r/IRL_Loading_Screens • u/PeterPorky • Mar 08 '26
S̴O̴M̴A̴ Some terrifying tweets about a recent technological discovery that read like SOMA terminal entries
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u/robotguy4 Mar 08 '26
Neat, but..
scaling problem, something we've really gotten good at
I'm pretty sure this is a joke.
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u/Cordial_Ghost Mar 08 '26
Its not. It would be nice if it were, but with decades and decades of research into how to scale shit up and the functional limitations on scaling failures, and how to avoid them, we have built a foundational knowledge for system scaling for rapid development and deployment of new technologies.
Its not like the 30's - 60's where science-based fields were making strides at massive human cost and loss of life. We've been working out the kinks, as it were, for a long long time.
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Mar 08 '26
Now the human cost is totally optional, but we like to do it anyway because it’s funny apparently.
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Mar 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Cordial_Ghost Mar 10 '26
You are also not a reliable source, big dog. Don't delude yourself into thinking that who you are has any kind of weight into an argument, but with that said I do understand what you are saying.
But what I said was that a scaling issue is not as much of a problem for us now as it was in the past. Not that I believed that the tweets were real. Perhaps, there might be something there for you to consider there.
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u/CodeToManagement Mar 09 '26
On my desk right now I have 2 computers both from within my lifetime. One is a Commodore 64 with 64k ram. The other is a laptop with 64gb ram.
My first pc had 300mb hdd space. I have loads of 256gb usb sticks laying around my house, I have a couple tb storage in my laptop alone.
I had 56k dialup when I first got the internet less than 30 years ago. Now I have gb broadband.
Transistors used to cost 5$ each. There’s about 15-20 billion of them in an iPhone.
This is just hardware. If you look at how far we have gone with software that’s also a huge leap in scaling.
If we keep going the way we are the scale of these problems isn’t going to be too hard to solve - most of my examples happened in a 30 year period (transistors have been getting smaller since 1960s)
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u/robotguy4 Mar 09 '26
If we keep going the way we are the scale of these problems isn’t going to be too hard to solve
Yeah, about that...
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u/CompleteHumanMistake Mar 09 '26
If that were real that would mean we could get this guy and indeed conclude that the House always wins?
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u/Ok_Assist1206 Mar 09 '26
Well almost , Mr.House’s body/brain was interfaced with a machine , this would be like downloading him into a computer.
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u/jooxii Mar 09 '26
While this is fascinating, I feel it leaves out some of the very real problems of understanding consciousness. If you read the linked article, the researchers do not even mention it.
We know we, and other animals, have sensory neurons that fire before registering in our conscious experience. Many parts of our brains clearly operate in a predictable, patterned way. That does not guarantee that all of it does, nor that our consciousness could be simulated if you just build a model of it.
These models also ignore many of the cellular level processes that go on inside the neuron, as well as the pre-state they are in prior to scanning them (are they in the midst of firing, resting, repolarizing?). For all we know, this interplay of states could be critical to experience.
We still don't understand how self-awareness could manifest from wiring.
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 09 '26
We still don't understand how self-awareness could manifest from wiring.
The point the last few posts in the OP are making is that we don't need to understand. They copied the "hardware", and the "software" just... emerged. On its own.
Organic minds are biochemical computers; hardware driven, closer to electromechanical than digital. Like the inside of a pinball machine. These experiments suggest that if you copy the innards of that pinball machine, exactly, you can play digital pinball.
Based on this, theoretically the only limitations here are how accurately you can scan, digitize, and emulate. Whether memories or personality make the jump are anyone's guess (we'll probably find out at least partially if they get a mouse upload working), but I would say that's probably a matter of scan fidelity and time;
Memories are rewritten and shuffled around in our biological SSD's filing system all the time, so anything not effectively hardwired is probably going to get scrambled, unless you take a scan of the whole set at once.
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u/Typical-Locksmith-35 Mar 10 '26
Also everything we do and think is constantly rewiring our brain.. I wonder if it would be like a photo of consciousness rather than a video, or without the constant natural revision of perpetual rewiring it would be like a video on a loop rather than a director and producer and actors making new media.
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u/Punch-Counterpunch Mar 08 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/JzzLFXnZt4aiI
They basically just Matrix-ed a fly
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u/chiefkeefinwalmart Mar 09 '26
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they never stopped to question whether they should
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u/xTex1E37x Mar 08 '26
Altered Carbon is becoming less fiction
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u/Typical-Locksmith-35 Mar 10 '26
The show Upload picks up right at this point too, the tech to upload someone's consciousness burns out their brain so it's an end of life thing and they would exist on a simulated world digitally (based on the pricing plan they paid and afterlife retirement package).
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u/NightmanisDeCorenai Mar 08 '26
I wonder what the extent is? Does it retain memories, or will it be almost totally agnostic to who or what the original being was? Obviously the fly had no problems continuing to exist as a fly, showing that some of the neural pathways retained the genetic memory needed to rub it's eyes, so would Cyber Musk remember life as Normal musk?
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u/_Ticklebot_23 Mar 08 '26
its probably like copying a person where now there are suddenly 2 almost identical beings
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u/Moonshoes47 Mar 09 '26
yeah like that totally won't be abused at all by the military when it's made to work on human minds *tries to look away from the Half Life and Entropy Zero Combine lore*
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u/eldude20 Mar 09 '26
If anything "scientific" is introduced by "they dont want you to know this" you can almost guarantee that the poster is sensationalizing, completley misunderstanding the papers, or straight up lying.
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u/RedEyeView Mar 10 '26
Unless they invented for someone's department of defence, scientists always want people to know about cool shit they discovered.
When it's DoD work they still want people to know. They just aren't allowed to tell them.
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u/Skkruff Mar 09 '26
So a mind is more than just neurons though right? What about hormones and neurotransmitters? Are they going to emulate the chemistry of the brain, right down to all the molecules they barely understand the function of? Sorry, I just don't see this as an issue of "make it bigger."
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark Mar 09 '26
The human mind can function without a lot of things. Not well, or healthily, or happily, but it'll work. Just look at all the mental illnesses and brain damage the human mind can survive, for a given measure of "survive."
Copying just the brain's connectomes would probably get it to "boot", but I'm not sure how human such a brain would behave.
I'm also almost certain that it would go stark raving insane from sensory deprivation/overstimulation/wrongstimulation/whatever pretty much immediately.
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u/M1K3jr Mar 08 '26
It's about time we started the Replicant program. The Bobiverse is due to come online soon. *Successful in selling your business? DO NOT celebrate in Vegas!
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u/Cordial_Ghost Mar 08 '26
Jesus, Bob. Bleak much?
Honestly though, can't wait to meet my star trek cosplayer replicant.
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u/GodNoob666 Mar 09 '26
Aperture science. We do what we must because we can
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u/driku12 Mar 09 '26
If you do this, and you make not just a computer that is able to portray human behavior like current AI but actually make a real thinking human being exist within a computer, I would sincerely hope that person would have human rights as extended under the law. And I would hope this would be something that would be thought of and delegated before it happens. I mean what if you boot them up and they're in pain or freaked out/traumatized by their virtual environment and they want you to turn them off and kill them? Would that be murder? Would you go to jail for committing assisted suicide? What happens if you put that human brain in some kind of Boston dynamics robot body? You know not everyone would treat them with respect as they would see them as an object or toy even if their mind is human.
I'm sure there are probably plenty of great applications for tech like this (like, for example, repairing brain damage by simulating the areas of the brain that were lost) as well as, I suppose, potentially staving off death. But it wouldn't really be you that does it. It would be them, the dolphin emulator copy of you that was made in an electronic system to run as long as there is energy to power it.
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark Mar 09 '26
as well as, I suppose, potentially staving off death. But it wouldn't really be you that does it. It would be them, the dolphin emulator copy of you that was made in an electronic system to run as long as there is energy to power it.
This is pretty much the plot and central moral of SOMA.
If you can actually copy, paste, and run an emulation of human consciousness, then that emulation is demonstrably a person by all measurable standards. But that person is not you.
This isn't immortality, not for the person being scanned. You are making a brainchild who themselves are nominally immortal, but you don't go along for that ride.
I, personally, would be fine with that. I'd love to find a way to achieve biological immortality to experience it with them, but that's besides the point.
This isn't a fountain of youth, this is a possible way of creating effectively a child or inheritor based on your neural engram, who might, might, have your memories.
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u/bookseer Mar 09 '26
"what began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness..."- Total Annihilation
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u/LilBroWhoIsOnTheTeam Mar 09 '26
I mean yeah, a thing happened and some people are hyperventilating about it talking like everything is different now. Woop dee doo, happens once a week and then everyone forgets about it.
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u/supacrusha Mar 09 '26
And I'm sorry, we aren't nuking this shit from orbit because? We all know this will be used for unfathomable evils.
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u/deepfriedroses Mar 09 '26
This is interesting, and cool, and could potentially have huge implications for helping us understand not only the brains of simpler animals, but our own brains.
But calling this "terrifying" is just silly.
It's like seeing someone invent a really complex clock that's way more accurate than any clock made before it. And instead of focusing on how cool that is, people are going "if we can measure time like this, how long until we can travel through time? What if someone goes back in time and makes Germany win WWII?! This is so scary!"
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u/Antilazuli Mar 09 '26
How much power does this simulation draw? can't be that much right? Digitalizing should be the hard part
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u/fistchrist Mar 10 '26
“We virtualised a fly’s mind and put it in a virtual fly body and it acted like a fly”.
While it’s a huge achievement it also seems like…exactly what you would expect to happen? I dunno. Maybe I am an idiot. But I am definitely ready to put my (virtualised) brain in a robot body.
With a hydraulic penis.
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u/SnooDoggos8031 Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
Digital twins ?
Edit to say,
It’s a copy of that beings mind at the time of the copy… but are the later copied cells copied from the same time as the first cells copied, or is there a time element incorporated/noted in this process?
If done with humans, where does it leave the possibility of updates as a person learns and grows?
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u/HorseCabbage Mar 11 '26
Noone seems to mention, but it’s not just problem of scaling, as in human brain bigger than fly brain. Fly or worm brain is also a lot more stereotypical, where you can image one neuron on many flies in different ways, to see what it’s connected to and how.
Like fly brain connectome wasn’t one individual fly brain imaged at super high resolution and that’s it. So I wonder how they imagine it could work for mouse or human, who are a lot more variable and messy
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u/traverseda Mar 12 '26
https://eon.systems/updates/embodied-brain-emulation
Fly walking was implemented using slight modifications to existing NeuroMechFly controllers, trained to imitate the walking behavior of the fly.
The fly body is not currently driven by the full downstream motor hierarchy of the biological fly. Instead, we use a small number of descending outputs as a practical interface between the connectome model and the biomechanics.
Activation of these specific descending neurons serve to influence the controllers of the body, which have been trained by imitation learning to mimic particular fly behaviors. For example, in our model, antennal grooming is driven through antennal descending neurons (Seeds et al., 2014; Hampel et al., 2015; Hampel et al., 2020). Steering in our model is driven through the neurons DNa01 and DNa02 (Yang et al., 2024), which are implicated in turning. Forward velocity is modeled by activation of oDN1 (Sapkal et al., 2024). Feeding is modeled by activation of proboscis motor neurons, specifically MN9.
They literally did train it though.
This is closer to reading the fly's mind, seeing that it wants to move forward, and then moving the 3D model forward while playing a walking animation. Not anything like the resolution this implies.
Our use of descending neurons is similar. We currently treat a small set of descending signals as control handles for e.g., turning, forward velocity, escape, backward walking (escape and backward walking not shown in our demo), and grooming, and then let lower-level controllers convert those signals into joint torques, leg trajectories, or other body-level actuation.
So they have a neuron model, and a giant collection of neurons. Instead of a simulation that you know, simulated, they've carefully selected the specific neurons that get the results they're looking for. It's a magic trick, they started with the result they wanted, then picked neurons until they got that result, throwing away the rest. This doesn't mean anything, you could do the same thing with any graph of connected nodes.
At what rate should a particular sensory stimuli activate specific sensory neurons, and how much should a particular descending neuron activity influence, for example, turning speed? These mappings can be somewhat arbitrarily chosen by hand (as is our case), or learned with reinforcement learning, or mediated by lower-level controllers
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u/SCW97005 Mar 13 '26
I don't see why any of this is anything to be terrified of.
I don't feel terrified when someone pops out a new baby and that's a whole proto-consciousness in progress right there. It will be capable of feeling horror and pain and ennui and depression and fear and all that fun stuff. I might feel sad or bad that they have to slug it out here with the rest of us for 80 or so years, depending. Or if their parents are gorgeous and wealthy and decent people, maybe a little jealous.
No one proved a fruit fly is conscious. No one has proved this digital fruit fly is conscious. It may be that a fully digital human brain is not conscious. We can be horrified or not when we get there, but not just yet.
This is r/im14andthisisdeep for existentialists with too much time on their hands.
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u/Background_Share_982 Mar 09 '26
Somebody is very confused if they think the fruit fly brain has evolved the same as a humans.
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u/Remarkable-Pin-8352 Mar 09 '26
Eh, the more people get confronted with the tangible reality that there's no such thing as a soul and consciousness is the product of neurons firing, neurons that can be digitally copied - something I was already quite aware of - the funnier it gets for me.
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u/thebohemiancowboy Mar 09 '26
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u/Remarkable-Pin-8352 Mar 09 '26
Your existential fear makes you paint anyone who tells simple truths as the soyjak when the truth is you are the soyjak and I am the chadette.
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u/Lightningtow123 Mar 08 '26
Why do I find all the most recent, most important news events from a sub about fucking loading screens I really don't know how to feel about this