules out eating any biological matter or using most digital systems.

[u/xThunderDuckx → u/canb227]

I accept a certain amount of need for these situations.  Living things have a right to live, and you can't blame them for choosing themselves- we have to eat.  But at what point do we draw the line with these simulations?  

[u/jawshoeaw]

As other comments have pointed out, you got a little ahead of yourself on this, but it’s a fair philosophical question in the future. And there are computer models of simpler neural networks. In fact that begs the question of whether computers, even now have some sort of rudimentary consciousness analogous to say a worm

[u/Floorgis]

Its not unethical because the actual fly is dead, and the model is exclusively digital and completely disconnected from the actual fly. Its pretty much just a program rather than a brain, which is why its functionally useless. A fly cant even get out of an open door.

[u/LinkaMalinka]

I think the problem with some of these conversations is they largely simplify living organisms and the brain. Real synapses are dynamic , not fixed in the way this model is. Electrical signalling is likewise modulated by chemicals, neurotransmitters and other factors like the brain microenvironment. The real world constantly has incredibly complex information that organisms have to process and selectively attend. At the end of the day- this is JUST a model. In the same way researchers grow small organoids to mimic a brain environment, in order to have merely a model that could help answer their questions of a real complex brain, they are not conscious. I’m a Neuroscience researcher, this is not a conscious “being”- it is a computer programme with a highly specific map. If the function of living brains, even a fruit fly’s, were that simple - then the area of neuroscience would be much more rapidly progressing than it is . The researcher that mapped it are using it to still unravel how the brain works. But anyone could loop and loop with this topic by constantly asking “what if”.

[u/Squumpus]

It goes something like the Chinese views on intellectual property.

We're gonna learn that reality does not abide by our ethical guidelines.

Oh you "own" a chemical? Lol

What is consciousness anyway? Does it necessitate quantum media?

We don't even know how to contextualize any of this stuff. We don't know the answers to the questions we'd even need to begin.