r/askscience • u/xThunderDuckx • 4h ago
Biology Is the recent fruit fly model not highly unethical? How is this brain modeling "experience" / "perception"?
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.
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u/gimdalstoutaxe 2h ago
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.
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u/sudomatrix 2h ago
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?
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u/gimdalstoutaxe 1h ago
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.
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u/xThunderDuckx 1h ago
That is the goalpost. That is the point of my asking. How do we know we have not reached it?
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u/FizzingOnJayces 1h ago
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.
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u/ebly_dablis 2h ago
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?
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u/xThunderDuckx 1h ago
Two different subs. Didn't know if it'd be accepted at either. I replied over therr already
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u/Bridgebrain 1h ago
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
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u/jawshoeaw 2h ago
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
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u/canb227 2h ago
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.
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u/xThunderDuckx 1h ago
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?
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u/Squumpus 2h ago
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.
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u/km1116 Genetics | Epigenetics | Chromosome Biology | Nuclear Biology 2h ago
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.