i think its disguting and immoral. i want to hear other people opinions on it. by biocomputing i mean dna used computer storage,neuron based computing ,and any other computing that makes use of living biology.
I think it’s just super nifty and I look forward to finding out what’s possible in the field. Imagine server powered by photosynthesis. That’d be awesome.
If you take the holistic view, servers are already powered by photosynthesis. It just happens that most of them are powered by photo synthesis that occurred millions and millions of years ago.
Why do you think it’s disgusting and immoral?
idk it rubs me the wrong way,like what if they are sentient and we are tormenting them?
also i have some religious beliefs that ban altering of creation of god. and i think biocomputing would be included in that.
What if computers are sentient and we’re torturing them too?
i dont think they are sentient. the ones made from silcon i mean. why? bec sand isn’t alive,but we have proof neurons arw alive since our brain is made of them.
What does it mean to be alive? And how do you know that something is or isn’t?
i think the answer would be if it has internal quaila or not. i think neurons do have them.
A component of a component of a living thing is not inherently alive. We know neurons are alive not because they are part of the composition of the brain, but because they exhibit properties of life. Neurons being alive doesn’t mean that atoms are alive, for instance. Similarly the brain also contains water and fats which are definitely not alive.
You’ve touched on a very old question in biology: “what does it mean to be alive?” and the answer to that is going to change somewhat on who you talk to and what your subject is. Cells are alive, but in a completely different way from both “simple” multicellular life and “complex” cellular life, but I’m not really aware of a clear boundary existing.
Like all fields of study, there are orders of magnitude more information available at higher levels of research than what most people are taught in school. Clinging to the simplified views of biology organized for university or lower grades as being the end all be all of the field is a great way to harbor ignorance and bigotry.
i will search more on this topic to see if my current views on it are wrong or right,according to my religious beliefs ,and how science actually treats and talks about them.
if you have any points to tell me about it im happy to engage in a discussion.
at what point do you distinguish a thing from the components it’s made of?
You say neurons have qualia, but its parts certainly don’t. Proteins don’t. Lipids don’t. Molecules don’t. But when you put them together in a specific configuration you say they do?
How is this different from silica? Why can’t a thing composed of silica have qualia even if the parts individually don’t?
ok this do you believe what are the least needed parts to make a being sentient? i believe 3 parts are needed,a heart,nervous system,and a brain. less than that it may or may not be sentient idk thats why i asked for other people opinions here.
I don’t think we understand sentience yet. I think it is possible, if not likely, that there are sentient things which we believe are not.
i also don’t think a heart is relevant at all to sentience, as it plays no role in perception which I believe is the core of sentience. The heart is just a pump that moves resources through the body.
I don’t think a nervous system is necessary either, unless you define “nervous system” very broadly. I think any sufficiently complex sensory input system would be enough to provide the elements of perception required to foster sentience.
As for the brain… I’m not convinced it has to look like a brain as we know it. The brain provides several primary functions, but only a few of them are related to perception (many are instead related to automation of bodily functions).
I think any system that can receive input, store a memory (and I don’t mean cognitive recall, I just mean historical record in the loosest sense), and perform complex conditional responses based on the input and memory, could produce something we would call sentience.
I encourage you to learn more about the subject and close some of your knowledge gaps. You still may not agree with myself on the matter, but you’ll hopefully be able to elucidate your concerns more concretely. As it stands now, however, “idk” and “it rubs me the wrong way” seem like a fear of the unknown which is an insecure basis upon which to construct a belief system or guide your principals.
I’m curious which greater religion you espouse. I’d argue that virtually any human action is one of altering, and while predation, gathering, locomotion, and vocalization could be ascribed to alter in a manner consistent with a god given design, every action from cooking onward directly alters “creation” in a manner not inherent to our biology. That is to say, once we adopted tools and fire we ascended above the actions of other animals.
i follow islam,specifically quran alone. i agree i do fear biocomputing bec it seems like a horror. i am however open to learn more about it. i will do research about it. but if you have any points to present to me im willing to listen even if i didnt agree.
I must admit, I know less of Islam than I do of Judaism or Christianity (being an agnostic atheist former nondenominational protestant christian myself); though I can understand coming to the conclusion that bioengineering is one of the moral tests in a world where humans are allowed to be but lack a specific dominion or subjugation over.
Unfortunately, I don’t have concrete resources for you at this time, as my understanding is borne of years of passive interest rather than specific study.
Do you believe that your moral opposition to this field of study should forcibly be respected by all people or that it is a personal guidance you alone must follow?
i don’t believe in force ,i think i should adovcate against it(in my current view of biocomputing that may change or not not sure now). so i should be against it,advice others to not use it and see it as moral failure etc and attempt to not use it myself and leave or minize use of services doing it.
That is fair.
Removed by mod
lmao and i thought i escaped reddit neckbeard atheism
Learn to read and spell and then come back so at least you sound vaguely educated.
idc enough to do so,english is a stupid language anyway.
I would love to know this user’s thoughts on gay and trans people… Getting really tired of arguments from the “it’s icky and I don’t like it” crowd.
i believe they are people like me and like any other human. and that doing homosexual acts or transiting is a sin .
i respect their right to exist as long as they don’t force me to support them morally.
transiting is a sin
So you believe all males are a living sin? According to biology all foetus start as female before developing male body parts.
If they’re Christian they do. But so are all women. Everyone. It’s a basic tenet of the faith that everyone is sinful but everyone is capable of redemption.
It’s just another frontier of science with its own risks and rewards. Sure there are ways to use or produce it immoraly, but it’s not inherently immoral.
DNA is just a polymer, one we have some capabilities in manipulating. It is not inherently alive, nor do it’s instructions necessarily have to relate to something living. When processed by living things they contain instructions on producing proteins, but they don’t need to be processed by living things and could be used to store arbitrary information in a dense environment.
Neurons, while cellular are not alive in and of themselves. They require a full host to operate, but are essentially weighted dynamic switches (interneurons), environmental inputs (sensory neurons), or outputs (motor neurons). Devoid of a host they are inert, but provided the right artificial environment they can function. “Function” just means operating in that input, switch, output mode though–it doesn’t mean being alive as a macroorganism, being sentient, or having feelings. Using a handful of farmed human neurons to play Doom is more an exercise in controlling the dynamic environment needed for the switch connections to be made, therefore, than an exercise in enslaving a conscience person.
Nature has been the source of inspiration and development since before the dawn of humans. I see no reason it should stop at the doorstep of biology–especially when the extent is cultured environments developed in a lab to be a facsimile of a part of a living thing. A part of living thing does not a living thing make.
Totally fine, it will be our technological goal. The natural biological functions that come from nature are far more powerful then artificial systems we build.
should we tho? i think morals should come before utlity. we should ask ourselves more if we should do smth rather than ask what it would grant us
Why should your morality be more important then mine? Morality is a deeply personal thing and a thing of the times.
Until 150 years ago it was moral to enslave people of different colour.
In some parts of the world it is still moral to withhold marriage rights to same sex couples.tbh i don’t really believe in relative morality ,i believe in objective eternal one.
so do you believe everyone was immoral until 150 years ago (participation in and tolerance for slavery) or do you believe we are immoral today for denying the right to own slaves (as allowed by religious texts)?
i think the quran doesn’t permit owning slaves no,not now not back then. so yeah everyone 150 years ago that supported human slavery(human is important word here) is immoral. i however do believe it was moral for king/prophet solomon to enslave demons by force as a personal grant from god.
So then everyone before the Quran was immoral? literally not a single human being existed before the Quran was written who was moral? Or were they immoral without knowing it because nobody had told them “slavery is wrong” yet? That seems profoundly unjust.
It’s also important to note that according to Surah Al-An’am 6:112, any human who rebels against God and dedicated themselves to leading others astray is classified as a demon.
So I guess enslaving an atheist activist like Richard Dawkins is morally acceptable according to you? Since he is, according to the Quran, a demon?
word demons generally refer to jinn(smoke fire hybrid beings) demons. not humans demons. so i dont think human demons could be enslaved. regardless this was for solomon,its not clear from quran if this is a eternal permit to enslave jinn demons(like some solomonic magicians claim) or a one off thing only for solomon.
are you talking about real morals humans follow, or nonsense “morals” written in a religious text several thousand years ago?
It’s definitely a gray area (pun intended). Research has shown that the neuron lab matter takes the normal gestation period to fully start communicating and organizing properly. So it suggests that its inevitable that neural matter reaches a state of completion ready for life at end of gestarion.
I.e. rat neurons are ready in a few weeks
so do you think its fine to make them and use them or is it too unethical?
I think its somewhat early in research. They are seeing they can process info through the neurons like computing, and that at full gestation period there is a change. However they claim that without external sensing and stimuli such as vision or movement or a way to interact with the environment that they arent sure if true conscious like behaviour would emerge, because an organism learns its surrounding and sense of self by interaction with the physical world. Its a scary topic that I don’t have proper knowledge to comment on how beneficial or horrific it might be
Why is it OK for nature to do this, but not us?
And if it’s only OK for God to do, why did God let us develop the technology to do it? In fact it could be argued all science is divinely inspired - the Catholics believe this for instance - so this is God’s plan for us.
Just a bit silly to decide a whole nascent field is unethical because it rubs you the wrong way somehow.
god lets us do whatever we want,this world is filled with moral tests to see if we sin or hold on god morality. not every thing one can do is automaticly blessed by god.
I think there are serious ethical problems that we need to solve with science before we start using either natural OR ARTIFICIAL neurons in computers.
i think these problems are inherent to biology itself. like no matter what you do after the neurons reach certain number they will be sentient and suffer from being slaves to some computer actions.
There are many living things in the world, most of which we don’t really care about. No one asks a tree if it wishes to be a plank of wood. No one feels bad for eating a potato, and only some would feel badly about training an ox to pull a plow. There’s no evidence sentience is a product of the number of neurons; there are creatures with many more neurons than us that are far less self-aware. Much like the circuitry of a chip, it’s not the amount of copper and silicon that makes it work, it’s how it’s arranged. The cells themselves do not suffer, they are fed and functioning and that is sufficient, no different than a bacteria. Beyond that, a neuron based processor is no more sentient than copper and sand unless we design it to mimic a living brain.
ok thank you for this info,i didn’t know that number of neurons doesn’t = sentience. i will research about this topic more.
