https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/

The most basic analogy between artificial and real neurons involves how they handle incoming information. Both kinds of neurons receive incoming signals and, based on that information, decide whether to send their own signal to other neurons. While artificial neurons rely on a simple calculation to make this decision, decades of research have shown that the process is far more complicated in biological neurons. Computational neuroscientists use an input-output function to model the relationship between the inputs received by a biological neuron’s long treelike branches, called dendrites, and the neuron’s decision to send out a signal.

This function is what the authors of the new work taught an artificial deep neural network to imitate in order to determine its complexity. They started by creating a massive simulation of the input-output function of a type of neuron with distinct trees of dendritic branches at its top and bottom, known as a pyramidal neuron, from a rat’s cortex. Then they fed the simulation into a deep neural network that had up to 256 artificial neurons in each layer. They continued increasing the number of layers until they achieved 99% accuracy at the millisecond level between the input and output of the simulated neuron. The deep neural network successfully predicted the behavior of the neuron’s input-output function with at least five — but no more than eight — artificial layers. In most of the networks, that equated to about 1,000 artificial neurons for just one biological neuron.

Absolute napkin math while I'm sleep deprived at the hospital, but you're looking at something around 86 trillion ML neurons, or about 516 quadrillion parameters. to emulate the human brain. That's.. A lot.

Now, I am a doctor, but I'm certainly no neurosurgeon. That being said, I'm not sure it's particularly conducive to the functioning of a human brain to stuff it full of metallic wires. Leaving aside that Neuralink and co are very superficial and don't penetrate particularly deep into the cortex (do they even have to? Idk, the grey matter is on the outside anyway), it strikes me as electrical engineer's nightmare to even remotely get this wired up and working. The crosstalk. The sheer disruption to homeostasis..

If I had to bet on mind uploading, the first step would be creating an AGI. To make that no longer my headache, of course.

Not an option? Eh, I'd look for significantly more lossy options than to hook up every neuron. I think it would be far easier to feed behavioral and observational data alongside tamer BCIs to train a far more tractable in terms of size model to mimic me, to a degree indistinguishable for a (blinded) outside observer. It certainly beats being the world's Literal Worst MRI Candidate, and probably won't kill you outright. I'm not sure the brain will be remotely close to functional by the time you're done skewering it like that, which makes me assume the data you end up collecting any significant degree into the process will be garbage from dying neuronal tissue.

Have you guys tried the inverse, namely tamping down the refusal heads to make the model output answers to queries it would normally refuse?

I will regard with utter confusion someone who doesn't immediately think of the last place they saw something when they've lost it.

It's fine to state the obvious on occasion, it's not always obvious to everyone, and like I said in the parent comment, this post seems to be liked/held useful by a significant number of LW users. I contend that's more of a property of said users. This does not make the post a bad thing or constitute a moral judgement!

Note that we don't infer that humans have qualia because they all have "pain receptors": mechanisms that, when activated in us, make us feel pain; we infer that other humans have qualia because they can talk about qualia.

The way I decide this, and how presumably most people do (I admit I could be wrong) revolves around the following chain of thought:

1. I have qualia with very high confidence.*

2. To the best of my knowledge, the computational substrate as well as the algorithms running on them are not particularly different from other anatomically modern humans. Thus they almost certainly have qualia. This can be proven to most people's satisfaction with an MRI scan, if they so wish.

3. Mammals, especially the intelligent ones, have similar cognitive architectures, which were largely scaled up for humans, not differing much in qualitative terms (our neurons are still actually more efficient, mice modified to have genes from human neurons are smarter). They are likely to have recognizable qualia.

4. The further you diverge from the underlying anatomy of the brain (and the implicit algorithms), the lower the odds of qualia, or at least the same type of qualia. An octopus might well be conscious and have qualia, but I suspect the type of consciousness as well as that of their qualia will be very different from our own, since they have a far more distributed and autonomous neurology.

5. Entities which are particularly simple and don't perform much cognitive computation are exceedingly unlikely to be conscious or have qualia in a non-tautological sense. Bacteria and single transistors, or slime mold.

More speculatively (yet I personally find more likely than not):

1. Substrate independent models of consciousness are true, and a human brain emulation in-silico, hooked up to the right inputs and outputs, has the exact same kind of consciousness as one running on meat. The algorithms matter more than the matter they run on, for the same reason an abacus or a supercomputer are both Turing Complete.

2. We simply lack an understanding of consciousness well grounded enough to decide whether or not decidedly non-human yet intelligent entities like LLMs are conscious or have qualia like ours. The correct stance is agnosticism, and anyone proven right in the future is only so by accident.

Now, I diverge from Effective Altruists on point 3, in that I simply don't care about the suffering of non-humans or entities that aren't anatomically modern humans/ intelligent human derivatives (like a posthuman offshoot). This is a Fundamental Values difference, and it makes concerns about optimizing for their welfare on utilitarian grounds moot as far as I'm concerned.

In the specific case of AGI, even highly intelligent ones, I posit it's significantly better to design them so they don't have capability to suffer, no matter what purpose they're put to, rather than worry about giving them rights that we assign to humans/transhumans/posthumans.

But what I do hope is ~universally acceptable is that there's an unavoidable loss of certainty or Bayesian probability in each leap of logic down the chain, such that by the time you get down to fish and prawns, it's highly dubious to be very certain of exactly how conscious or qualia possessing they are, even if the next link, bacteria and individual transistors lacking qualia, is much more likely to be true (it flows downstream of point 2, even if presented in sequence)

*Not infinite certitude, I have a non-negligible belief that I could simply be insane, or that solipsism might be true, even if I think the possibility of either is very small. It's still not zero.

I mean no insult, but it makes me chuckle that the average denizen of LessWrong is so non-neurotypical that what most would consider profoundly obvious advice not worth even mentioning comes as a great surprise or even a revelation of sorts.

(This really isn't intended to be a dig, I'm aware the community here skews towards autism, it's just a mildly funny observation)

I would certainly be willing to aim for peaceful co-existence and collaboration, unless we came into conflict for ideological reasons or plain resource scarcity. There's only one universe to share, and only so much in the way of resources in it, even if it's a staggering amount. The last thing we need are potential "Greedy Aliens" in the Hansonian sense.

So while I wouldn't give the aliens zero moral value, it would be less than I'd give for another human or human-derivative intelligence, for that fact alone.

My stance on copyright, at least regarding AI art, is that the original intent was to improve the welfare of both the human artists as well as the rest of us, in the case of the former by helping secure them a living, and thus letting them produce more total output for the latter.

I strongly expect, and would be outright shocked if it were otherwise, that we won't end up with outright superhuman creativity and vision in artwork from AI alongside everything else they become superhuman at. It came as a great surprise to many that we've made such a great dent in visual art already with image models that lack the intelligence of an average human.

Thus, it doesn't matter in the least if it stifles human output, because the overwhelming majority of us who don't rely on our artistic talent to make a living will benefit from a post-scarcity situation for good art, as customized and niche as we care to demand.

To put money where my mouth is, I write a web serial, after years of world-building and abortive sketches in my notes, I realized that the release of GPT-4 meant that any benefit from my significantly above average ability to be a human writer was in jeopardy, if not now, then a handful of advances down the line. So my own work is more of a "I told you I was a good writer, before anyone can plausibly claim my work was penned by an AI" for street cred rather than a replacement for my day job.

If GPT-5 can write as well as I can, and emulate my favorite authors, or even better yet, pen novel novels (pun intended), then my minor distress at losing potential Patreon money is more than ameliorated by the fact I have a nigh-infinite number of good books to read! I spend a great deal more time reading the works of others than writing myself.

The same is true for my day job, being a doctor, I would look forward to being made obsolete, if only I had sufficient savings or a government I could comfortably rely on to institute UBI.

I would much prefer that we tax the fruits of automation to support us all when we're inevitably obsolete rather than extend copyright law indefinitely into the future, or subject derivative works made by AI to the same constraints. The solution is to prepare our economies to support a ~100% non-productive human populace indefinitely, better preparing now than when we have no choice but to do so or let them starve to death.

should mentally disabled people have less rights

That is certainly both de facto and de jure true in most jurisdictions, leaving aside the is-ought question for a moment. What use is the right to education to someone who can't ever learn to read or write no matter how hard you try and coach them? Or freedom of speech to those who lack complex cognition at all?

Personally, I have no compunctions about tying a large portion of someone's moral worth to their intelligence, if not all of it. Certainly not to the extent I'd prefer a superintelligent alien over a fellow baseline human, unless by some miracle the former almost perfectly aligns with my goals and ideals.

Ctrl+F and replace humanism with "transhumanism" and you have me aboard. I consider commonality of origin to be a major factor in assessing other intelligent entities, even after millions of years of divergence means they're as different from their common Homo sapiens ancestor as a rat and a whale.

I am personally less inclined to grant synthetic AI rights, for the simple reason we can program them to not chafe at their absence, while not being an imposition that doing the same to a biological human would (at least after birth).