Categoría: Speculative Sentience
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Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally?
Artificial reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely used technique in artificial intelligence that provides a general method for training agents to perform a wide variety of behaviours. RL as used in computer science has striking parallels to reward and punishment learning in animal and human brains. I argue that present-day artificial RL agents have a…
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Ethical Issues in Artificial Reinforcement Learning
There is a remarkable connection between artificial reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms and the process of reward learning in animal brains. Do RL algorithms on computers pose moral problems? I think current RL computations do matter, though they’re probably less morally significant than animals, including insects, because the degree of consciousness and emotional experience seems limited in…
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Why digital sentience is relevant to animal activists
Robots are hard to build, but they can go places like Mars where it would be more expensive and more risky to send humans. Computers need power, but this is easier to generate in electrical form than by creating a supply of human-digestible foods that contain a variety of nutrients. Machines are easier to shield…
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Sentience in machines and anti-substratism: Can machines feel?
First version: Dec. 2016. Updated: Jan. 2017 I have created this text from the materials I prepared for the talk I gave at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Santiago de Compostela on December 15, 2016 along with Brian Tomasik, which was entitled «Outlook and future Risks of artificial consciousness». «Digital computers have…
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Living robots created as scientists turn frog cells into entirely new life-forms
Xenobots. Could self-replicating blissbots create a happiness explosion? Seen in The hedonistic Imperative «The world’s first living robots have been built using stem cells from frog embryos, in a strange machine-animal hybrid that scientists say is an ‘entirely new life-form.’» Read more
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Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
There was no evidence that the disembodied pig brains regained consciousness. However, in what Sestan termed a “mind-boggling” and “unexpected” result, billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity. “These brains may be damaged, but if the cells are alive, it’s a living organ,” says Steve…
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Mini brains: Artificially Created Tiny Brain «Organoids» Show Signs of Neural Activity
The “mini brains” were technically “cerebral organoids,” made from the cells that make up the region of the brain known as the cerebellum. They started out as clusters of stem cells raised in a special medium designed to support brain development, eventually growing into organoids with a similar structure as a real-life cerebellum. Read more
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What is paneudaimonia?
This paneudaimonia looks like the opposite of panpsychism. «Paneudaimonia is the idea that the whole universe is absolute pleasure, except in the domain of what we know as sentient beings, in which all experiences imply different types of suffering. Paneudaimonia is the idea that identity, and / or the “I” and / or consciousness are generated…
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Organoids, chimeras and ex vivo tissues
“Organoid” is the term generally used to refer to a small ball of human cells grown in cell culture from stem cells (human stem cells for human organoids). The stem cells may be embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, or other types of stem cells, but the effort has been to get cells that…
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A biomaterial that arrange itself
«Using DASH, the Cornell engineers created a biomaterial that can autonomously emerge from its nanoscale building blocks and arrange itself – first into polymers and eventually mesoscale shapes. Starting from a 55-nucleotide base seed sequence, the DNA molecules were multiplied hundreds of thousands times, creating chains of repeating DNA a few millimeters in size. The…