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A comment on Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law. Parent comment

Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by omnicognate on Monday November 22, 2021 @02:11AM (#29303694)
Not sure what you mean by "interestingly complex". To say we are nowhere near understanding the nervous systems of fruit flies would be a massive understatement. Even for C.Elegans, for which we know the complete connectome and much more besides (and which has a thousandth of the number of neurons a fruit fly does), we're not close to explaining (or simulating) the behaviour of the animal in terms of the properties of the nervous system.
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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by stickfigure on Monday November 22, 2021 @04:52AM (#29304656)
Are you suggesting I should feel bad about squishing fruit flies?
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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by omnicognate on Monday November 22, 2021 @05:02AM (#29304741)
No, I squish flies all the time. However, as an empathetic human you should probably feel a bit squeamish about inflicting unnecessary suffering on them.
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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by afiori on Monday November 22, 2021 @09:37AM (#29306692)
It might be nice not to slowly boil them alive
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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by catlikesshrimp on Monday November 22, 2021 @06:33AM (#29305283)
Not if you need to, and your mind feels bad about it to keep the balance.

But if you do it for fun, I would keep my distance from you and stay close to a pike.

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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by robbrown451 on Monday November 22, 2021 @03:44PM (#29311381)
You should maybe feel bad about how much time you are wasting squishing them, compared to using one of those electric tennis racket bug zappers. They clear a kitchen of fruit flies in minutes, while giving you a most satisfying sound as you send them to the great fruit fly beyond.
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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by yummypaint on Monday November 22, 2021 @09:12PM (#29313881)
Electric zappers make insects explode and spray atomized guts all over the space spreading disease
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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by robbrown451 on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @01:16AM (#29315058)
They don't. At least mine doesn't. I've cleaned up the remains, they are intact but with burned sections.

I think getting rid of them quickly outweighs germs flying off them. Regardless I don't think they are known for spreading disease.

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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by dTal on Monday November 22, 2021 @08:59AM (#29306331)
Why do you squish fruit flies? They're harmless,
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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by biofox on Monday November 22, 2021 @01:24PM (#29309843)
They lay eggs on my fruit, and in my plant pots... Not cool
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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by GoblinSlayer on Monday November 22, 2021 @09:58AM (#29306932)
Wasn't simulation done? https://github.com/Flowx08/Celegans-simulation
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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by omnicognate on Monday November 22, 2021 @10:35AM (#29307467)
That's a simulation based on the connectome and a trivially simple body, producing a very small piece of behaviour. I don't mean to minimise it, it's very cool and I'm not an expert. The video itself says that it is limited.

As I understand it, C. Elegans displays a surprisingly large and complex set of behaviours given its (relatively) extremely simple nervous system. A database of thousands of these "behavioural phenotypes" has been built and provides a well-defined goal for attempts to reproduce the behaviours in simulations. Very few of these behaviours have been replicated. To solve the problem will apparently require a lot more than the connectome, which has been known for a long time. It's not enough to know that neuron A connects to neuron B, or even the full 3D structure of that connection. You need to know how that connection influences the behaviour of the connected neurons. People refer to this as "knowing the weights" but AFAIK it's still an open question whether a model based on "weights" is sufficient.

This is a recent comment from one of the researchers about progress on this over the last 10 years: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-b...

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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by GoblinSlayer on Monday November 22, 2021 @12:03PM (#29308659)
That model's phase space is about 2000 bits, realistically speaking its behavior never repeats. It can't be searched either, our computational limit today is about 70 bits.
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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by omnicognate on Monday November 22, 2021 @01:11PM (#29309682)
I'm not clear what you're saying there. You shouldn't need to exhaust the phase space to check if the model exhibits a particular behaviour, but perhaps you're not claiming that?
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Re:Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentien... by GoblinSlayer on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @02:07AM (#29315323)
The simulation derives behavior from the state of neural network, in order to produce desired behavior the state should be known first, in general case you need to search it if you don't have a reliable method to reach it from any other state.
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