The sentience backlash — what the Neuron rebuttal argued

1:07:27that's what all of the news articles are saying, right? All of the news articles are like >> uh brain in a petri dish play doom. >> I don't think anyone's mentioned this reinforcement learning paradigm in the middle right? >> That is kind of the whole game maybe, >> right? And because there's not a paper again like the Pong version which they previously done, the jury is going to still be out on this. And that's why it's really important to have peer-reviewed journals because a reviewer would be like, >> you know, what are you doing? >> We're we're doing that here on the pod, let alone in a professional. >> Exactly. Yeah. Um, one last thing I want to um touch on is there was a lot of heat that the authors took for their 2022 paper because the 2022 paper in

1:08:07their title mentioned sentience, >> learn and exhibit sentience. There was another paper that came out um that was a backlash. Okay, again published in neuron as a rebuttal and they were effectively saying that you can't use sentience, right? Or the idea of perceiving >> because the behavior that you're mentioning and you're observing here when the petri dish plays pong is one of homeostatic feedback stabilization. There's no highle cognitive intent. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Right. And so you can't really say things like that because then with sentience comes ethical concerns. In the public lexicon, the term sentience means

1:08:49there's some morality now that we have established. >> Yes. >> Onto this dish. And if that's the case, well, what are we actually doing? >> Yes. >> Yeah. And I think we kind of over the course of this episode we've kind of like landed on that same point which is oh this is an interesting fundamental understanding of how you can control neural networks through electrical uh s like electrical read and write architecture to optimize for stability in the system. That's cool. But that's effectively what it's and then we're just connecting that to an external thing we are interpreting and giving value to >> as like oh hit it with the paddle.

1:09:31>> But it it >> fundamentally >> Yeah. fundamentally it's just trying to reduce surprise. But surprise itself is a mathematical construct that is trying to reduce right >> just because of the way that the proteins and the >> and the neurons work when they when they get together. So it's it's a far leap to say this dish brain is sentient because it can sense and respond to an environment like Pong. Right. Right. But this again I don't know this is again this this is I'm we're going beyond my pay grade and I do want to be very clear about that. Right. Because questions of consciousness, questions of sentience is something that I grapple with all the time. I have a a PhD in like neural

1:10:12systems, right? Like one of my PhDs was about how neural networks talk to one another and sleep and so on and so forth. You can create very simple neural systems that sleep and mimic behavior. >> I don't know what consciousness is, but