Trump is still alive - he can and should be punished for his crimes. I don't know what makes him special that he should never be.

Love this idea. This new form of consciousness is terrifying but your ideas makes it more tolerable for me. ❤️

aw sweet, man made horrors beyond my comprehension 😍

Personally my worry really isn't reincarnation, there's no reason to believe that that's true. But if these are fundamentally the same neurons that make up our brains, then how much do you need to put together before they acquire some form of "sentience"? Does a clump of 800,000 human neurons experience pain, sadness, a sense of self? Where is the line between an emotionless biocomputer and torturing a living organism for its entire lifespan?

Despite the fact that I really hate "AI", that question was of course already sort of relevant for the latest AI models, even though we can generally conclude that they're not there yet at all. But real neurons are different, we know what they're capable of. How many do you need before a clump of neurons has rights?

"Do lab grown neurons have a soul?"

There's another bunch of guys who are trying to do the same thing with rat neurons on the cheap using Gatorade as a growth medium.

https://youtu.be/bEXefdbQDjw

OK but hear me out here, I think I have the beginnings of a business plan:

1. Create the Torment Nexus

2. ?

3. Profit

Some components of the plan are still under development, but let's not lose momentum. We can advance with the initial phase while brainstorming to refine the plan in real time as we progress. It's an exciting opportunity and we mustn't forfeit our first-to-market advantage.

Honestly? Sounds preferable to being stuck in the universe of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream..... I'll take a challenging power fantasy with some massively overpowered weapons over millennia of endless physical and psychological torture by an insane AI..... might just be me though...

We need to take it back a step and see if it'll run Linux.

They trained a tiny patch of neurons to respond to low-voltage electric impulses. The cells don't know they're playing Doom. They don't have any kind of social context or even video feedback.

Imagine if I stuck you in a sensory deprivation chamber, handed you an NES controller, and asked you to hit the buttons. Then, periodically, I said "Yes" or "No" based on the buttons you pressed. And when I pulled you out of the tube at the end of an hour, I told you "the yes and no messages were intended to encourage you to correctly navigate Mario through the first level of the original game." What if, instead of Mario, I'd been telling you how to play Street Fighter?

It doesn't matter if its Doom. They likely picked Doom because the I/O is so rudimentary that you can install the game on practically anything. The cellular matter has no idea what it's doing beyond the "Yes/No" signaling.

IIRC, it doesn't actually pay the game itself. We prod the cells, they fire in a certain way and that response is read to convert it to an output for the game. The cells aren't a rudimentary Doom bot, they're the controller.

Maybe the real hell is the life we've lived along the way.

Yah but the visuals of "growing a human brain and trapping it in hell" gets a lot more clicks than "We made a very basic microcontroller out of organic chemistry to interact with an old video game poorly."