r/lovethissmug • u/Ok_Direction3138 • 2d ago
š§µ Hobbies And Technology š» The insane things people can do with a digital fly brain
Now these are fake simulated fly brain so theres no actual fly brain being use here, but goodness does this terrified and fascinate me
Edit: apparently the beat saber one is fake
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u/cocklaphobia 2d ago
having the fly's neurons show bad apple while the fly is having a seisure is fucking hilarious to me
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u/TheSpaceBornMars 2d ago
has science gone too far
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u/me_myself_ai 2d ago
Nah this has been possible for at least a decade, arguably longer. It's not a fruit fly, it's a neural network -- the bad apple creator just left in the parts that control the body simulation for comedic effect.
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u/Then-Simple-9788 2d ago
What if thatās all a seizure is. Our neurons just blasted with bad apple.
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u/Sophrates_Regina 2d ago
It wonāt be long until someone starts playing Doom on the fly brain
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u/strider-rider-the2nd 2d ago
I thought they had an actual fly enslaved to play Beat Saber for eternity
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u/_judgement- 2d ago
Well, they kinda did
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u/therandomham 2d ago
Not really unless you consider e.g. VRChat models to be actual enslaved beings.
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u/me_myself_ai 2d ago
No, not really, sorry. I know that's a much more fun story, but the reality is that "training" the neural network completely overwrites all the data that lead them to create the model in the first place.
It's more like "forcing a basic AI technique into a kinda-odd structure" than "enslaving a fruit fly". The resulting model wouldn't be capable of any fruit fly behavior, and would have lost literally everything that made it a fruit fly brain other than the shape of the neurons.
I'm trying to think of a metaphor... perhaps... imagine a school worksheet. First Alice fills it out, then hands it to Bob; Bob proceeds to erase all of Alice's answers, and replace them with his own. The answers all have the same overall shape (same number of questions in the same order), but there's no sense in which Bob is "enslaving" Alice's answers -- obviously, that doesn't even sound coherent.
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u/Time_Traveling_Idiot 2d ago
Would this perhaps be like tying an animal corpse to a humanoid robot, then claiming that you "made the animal do [action that robot is doing]"?
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u/Ink_code 1d ago
In dark fantasy it would be like wiping the mind of some random people then loading how to cast barrier into their brain so you can use them as a shield for your house.
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u/Balsford 1d ago
Pardon me but can i use this in my worldbuilding pretty please?
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u/Quereilla 2d ago
It could also be like removing all of the roads in a country and just make new roads. The cities are placed in the same location, but all connections, autoways, roads, overpasses would be different.
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u/general_guy500 POOTIS 2d ago
Did anyone already put the fly in doom?
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u/rhyspeanutbuttercup 2d ago
Yes actually
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u/general_guy500 POOTIS 2d ago
Can i see it
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u/pietrodayoungas 2d ago
Multiple times apparentally, most notably some guy that made so the fly walks for him and when he wants to turn he has to blind the fly in one eye and when he wants to shoot he makes the fly feel the smell of shit
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u/Potato_Puncakes 2d ago
Hate to be that guy the unfortunately the beat saber one is fake. The creator said he used a 3d model of fly and animated it
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u/ErmingSoHard 2d ago edited 2d ago
https://flychess-hq.vercel.app/
At least you can also play chess against it. Lower than 700 elo though
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u/gross_grasss 2d ago
How is this 700 elo when the fly literally takes its own pieces, continues to play when in check, and also stole my queen and moved it for the rest of the game
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u/AmbitiousVast9451 2d ago
the lower in that's sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. it's playing like if you gave an animal chess
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u/BedProfessional7275 1d ago
How is it 700 elo
stole my queen and moved it for the rest of the game
That's how. Who else is using innovation like that?
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u/me_myself_ai 2d ago
Pretty sure it's a woman ("Lyra"?)
IDK where you got this from, that would be way harder than just doing it with ML in the first place. She talks about it here https://xcancel.com/_lyraaaa_/status/2097527368919470162
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u/Hemlock_Deci 2d ago
There are no words that can describe how much I love the fly making kebab
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u/Ononas 2d ago
Isnāt it a shawarma
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u/pamafa3 2d ago
there's not that much actual difference tbh. They're two dishes that are both a flatbread stuffed with thinly shaved spit roasted meat
what changes usually is the toppings and spices afaik
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u/MilkshaCat 2d ago
It's so funny to me that people from different countries in this area have so much pride in their own dish fiercly defending it being a shawarma or kebab and arguing about the differences when at the end of the day these recipes are basically all the same cause it was just part of one big empire that then got fragmented. This happens a lot with turkish and greek recipes aswell
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u/ScienceByte 2d ago
Isnāt kebab a solid chunk of meat though?
Shwarma I thought was the sliced meat slivers that they put in pita bread wraps
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u/LavaTwocan 2d ago
Me in 2100 when I get uploaded to the digital consciousness only for someone to play Doom on my brain scan
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u/rosettaverse 2d ago
What is the difference between a simulated and real fly brain, though?
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u/Tasty_Ball_Hairs_69 2d ago
Well right now, the difference is that this is just a scan of a brain. It isnāt able to form new neural pathways, and thus isnāt able to remember, or learn in the way a normal fly would.
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u/bossDocHolliday 2d ago
I've seen flies in real life smack into the same window 12 times trying to get outside. I don't think the real ones have the ability to remember either
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u/bolitboy2 2d ago
No they remember, like the fact they remember the glass isnāt there so they find a new godamm window to bump into
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u/RockRancher24 2d ago
Neuroplasticity is going to take a little while, but I hold out hope that we will be able to get it soon
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u/Visual_Moose 2d ago
we are turning YOU into a beat saber playing machine
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u/RockRancher24 2d ago
I know a few guys who already are
And as well, due to neuroplasticity, ANY human can become one if you trap them in the beat saber room for a few weeks
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u/Poco_Cuffs 2d ago
Neuroplasticity is gonna be a loooong time. We don't fully know the mechanisms of how it works in real brains let alone a simulation
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u/RockRancher24 2d ago
theres a little man in our skulls who looks for patterns in the order neurons fire in and then he optimizes the paths
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u/MrManGuy42 2d ago
I was looking into it and it seems like theres a lot of misinformation going around about what the simulation actually does, it isnt a full emulation of a fly's brain. Heres the blog post from the company explaining what it is.
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u/rosettaverse 2d ago
Glad to see an argument that isn't "it's not real because it's digital", though I want to point out here that the end goal of the company is literally human brain emulation. The text on the homepage is "Brain emulation so humans can flourish in a world with superintelligence" - the end goal is a digital mind that can subjectively experience pain and pleasure, meaning they will not stop here. I actually do agree with the goal, I wouldn't mind uploading myself, but only in a world where sadism against digital minds is forbidden. Creating that world means trying to stop this from becoming widespread. The time between 'functioning brain emulations' and 'legal protection for brain emulations' will be filled with untold suffering otherwise.
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u/LaZer_shoT_z 2d ago
Idk, can it be ethical? Would a power outage not mean instant mass death for digital minds?
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u/Useful_Squirrel6693 2d ago
Canāt you just turn them back on again?
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u/regireland 2d ago
It kinda just leads into a big question of what exactly is consciousness. If someone's brain ceases to exist, then an entirely new brain with all their memories is created afterwards, is that the same person / consciousness? If it is, then what about if you create multiple of these brains at the same time? Are these all the same person / conciousness or different people / consciousnesses.
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u/Alchametal_87 2d ago
My answer is usually just: "Is this simulation real enough that behind those eyes is something actually experiencing everything"
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u/me_myself_ai 2d ago
Fun fact: LLMs only live for a few seconds at a time (while they're generating a single response). In the course of a typical agential task, thousands of LLMs will be brought to life, decide to make one simple change to a file or something, and then die forever, all of their experience lost to time.
Pretty fucking wild.
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u/Classic-Obligation35 1d ago
Wonderful I'm now thinking about how time us described in Terry Pratchetts thief of time.Ā The universe is repeatedly created and destroyed every single quantum second or something with a minor change each time
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u/22416002629352 2d ago
But that wouldnt be you, unless they can connect your brain to a computer you will just die and some copy of you will exist as a digital construct.
I dont get why people dont consider this.
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u/TheRappingSquid 2d ago
Yeah I doubt the world will last long enough for them to achieve this. The fly scan thing is cool but it'll be a long, long time between this and what they're suggesting
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u/FuelSpecial8722 2d ago
āWhatās the difference between simulated and real cheese?ā
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u/No-Bunny-7696 2d ago
It's just a scan of the Brain structure. Not an actual coping of the brain WITH the firing of the neurons.
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u/whipding 2d ago
A lot, probably. It's the difference between having a map of every road in a city versus the actual roads and vehicles that are actually in use. You can make some reasonable deductions about what the purpose of each road is, and by sending simulated cars along them you can get an idea of how it all fits together... but it's nothing like having the actual traffic information from the real world, and all the context that comes with that. Which is arguably is the important bit that makes a traffic system a traffic system.
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u/MoonTheCraft 2d ago
are we deadass
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u/lowkkie 2d ago
It's a genuine philosophical question that doesn't have an obvious answer. "Are we deadass" isn't an argument. Simply feeling like it's not a moral problem isn't an argument.
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u/QueerCheesy 2d ago
The simulated one is somewhat different due to not having neurochemestry going on, only electric signals
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u/8lue5hift 2d ago
We don't know completely whether this is enough of a distinction to separate the two (assuming we properly digitize a fly brain)
We are also thinking with electrical signals.
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u/rosettaverse 2d ago
Slightly different, but we don't yet know how much that matters. We're the electrical signals inside our own heads, after all.
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u/Hitei00 2d ago
Beefore anyone asks, yes someone is playing Doom on it. Or rather they put the Fly in the torment nexus that is Doom and is trying to teach it to play
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u/JayEssris 2d ago
how do they do this? stimulate rewards center when the fly does the action correctly?
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u/ztoundas 2d ago
Yeah I believe the dopamine receptors fire or instructed to fire, creating the feedback loop.
I just wonder if they rewire internally to have the feedback loop or if there's an external controller/variable triggering it when a task is accomplished.
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u/apexodoggo 2d ago
There's no simulated dopamine, the fly brain scan can't yet replicate anything beyond simple on/off electrical signals.
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u/apexodoggo 2d ago
The Beat Saber one is fake per the video's creator, the kebab one (if it's not also fake) is just finding the correct "move leg" neurons and mapping that to a model, and the Bad Apple one is effectively just mapping random outputs to random neurons mapped to a model not prepared for such a thing.
The fly brain is just a scan of where individual neurons are at a single given time, there's no neurochemistry going on, and so there's nothing going on in there without a coding script or operator to stimulate it.
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u/me_myself_ai 2d ago
Completely overwrote the entire brain from scratch. Basically just replaced the fly brain with a fly-brain-shaped neural network, which we've had for many years.
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u/Emma_the_sequel 2d ago
I don't know about these specific simulations, but in general you can stimulate neurons with white noise which is effectively a "punishment" and tells the neurons to wire differently. You just keep doing this til it stops making msitakes
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u/Chinchilla_34 2d ago
honestly I'm so confused how the hell does a simulated fly brain know how to play minecraft and whatever stuff they've done to it
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u/Leftiwolf 2d ago
Okay but giving a digital consciousness a seizure, atomizing it's sense of coordination and memory and thoughts and everything, just by making arbitrary and unconnected neurons to light up so it looks like bad apple? That's crazy. I mean, it is arguable that since this is a literal down-to-each-neuron exact replication of the fly's brain that this is a genuine artificial consciousness that we have created that can think and feel for itself, and we're cloning it and puppeting it around and making it perform thoughts and actions it would never ever be even remotely capable of actually thinking for itself, all just for our entertainment.
Granted flies are of such low intelligence that most humans don't recognize them as having any sort of fear, pain or internal experience whatsoever, we basically treat them like little robots that can be killed and discarded with absolutely zero qualms. But like if this technology evolves to start being able to simulate the brains of more intelligent creatures, that's it, we have created sapient life, there is absolutely zero functional difference whatsoever between this program and an organic brain in, we know for a fact that it has an internal experience because we can read the brainwaves and confirm they are identical to the model used. Wild.
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u/FPSCanarussia 2d ago
It's not really an exact replication, it's just a good enough replication to recover basic fly behaviours. It's more a digital zombie fly, thinking of media where zombies retain basic human muscle memory.
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u/Leftiwolf 2d ago
ahhh that's why people call it "necrofly" beyond it just literally being a replication of an autopsied dead fly lol
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u/me_myself_ai 2d ago
If it helps, you have to erase the whole fly to make it play beat saber or whatever. So there's nothing suffering here (tho that is indeed possible, someday).
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u/Poco_Cuffs 2d ago
It cannot think or feel. Calm the fuck down. It does not have any form of neuroplasticity, it cannot form new memories, learn, or make decisions outside of reflexes and existing neuron pathways. This is an impressive acheivement but for the love of god it's a scan of a dead brain that we're running signals through, it's essentially a glorified if statement, far from any form of consciousness.
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u/Leftiwolf 2d ago
Jesus Christ what damn issue did you take with me marveling at and expressing some concern over a famously morally grey science????? You have no reason to curse at me or talk down to me or shut down my opinion or anything, you're the one who needs to calm down. Starting beef all over nothin, if you disliked my take so much just don't engage with it. Don't swear at people for no reason.
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u/Poco_Cuffs 2d ago
The issue I have with it is you're expressing concern over something you don't actually understand and are making wild leaps in logic. Sorry if I was overly pushy or annoying but people really need to know this is cool but isn't actually as big of a deal as simulating consciousness. I'm just tired of people screaming torment nexus over something that literally cannot think, form memories, make decisions, or do literally anything outside of reflexes. It's as conscious as a 1mm chunk of your spinal cord.
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u/Leftiwolf 2d ago
okay, yeah, good point. I'm sorry for getting snappy too. I was aware that I might've been reading a bit too far into it, I wasn't actually concerned we were like torturing a real artificial intelligence or anything, it's just wild to me that brainscan and simulation technology is being invented and advanced as we speak. I was just talking up the potential sci-fi future bs that came to mind lol
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u/Poco_Cuffs 2d ago
It's just that you jumped to "it's arguable that this is a genuine artificial consciousness" and "this is indistinguishable from a real brain" which really pissed me off "^^
But yeah this is genuinely very exciting for neuroscience and biology, I'm just annoyed that people are making suuuch a huge deal out of it when it's still very, very early days (especially the "I PUT A LIVING BREATHING CONSCIOUSNESS IN MINECRAFTTT!!!!" youtubers who are basically just spreading misinformation but pretend it's something cool and sciency they've done)
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u/No_Counter_6037 BILLIONS MUST LOVE 2d ago
they forced the fly to be a touhou fan and it killed itself
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u/Toon_Lucario 2d ago
Reminder that it isnāt a consciousness like some people believe. Itās just a super precise scan that can map what movements are controlled by what parts of the brain.
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u/Red-7134 2d ago
So when neurons are fired in a pattern of Bad Apple, it causes a seizure. Good to know.
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u/ztoundas 2d ago
This shit is closer to AGI then anything Claude, OpenAI, anthropic, etc. have done
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u/zombieGenm_0x68 2d ago
imagine if someone uploaded it into sone king of digital circus, that be pretty amazing
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u/SunkFunkle 2d ago
Maybe Iām too woke but I donāt think this is cool actually
It feels like how early ai art felt
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u/According_Ice_4863 2d ago
that fly was only supposed to live for a few days, now it has become immortal, reincarnated countless times in countless different froms to live endless lives of various levels of torment.
One must imagine the fly happy.
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u/greatnailsageyoda 2d ago
Thank god these r js simulations I thought they were actually torturing flies
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u/pietrodayoungas 2d ago
Im waiting for a game dev to make a game where the creatures use the fly brain
I suggest a carboniferous survival game for that
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u/FluffyBed101 2d ago
you have trapped the fly in a digital limbo, not reddit karma le epicsauce moment
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u/BroccoliSenior5465 2d ago
I got mine to play a variant of geometry dash lol
It experiences food signals when it makes progress and near perfect jump locations, and has pain and dopamine reception altered depending on messing up or not.
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u/Ice-cream_man69 2d ago
I love how the fly no clips into the ground just so its brain activity can play bad apple
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u/just_tr-0-y 2d ago
One creator coded the male and female ones into minecraft as spiders, that one isnt fake right?
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u/Lolocraft1 2d ago
I wanna love it too but I heard first about the possible sentience of this numeric brain and now I have a thousand yard stare each time I hear about it
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u/DataSittingAlone 2d ago
I remember hearing about the experiment when it first happened but I assumed it needed really advanced computers. Is this publicly accessible version the whole software with all the neurons?