Anil Seth Profile picture
Oct 13 6 tweets 4 min read
1/ Fascinating new @NeuroCellPress paper by @CorticalLabs showing that neuronal cultures can be trained to play Pong through a training regime based on active inference cell.com/neuron/fulltex… - 👏🏽 @ANeuroExplorer, Hon Weng Chong and colleagues
2/ I greatly admire the work, but I am concerned about the "exhibit sentience" in the title of the paper. True, sentience can be formally defined merely as 'responsiveness to sensory impressions' - but many people interpret it as a minimal form of consciousness or awareness
3/ There is *no reason* to suppose that @CorticalLabs #DishBrain experiences anything at all, and confusion over this issue is dangerous because the prospect of synthetic awareness in cultures/organoids is ethically highly problematic
4/ Tim Bayne & I (@CIFAR_News) wrote about the possiblity of organoid consciousness in our Islands of Awareness paper in @TrendsCognSci - noting the problem of knowing when an organoid might become conscious, and the ethical catastrophes that could result cell.com/trends/neurosc…
5/ This debate offers an interesting contrast that over machine consciousness - which I was involved in yesterday at @WorldSummitAI - where, in my view, consciousness is likely even more remote, since the substrate is different (silicon vs carbon) worldsummit.ai/programme-2022/
6/ The @CorticalLabs work is getting lots of media. I hope this coverage is for the right reasons, and not because of a superficial appeal to the possiblity 'sentient' (conscious) "mini-brains". Motto: don't use 'sentience' without being aware of what you're doing 🤓

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More from @anilkseth

Oct 12
Really enjoyed this opening panel on "AI, sentience, and hype" at #WSAI22 @WorldSummitAI - many 🙏🏽 to my fellow panelists (& brilliant host @Kantrowitz), and I'm so sad I can't be there IRL ...
I talk more about the prospects and pitfalls of 'machine consciousness' in my book Being You - A New Science of Consciousness, elaborating on the distinction between consciousness and intelligence & much more anilseth.com/being-you/
... and forgive me for a blatant plug - people at #WSAI22 @WorldSummitAI do please consider taking part in #ThePerceptionCensus to help us advance research into 'perceptual diversity' and discover more about your own powers of perception perceptioncensus.dreamachine.world
Read 4 tweets
Oct 8
1/ A great summary of the @NobelPrize winning work in Physics this year, awarded to John Clauser, Alain Aspect, & Anton Zeilinger - by @dangaristo in @sciam scientificamerican.com/article/the-un…
2/ It's great to see the Physics prize recognise work in the fundamentals of quantum mechanics (QM) - in particular the fantastically creative & rigorous experimental work, stretching back decades, showing that the universe is not 'locally real'
3/ The experiments test, in various ways, the famous 'Bell inequalities' - formulated by the physicist John Bell (who sadly died in 1990, & so could not benefit from the prize). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stew…
Read 11 tweets
Oct 6
1/ "The afterlife is in our heads". A detailed and balanced analysis of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) by @KristenFrench in @NautilusMag - well worth reading nautil.us/the-afterlife-…
2/ There's a near-dead-give-away quote right up top, from Lujan Comas: "For us, it’s important to demonstrate that death is only for the material body". Using 'demonstrate that' rather than 'investigate whether' speaks volumes
3/ I don't deny that NDEs are extremely meaningful for those that have them, but to take their content literally is to make a common confusion between 'how things seem' and 'how things are' - a confusion that bedevils all of perception, in one way or another
Read 4 tweets
Jul 7
1/🧵 Do you what I see? Today we launch #ThePerceptionCensus, part of @Drea_m_achine, and one of the largest citizen science studies on human perception ever undertaken. Check out this video, and discover more (and sign up) here: perceptioncensus.dreamachine.world Image
2/ It may seem to us that we experience the world ‘as it is’, but in fact we each inhabit a unique, personalised ‘inner universe’. Just as we all differ on the outside, we all differ on the inside too. Image
3/ Sometimes, these differences are very clear. Remember #TheDress? Half the world saw it as blue-and-black, while the other half saw it as white-and-gold. (It really was blue-and-black, honest). Image
Read 18 tweets
Jun 15
1/ A little late to the #LaMDA party, but here's my 2p for what it's worth 🧵. Basically, I agree with @GaryMarcus (& the vast majority of the AI/neuro community) that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that #LaMDA is conscious garymarcus.substack.com/p/nonsense-on-…
2/ #LaMDA is a highly impressive 'word sequence model' (h/t @rogerkmoore) which can give the impression of intelligent understanding, but it is a mistake to take this (variable) impression as evidence for actual intelligent understanding.
3/ In this sense, #LaMDA is fully in the tradition of previous chatbots, such as Eugene Goostman (b. 2014), for which grandiose claims were also made (both @GaryMarcus & I wrote about Goostman before, & the same points apply) neurobanter.com/2014/06/09/the…
Read 10 tweets
May 31
1/ A milestone I had hoped not to mark. Today is 6 months since my COVID infection, and I’m still on my #LongCovid journey. Time for a few thoughts. Longish 🧵👇🏽
2/ TLDR version: it’s rough as hell, don’t get COVID, if you do get COVID then do what you can to stop it going long (there are things), if it does go long then rest, take care of your body and mind, you’re not alone & there is hope
3/ #LongCovid is a journey well worth avoiding. While everyone’s experience will be different, there are no good options. My own has featured a rolling banquet of deeply unpleasant fatigue – very unlike normal tiredness; chest pains; weird tingling throughout body …
Read 27 tweets

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