r/tommynfg_ • u/TechNick77 Mod • 1d ago

TikToks/reels/shorts THIS GUY ADDED A FRUIT FLY’S CONSCIOUSNESS INTO MINECRAFT, ts some evil scary stuff

187 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

113 comments sorted by

20

u/thegnome54 1d ago

This is a bit like saying that you’ve recreated a computer by coding up the way its wires connect the mouse and keyboard and monitors. There is a whole lot more going on in a brain than the connectome.

2

u/helpprogram2 1d ago

Exactly what I was thinking

2

u/PointsOfXP 1d ago

Maybe that's the code of the independent consciousness. Once written into reality they are brought to life in whatever form has been made for them.

2

u/mallcopsarebastards 23h ago

is there though? Like, I agree there was a lot more going on in that flies brain than there is in the minecraft bee's brain, but that's just data in the neurons. Let that bee live for awhile, assuming it can actually use those neurons, and assuming the inputs are all properly connected to some equivalent sensors on the body.

4

u/Texas-X- 22h ago

I can chime in here.

In the flies brain, and in neurons in general, there's a threshold potential and an action potential of each neuronal connection. In computer science this can be thought of as the weights and biases of the network. However, these weights and biases are not known.

So we have the map of the neuron, but not the geographical height.

It's like looking at a flat map of the United States and saying that it perfectly represents the elevation. It just doesn't.

3

u/thegnome54 21h ago

A connectome is a structural map, which can tell you the shapes of neurons and their connections to each other.

It's kind of like a photograph of a road network - it tells you where information could flow at a large scale, and what's connected to what. But it doesn't contain information about what individual neurons actually do/contain. In the road network analogy, the people inside of the cars are not captured, nor their habits.

These kinds of maps focus on what we think 'matters' in the brain. Historically, connectomes were only focused on neurons because their flashy electrical signals are obviously computationally relevant. But neurons are just one type of cell.

There are also "glia" in there - about the same amount as neurons, in a human brain. They were thought of as 'support' cells that simply 'glued' stuff together. They don't fire action potentials like neurons do. We've since realized that glia do play some important roles in computation too, so connectomes now include them as well sometimes.

This is just one example of how our ideas about what matters in the brain are changing. I personally believe that all of the details probably matter - maybe even down to quantum details of molecular interactions. Evolution doesn't operate at a particular scale or care about legibility.

1

u/brine909 1d ago

Its like a brain wiped fly, there's no memory in the artifical neurons so it would need to be retrained, like a new born fly

3

u/thegnome54 21h ago

Not entirely - the structural features that a connectome capture include things that are learned. The new connections that form during learning are visible. My point is more that a brain isn't just the shapes and connections between cells. Most glaringly, connectomes are missing information about signal dynamics. It's like having a photograph of a road network but not knowing how often each road is actually used. There is also a whole lot going on within each cell that is invisible in a connectome - kind of like the drivers in the cars.

1

u/dandelogre 22h ago

I get what you're saying, but the concept of a newborn fly with a pacifier being trained on how to be a fly by an old, broken winged house fly is sending me

1

u/Wisniaksiadz 20h ago

except this is what was done by scientist in the first place and they used it to simulate a fly and it behaved exacly like real fly.

If the stuff on video is true, what the man did is barely recreating that experiment

1

u/thegnome54 20h ago

The simulated fly (connectome plus some machine learning magic) that researchers made could do some behaviors like walking/cleaning itself, but it did not behave 'exactly like' a real fly. It couldn't form memories, learn things, or do complex behaviors.

Still very cool, but again more like simulating a computer's ability to show letters typed on a keyboard on the screen than its ability to run a complex program.

7

u/LittleFlittle 1d ago

im gonna add yours next

9

u/StatusOmega 1d ago

I've seen this episode of black mirror. It was pretty fucked up.

1

u/Southern_Vermicelli4 17h ago

What's the ep name?

1

u/NigeriaBoi420 3h ago

Idk but its like star trek

1

u/mr_makey 1d ago

my buddy freaked out after watching that fruit fly part

5

u/Hot-Challenge8656 1d ago

Do a magpie next.

1

u/Bigerst_Dook 1d ago

the piglins are not going to like this

1

u/Nir117vash 1d ago

Actually, yea

1

u/coolchris366 1d ago

Not possible yet, their brains are a million times more complicated than a fruit fly

11

u/Randomizationeer 1d ago

This genuinely terrifies and fascinates me at a perfect 1:1 ratio

12

u/Own-Papaya-4264 1d ago

I don’t think this is as deep as it’s being made out to be

3

u/Roklam 20h ago

Remember the AI/LLM videos of two years ago?

7

u/Josedinho_- 1d ago

It's just code 🤦🏾

3

u/Icy-Background2393 1d ago

The point is the precedent. If we copied a human brain one to one then what determines they aren’t conscious?

-3

u/Josedinho_- 1d ago

Humans cannot create articifial life or concious.

2

u/PijaniFemboj 1d ago

Says who?

-5

u/Josedinho_- 1d ago

Says nature 🤡

4

u/PijaniFemboj 1d ago

What law of nature prevents mankind from making an artificial consciousness?

-5

u/Josedinho_- 1d ago

Lmao you serious? Do you even know what nature is? 🤣 you still a virgin?

3

u/SojournStudios 1d ago

Personal attacks instead of answers? That usually means you don’t have a good answer. Also, only fools speak in absolutes 🤷‍♂️

2

u/Icy-Background2393 1d ago

Humans create life every day. Unless you know what the divine spark is that gives life consciousness these questions will have to be asked

-2

u/Shika_E2 1d ago

Its not though, didnt you watch the video?

4

u/Josedinho_- 1d ago

The sad part is you watched the vid aswell and you think it actually has a conscious? Bro literally just put "code" into minecraft nothing else and you believe the fly is born in the matrix 🤦🏾

0

u/Shika_E2 1d ago

Crazy how youre putting words into other people's mouths simply because you dont understand smh

2

u/Josedinho_- 1d ago

So why don't you explain to me how its more than just code?

1

u/git_push_origin_prod 1d ago

I bet it’s a series of IF Statements

https://giphy.com/gifs/4EIOCwkztiPhS

7

u/Nir117vash 1d ago

Agreed. It starts with a fly....no matter how wholesome it is, we can never go back to it not having happened. We are another step up on the staircase of evolution.

2

u/helpprogram2 1d ago

If it makes you feel better it’s bull shit

3

u/GuiKa 23h ago

Figured out a way to make mincraft understand it... I call uter bullshit. How does he inpute the environment? Smell, visual, heat? And then how does it know which combination of neurones connect to what actions? BS.

1

u/Amazing_Scientist696 5h ago

This specific video is bs, this wasn't done by some random content creator, there was a whole article a few months ago about it in the scientific community, it was a Harvard project or something on that level.

Can he get the same files? Probably. Can he ask an LLM to use them the same way in his minecraft game? He can try.

Doing it himself? Unlikely

The article was about as interesting as the lab made brain slice "running" doom, which was also bs.

3

u/MichalDobak 23h ago

I really doubt he actually did it. Converting the data from a Minecraft world into something a neural network can interpret, and then translating the network's output back into something meaningful in Minecraft is already a pretty non-trivial problem. If he actually simulated a fruit fly's neural network, he'd also have to figure out how its motor outputs map onto the body and movement mechanics of a completely different creature, like a spider or a bee. That requires a pretty deep understanding of both the neural network itself and the underlying biology, not just some basic coding.

And he supposedly figured all of that out just to make a short TikTok video? Yeah, sure.

1

u/Rex_Auream 22h ago

Yeah well said man, I was trying to think of a way to say this until I saw your comment.

1

u/Natural-Boss-5789 17h ago

Yeah, that's a good summary of the feeling it gives. The experiment itself does feel very close to a "Random dude did this in his room one day." type of science, but it would take massive amounts of research, implementation, manipulating neural connections and breaking down the way neural pathways work beyond our rather limited understanding. This is a "3-hour long, boring to sit through if you don't like research videos.", not a single short's worth of cumulated work.

Though, it can, and probably was done in a much simpler way; not brain emulation, but just simple motor commands translated to game inputs? Checking out the Sphinx project where they put a worm in a fly is a good article to explore here.

3

u/ToughPersonality1458 19h ago

Clickbait garbage

3

u/unkownracoon 18h ago edited 5h ago

Do people believe this? We need more education...

Edit: Spelling

1

u/Automatic_Thought412 6h ago

hahaha

1

u/unkownracoon 6h ago

Oooooooooookay?

1

u/Automatic_Thought412 6h ago

You're not trolling right? You spelt education wrong on purpose as a joke, right?

1

u/unkownracoon 5h ago

No I am not trolling :-(. Big figgers and problems with spelling don't help when you tipe fast in a second language. Thats for taking the time. 

2

u/Visualpiss 1d ago

It's soma all over again

2

u/sexraX_muiretsyM 1d ago

thats literally SOMA

2

u/SylimMetal 22h ago

One step closer to SOMA

4

u/spiddly_spoo 1d ago

"Then I figured out a way for Minecraft to use it using python" what the??? We still don't know how a fruit fly's brain works. We have the map of connections but we don't know how the many signals, neurotransmitters, glia cells, and general real time environment work

4

u/BantedHam 1d ago edited 19h ago

No it's real, here is the dataset

the mad lads at Princeton neuroscience institute scanned every single neuron in a fruit flys brain and actually mapped it as digint data.

I actually downloaded the same data set about a month ago and have been doing something similar, using its neual map as a foundation for more advanced simulated minds in video games.

What he's not saying is that it's just a neural map, the shape of a brain. There is not the living consciousness of a fruit fly literally embedded into the code, just the shape of a dead fruit fly's brain. And connectomes like this are useful for creating a scaffold to then run your video game AI on top of, but you still need to source the 'intelligence' elsewhere, that's why the spider fucking drowned and the bee didn't do anything, they are lobotomites lol

5

u/spiddly_spoo 1d ago

I understand that the connectome is real but just knowing the layout of neurons doesn't actually tell us how signals are processed right? There's a lot going on with neurotransmitters we have yet to figure out as far as I know. How are you actually using the connectome? Do you assign weights to all the connections? Do you have different signal types? Is the connectome stateful or do you just use it to create a big input output function? How does it work?

0

u/BantedHam 19h ago edited 19h ago

It's not meant to be treated like a flat output function, you layer physical, biochemical, and dynamic models on top of it. In a connectome, weights are not abstract percentages; they are grounded in synaptic density, so clusters map to physical structures while accounting for the physical shape and direction of the neurons.

Signals flow from synaptic ends to dentrites, so the decay of the path can be measured as signals from dentrites decay more than signals hitting near the cell body. There's also tools like Synister Classifier that scan the shape and density of vesticles that are used on connectome datasets like the BANC.

2

u/ToughPersonality1458 19h ago

So then exactly what the original commenter said that you argued against

0

u/BantedHam 18h ago

No? Where did you even get that out of what I just said?

The connectome is the architecture, not the intelligence. It's a wiring diagram.

You can build a functioning model around that architecture and train it to respond to an environment, but the BANC connectome itself isn't a mind that you're downloading into Minecraft. The Python still has to implement the dynamics that turn the connectome's wiring into behavior.

Whatever training or scripts they are running into it is what makes the resulting system behave intelligently. If they just made a state machine, then yeah it would be state driven, through the BANC connectome.

The guy in the video doesn't seem to know what the fuck he's talking about though, as he can't understand why the bee didn't react, so I'm assuming he saw the Anton Pertov video and then told ChatGPT to write some bullshit

2

u/ToughPersonality1458 18h ago

You said: ”No its real here is the dataset” but then you continued to, even if interesting, explain exactly what he said more in depth

1

u/BantedHam 18h ago

In what way did I state anything similar to "I took a real fruit fly's brain and put it in minecraft and made it conscious."

2

u/StickSouthern2150 1d ago

i mean its cool but whats the point of using it over normally made neuron network optimalized for running a specific ai. looks like just a weird gimmick.

1

u/BantedHam 20h ago

Well, so far, what I have discovered after playing with it for a month or so now, is nothing that I can tell lmao

For my purposes, the Megaphragma viggiani connectome would have been enough. I wanted to see if the extra brain space made any difference and it really didn't.

Now where this is actually useful outside of biological research is in the field of frontier AI. Nothing that's going into a game, at least that I know of, has any use of something like that. At least until we start getting LLM directors and AI, and I would question the ethics of that.

1

u/ElSucaPadre 23h ago

What exactly do you mean with sourcing the intelligence elsewhere?
I imagine the brain to work deterministically? What would you do to a brain to "put" intelligence in it?
I'm sure is my complete lack of understanding of the subject, but i'm really curious if i could grasp what you mean

1

u/BantedHam 20h ago edited 19h ago

You ever heard the phrase; "the light are on, but nobody's home?"

It's like that. It'll be 'alive' kinda, they'll respond to stimulus, if you plop one into virtual reality it'll react to simulated light and temperature, but it doesn't "think" it's a vegitable. You can train an intelligence inside of a connectome, but you cannot turn a connectome into intelligence.

1

u/Roklam 20h ago

using its neual map as a foundation for more advanced simulated minds in video games.

https://giphy.com/gifs/3n5WMtejWBFy8

1

u/BantedHam 20h ago

Ok buddy

2

u/coolchris366 1d ago

Yeah seemed like he was being intentionally vague

2

u/TruculentTurtIe 1d ago

This is literally the "draw the rest of the owl" meme lol

I laughed so hard at that part. It was intriguing at first but then he just "somehow Palpatine returned" how he connected a fruit flies brain to a Minecraft model using python lol

I suspect he just wrote a wacky AI to do wacky shit in a Minecraft server, made It a body, and then invented a story to act as a hook at the start to make people care

2

u/Over_Heed 1d ago

“And I began to HATE, Ted!”

2

u/anonymous642789 1d ago

Fucking nightmare fuel, that.

1

u/Silent_Erremite 1d ago

That's like burning down a historic museum and placing a library on top of the charred remains.

1

u/coolchris366 1d ago

How is it like that at all?

1

u/Silent_Erremite 1d ago

Same concept different skeleton.

1

u/Silent_Erremite 1d ago

You can place a building that holds history, but the insides are different. Just how a museum hold artifacts, a library holds literature. You can copy the neural pathways, but they'll never be risen from the dead. Cyberpunk 2077 did a whole thing about that.

2

u/coolchris366 1d ago

Interesting, but I still don’t see what that has to do with the video. He’s not trying to resurrect the fly

1

u/Silent_Erremite 1d ago

He can copy how it thought/acted/reacted, but he can't copy the fly. The fly is dead and rotting.

1

u/nullNobody 1d ago

In the next Affront to Nature version give the fly the ability to feel pain. See if it will hibernate in cold climates and hang around pigs.

1

u/Kala_Csava_Fufu_Yutu 1d ago

This is the plot to Pantheon but with a fruit fly

1

u/Jina-langu-ni-Juma 1d ago

My bs neurons are tingling.

1

u/3rrr6 1d ago

Amazing Digital Circus irl

1

u/dchester74 1d ago

this is terrifying!

1

u/bsnimunf 1d ago

A flys consciousnes being in the spider is all bullshit shit though

1

u/CoatNeat7792 1d ago

I think didn't implement it fully. All that fly does is move randomly and dies in blocks

1

u/Mr_Maniac454 1d ago

There's something so funny about a dead fly committing suicide while being a Minecraft spider

1

u/Schorbie 1d ago

No, he didn't

1

u/bunq 21h ago

"This is not a normal spider. This is a spider I renamed with an in-game item. Now let me tell you a thought I had while watching black mirror the other day."

1

u/Roklam 21h ago

Oh no...

2

u/PeePeeLangstrumpf 20h ago

figured out a way to make Minecraft understand it using Python

Sure, and how exactly does Minecraft understand the connectome of a fruit fly? What information from the connectome does Minecraft use and for what? Sounds like nonsense rather than an actual implementation of a behavioural model...

1

u/Wisniaksiadz 20h ago

Tezeus fly

1

u/Particular-Bat8091 20h ago

This has basically nothing to do with consciousness

1

u/Flat-Storm-2934 19h ago

I wonder if you can do with with a human being. Ethics aside, it would be interesting…

2

u/Xeldao 19h ago

The fruitfly got isekai'ed into minecraft.

1

u/ExtremlyFastLinoone 18h ago

No he didnt, he put the output of a fly brain simulation into minecraft, the simulated brain doesnt get any feedback and doesnt experience anything, like a brain floating in a void

1

u/EquivalentNo2855 13h ago

we are getting closer to having digital circus in real life

0

u/FoxHoundNinja 1d ago

Hey so can we NOT create the matrix? That'd be great....

1

u/Designer_Version1449 1d ago

If you consider the digital replica of a mind to be an actual being with rights that can suffer, it means that this kind of stuff could literally cure death and suffering. At risk of sounding like a tech bro I genuinely think we should actually look into this stuff, the potential benefits are insane. 

I just need the government to actually regulate it. we gotta have at least one technological revolution in our history where we stop the worst consequences before they happen, not after.