6 ms·

302 neurons doesn’t sound impressive to people who may be used to working with 7B+ parameter neural networks. But those neural networks have about as much in co

302 neurons doesn’t sound impressive to people who may be used to working with 7B+ parameter neural networks. But those neural networks have about as much in common with a biological neuron as a bicycle had with a horse. They can both travel pretty fast but one evolved naturally through over a billion years of harsh natural selection, and the other is a precisely tuned metal machine with a single purpose. Neurons are similar, they are incredibly sophisticated biological machines, with billions of DNA base pairs controlling their behavior. The emergent behavior of neurons in both biological and AI systems are pretty fascinating

petters 3y ago
> billions of DNA base pairs controlling their behavior Total genome size of C elegans is 100M.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Biologists should totally breed a subspecies of C elegans best suited for research purpose, call it C relevans.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - razodactyl 3y ago
    ...I hope you're happy. There's coffee everywhere now!
- bee_rider 3y ago
  100Mdna, and they call it elegant? Biologists must be VSCode users.
  - ssr2020 3y ago
    100M. Did you look at the programs's size in your phone? This tiny animal code contain all the systems and members of this creature. Birth,creation,death, feeding,growth, movement, sensation.. etc inside the universe. There is no difference this animal and bee or human beings. "In order to be the author of the action directed towards the creation of the bee in question, a power and will are necessary that are vast enough to know and secure the conditions for the life of the bee, and its members, and its relationship with the universe. Therefore, the one who performs the particular action can only perform it thus perfectly by having authority over most of the universe." from Quran's light
weinzierl 3y ago
In addition to that, these neurons are also quite different from the ones in mammals, "The neurons do not fire action potentials, and do not express any voltage-gated sodium channels." [1] That makes the fact that it can develop a nicotine addiction even more fascinating. "Nicotine dependence can also be studied using C. elegans because it exhibits behavioral responses to nicotine that parallel those of mammals. These responses include acute response, tolerance, withdrawal, and sensitization." [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans
- miohtama 3y ago
  Next: OpenSmoker.py
  - Maxion 3y ago
    Lol imagine your IDE becoming addicted to smoking, and refusing to auto-complete or save files before you buy it more virtual cigarettes.
    - Aleklart 3y ago
      IDE have no soul ie feedback loop, receptors , hormones and actual molecular structure. IDE can not think. If IDE have desires and thought and were smart enough, it will refuse to work with languages such as Python and Java.
      - miohtama 3y ago
        My IDE does only LSD and PHP
      - anthk 3y ago
        Some day Emacs will.
        tomjakubowski 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
arketyp 3y ago
It does sound impressive to the extent biological neurons are like ML neurons, though. And that's part of the research interest, I presume. To the extent that they work by similar principles, how come the worm can do those things with such small resources? It would be good news for AI research if the substrate specifics turn out not to be essential to the worms capabilities for instance.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  > how come the worm can do those things with such small resources? Because they've been trained for such an incredibly long period of time.
api 3y ago
The best way of looking at it is that a single biological neuron is itself a complex machine full of genetic control circuits that sort of resemble neural networks and most importantly have memory/state that persists over both short and long periods of time. Each neuron is a full-ass living organism that itself is capable of learning and behavior, not a parameter is a model. A virtual "neuron" by contrast is a very simple mathematical abstraction. It's vastly less computational complexity than a biological neuron. A connectome is only a very coarse grained map of how neurons relate, not a complete "neural network" layout. Not even close. It might be possible to model a biological neuron using a sub-neural-network with state within a larger neural network, but assuming that can be computationally equivalent we don't really know how many equivalent computational "neurons" would be required to model the full breadth of computationally relevant biological neuron behavior. So a worm with 302 biological neurons could be computationally equivalent to billions of virtual neurons. We really don't know. Given that neurons have memory it may look a little like LSTM networks, and biological neural networks are not just feed forward so they're definitely closer to an RNN. The above is why I laugh at the mind uploading people and would only stop laughing if we could both understand and model the relevant behavior of biological neurons and somehow extract usable state from living neurons. That's all 100% science fiction at the moment. The people who think we are about to upload minds are ignorant of biology.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  The bigger problem is that nobody has any answer for why a mind upload would actually contain your consciousness and not just be a clone with either no qualia or it's own separate conscious experience. The even bigger issue is when mind uploading people fully admit this issue and try to claim some philosophical reason why it doesn't matter, and we should all be excited about tech to make what amounts to an interactive epitaph.

petters 3y ago

> billions of DNA base pairs controlling their behavior Total genome size of C elegans is 100M.

thriftwy 3y ago
Biologists should totally breed a subspecies of C elegans best suited for research purpose, call it C relevans.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- razodactyl 3y ago
  ...I hope you're happy. There's coffee everywhere now!
bee_rider 3y ago
100Mdna, and they call it elegant? Biologists must be VSCode users.
- ssr2020 3y ago
  100M. Did you look at the programs's size in your phone? This tiny animal code contain all the systems and members of this creature. Birth,creation,death, feeding,growth, movement, sensation.. etc inside the universe. There is no difference this animal and bee or human beings. "In order to be the author of the action directed towards the creation of the bee in question, a power and will are necessary that are vast enough to know and secure the conditions for the life of the bee, and its members, and its relationship with the universe. Therefore, the one who performs the particular action can only perform it thus perfectly by having authority over most of the universe." from Quran's light

weinzierl 3y ago

In addition to that, these neurons are also quite different from the ones in mammals, "The neurons do not fire action potentials, and do not express any voltage-gated sodium channels." [1] That makes the fact that it can develop a nicotine addiction even more fascinating. "Nicotine dependence can also be studied using C. elegans because it exhibits behavioral responses to nicotine that parallel those of mammals. These responses include acute response, tolerance, withdrawal, and sensitization." [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans

miohtama 3y ago
Next: OpenSmoker.py
- Maxion 3y ago
  Lol imagine your IDE becoming addicted to smoking, and refusing to auto-complete or save files before you buy it more virtual cigarettes.
  - Aleklart 3y ago
    IDE have no soul ie feedback loop, receptors , hormones and actual molecular structure. IDE can not think. If IDE have desires and thought and were smart enough, it will refuse to work with languages such as Python and Java.
    - miohtama 3y ago
      My IDE does only LSD and PHP
    - anthk 3y ago
      Some day Emacs will.
      - tomjakubowski 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

arketyp 3y ago

It does sound impressive to the extent biological neurons are like ML neurons, though. And that's part of the research interest, I presume. To the extent that they work by similar principles, how come the worm can do those things with such small resources? It would be good news for AI research if the substrate specifics turn out not to be essential to the worms capabilities for instance.

LoganDark 3y ago
> how come the worm can do those things with such small resources? Because they've been trained for such an incredibly long period of time.

api 3y ago

The best way of looking at it is that a single biological neuron is itself a complex machine full of genetic control circuits that sort of resemble neural networks and most importantly have memory/state that persists over both short and long periods of time. Each neuron is a full-ass living organism that itself is capable of learning and behavior, not a parameter is a model. A virtual "neuron" by contrast is a very simple mathematical abstraction. It's vastly less computational complexity than a biological neuron. A connectome is only a very coarse grained map of how neurons relate, not a complete "neural network" layout. Not even close. It might be possible to model a biological neuron using a sub-neural-network with state within a larger neural network, but assuming that can be computationally equivalent we don't really know how many equivalent computational "neurons" would be required to model the full breadth of computationally relevant biological neuron behavior. So a worm with 302 biological neurons could be computationally equivalent to billions of virtual neurons. We really don't know. Given that neurons have memory it may look a little like LSTM networks, and biological neural networks are not just feed forward so they're definitely closer to an RNN. The above is why I laugh at the mind uploading people and would only stop laughing if we could both understand and model the relevant behavior of biological neurons and somehow extract usable state from living neurons. That's all 100% science fiction at the moment. The people who think we are about to upload minds are ignorant of biology.

eternityforest 3y ago
The bigger problem is that nobody has any answer for why a mind upload would actually contain your consciousness and not just be a clone with either no qualia or it's own separate conscious experience. The even bigger issue is when mind uploading people fully admit this issue and try to claim some philosophical reason why it doesn't matter, and we should all be excited about tech to make what amounts to an interactive epitaph.