NewsExpress Fetch

Interconnected fetch started: Interconnected updated:

Description: A blog by Matt Webb. My notebook and space for thinking out loud since February 2000.
Web: https://interconnected.org/home
XML: https://interconnected.org/home/feed
Last Fetch: 05-Nov-26 9:23am
Category: Weblogs
Active: Yes
Failures: 0
Refresh: 150 minutes
Expire: 4 weeks

Fetch now | Edit | Empty | Delete

All the news that fits

30-Oct-26

Interconnected [ 30-Oct-26 2:44pm ]

Filtered for spelunking the archives [ 30-Oct-26 2:44pm ]

Back in February 2023 I launched Braggoscope, my unofficial spelunker for official best show ever, BBC Radio 4's In Our Time (write-up here).

You can listen to all 1,000+ episodes online for free (and see all books in the online reading lists). i.e. there's a lot so don't miss the visual explorer to find the good stuff.

("Spelunker" from George Oates' use of the term: "an interface to let you wander around a big dataset, and … to show relationships between things.")

Notturnometer, late night classical music and opera:

every piece played since July 2008 on BBC Radio 3's_Through the Night_, built from the BBC's own programme data. Discover the most popular works, composers, and individual performances across 6,644 episodes.

Built by Nick Sweeney.

As a classical music newb (but I know what I like when I hear it) I would love this site as an overlay on Apple Music to help me navigate. Help me see the well-trafficked roads.

The Gilbertoscope by Sameer Padania.

Need reading inspiration? Here are over 2,000 books chosen on BBC's A Good Read presented by Harriett Gilbert.

Note to self: here are all the times books by Graham Greene have been recommended and I really need to pick up Brighton Rock.

3books.net: books recommended on The Ezra Klein Show (New York Times).

1,680 books. More reading inspiration.

ALSO listening inspiration. e.g. here's the record for Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, which is a fave, and now I want to listen to the episode it is mentioned in.

Built by Michael Sippey.

BBC Radio 1's Essential Mix: new DJ mixes every week since 1993, hosted by Pete Tong.

This is a genuine community labour of love, originally a massive spreadsheet: Essential Mix Index.

Mixes have a track listing, where available, and a link to a YouTube search.

I am delighted to discover this mix by Blu Peter from 1997. Music peaked with mid 90s trance.

In case you missed it:

Google Research and partners mapped the complete brain of fruit fly (3 September).

It's a common bug and common in scientific research. The male fruit fly has 166,000 neurons across the brain and main nerve cord; the map is called the connectome.

Long story short, the connectome is now available for free download, you can get a simulator of the different types of neurons, it caught the imagination of the internet, over September there has been all kinds of wild nonsense (impressive nonsense!).

e.g. here's a GIF of the fruit fly connectome playing Beat Saber (a VR rhythm game).

And now there are 100s of demos with embedded fruit fly sims.

Such as DesktopFly: "A 3D fruit fly that lives on your macOS desktop, with spiking simulations built from FlyWire brain wiring and the MaleCNS brain-to-leg network. It combines identified neural circuits with modeled senses, joints and behavior."

Or Fly64: "Hooks a MaleCNS model up to Super Mario 64". Requires you to bring your own game ROM and there is something in the irony that Nintendo has more IP over Mario than the fruit fly over its connectome…

It's all gotten a bit excitable and irreverent.

Seeing all these experiments, I am not excited. I have a nagging feeling of wrongness.

I am aware that I am the outlier here. And I wouldn't want these playful experiments to stop - and yet…

It's worth examining where my feeling of wrongness is coming from?

Do I imagine that the simulated fruit fly is someone being trapped and tormented, again and again and again, in a software prison?

No, the fruit fly connectome is unlikely to be sentient.

(Loosely my model is that sentience is the capacity to feel and experience; consciousness is the higher test of self-awareness. I'm not considering consciousness here.)

BUT I don't believe that sentience is a binary category.

At some point on the scale, sentience starts to be meaningful. Humans are, rocks aren't, cats mostly are, ants are more than rocks but only just. Who knows about stellar nebulae or the fluid dynamical gas storms in the Jovian atmosphere.

Where would I place the fly connectome in relation to say, a bacteria, or a virus? A virus doesn't have sentience (even in my most panpsychist moments) and is not alive in itself - although it is part of a living system. The connectome is just a pattern of weights, right?

Well I am predisposed to believe that the pattern of the neurons does indeed capture something essential of the fly.

What makes a brick wall? "A brick wall is bricks, and mortar, and pattern."

So this MaleCNS file download does capture some of the essence.

But in a meaningful way?

It's also relevant that I believe that AI will one day be sentient, about which I've written a bunch.

Are today's LLMs sentient?

Look, I am not an AI researcher and I have no special expertise here, and let's not let that be a barrier: my guess is that today's LLMs are not sentient but that they may well be in the lineage.

My guess at the roadmap to AI sentience goes something like this:

Sentience will require a singular AI which is run continuously, not today's cloned instances which are spun up for one-off responses.
The singular AI will be capable of learning (because experience and learning are basically the same thing)
Therefore it will have to be capable of guiding its own learning, probably from day 0, growing in capability over time
This future AI will not initially be a giant matrix of weights. It will start as an intelligence kernel which has pre-baked information-gathering/interaction tropisms and biases in how it structures and incorporates its learning. It will probably be very, very small. And trained by letting it loose in world sims and libraries.

The exact shape of that kernel will be establishing by understanding the gestalt of the world it will eventually live in: i.e. it will be structured by the experience encoded by today's LLMs.

But the kernel's architecture may well be based on something we already have, an already viable connectome.

Say, the fruit fly.

Yes yes this is highly, highly speculative. But I can't help how I see the world.

Therefore my feeling of moral worth of the fruit fly connectome seems to arrive from two directions:

Where it comes from: It is derived from something that is alive and, although probably not sentient, closer on the scale to sentient humans than to non-sentient rocks.
Where it goes: there is a small chance that this connectome is in the lineage of future new sentients.

Does it matter?

I mean: I am a hypocrite, surely? I eat meat? I will destroy an ant nest when the ants are coming into my house? I believe that animal testing in the name of science is on-balance worth it?

There is a scale to moral worth.

Or rather: any moral framework has to be subjective.

I care more about my immediate family than yours; I care more about humanity than aliens living near Sirius B.

Likewise I would fully expect you to care about your immediate family more than mine! And the Sirius Betans couldn't give a fig about humanity while they care very much for their own!

A good moral framework has to incorporate and respect that subjectivity, and also the sliding scales and the trade-offs.

So - to take the meat example - I can live with animals being farmed and killed, in my name, for my supper… so long as I don't take it for granted. I need to retain gratitude for meat.

Part of being human is learning how to live with the self-evident worth of animals and also eating them; or negotiating the rival concerns of oikos vs polis and simultaneously value our nearest and dearest while insisting on the equality of all.

Possibly we don't notice this inner conflict (and settlement) consciously, not all of us, not all the time, but I am convinced it is there.

This perspective helps me be more precise about the fly connectome.

It is not the fly connectome itself that makes me queasy.

It's that's we aren't taking it seriously. It's our lack of respect?

Like - consider my two directions… a slippery slope problem arrives from both ends:

Where it comes from: if we don't respect that the connectome comes from a living fruit fly, then what about when it comes from a cat? A human baby?
Where it goes: if we don't at least have a glimmer of respect for software sims today, then what about the sentient software in its lineage tomorrow? (And what will that sentience software make of us?)

Cast forward 100 years: these will be real issues, no doubt.

In 10 years? There's a decent chance.

Next year? Well, we should start the conversation.

I feel comfortable in saying that my moral queasiness over the fruit fly connectome is valid, having thought it through.

I don't think we should stop playing around.

Of course we shouldn't stop! It would be absurd and inconsistent to stop!

Uncountable millions of fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster have been bred, ethered, and used scientific work both serious and frivolous over the years.

Progress has trade-offs; the fly connectome is an easy one.

But I do feel like we should begin to practice respect, gratitude, even forgiveness - even in very small ways.

I'm not the only one!

I was writing about rituals back in 2021 when I ran across futurist Jaron Lanier talking about dignity:

Dignity is something people have to create. … I don't want to be living in a world in 20 years where there is a non-ritualistic way to do stem-cell research.

(And so new rituals of dignity should be invented, he said.)

He's so right.

Practically: where do we start?

I would like to think that a person vibe-coding a hook-up between the fly connectome and the Doom game engine is taking a moment to say "thanks" as the file downloads…

…but I doubt it. We have no established cultural practice of that.

Like Lanier said, we have to invent it.

So my suggestion is this:

Google Research should build a small shrine to the fruit fly.

Incorporate the body of a fly and the extracted essence, the connectome itself, engraved onto something effortful and monumental: perhaps it would be appropriate to use chip fabs, our civilizational peak, to lay it down on unique silicon.

Put the shrine (it can be small) somewhere anyone can visit. The new building in London King's Cross maybe, just a corner there.

Find a poet to write a few words. A new secular prayer to recognise, express thanks and ask forgiveness. Nothing onerous, just a short grace. Print the words on cards.

Visitors can read the words, light a candle and move on. Treat it lightly but seriously.

Barely anyone will visit to begin with. For people who do, it will mostly be a novelty. Not for everyone.

It would be a beginning.

More posts tagged: ai-consciousness (6).

Auto-detected kinda similar posts:

Filtered for nematodes and Uniqlo (17 Dec 2014)

18-Sep-26

Running my second marathon as a hollow man [ 18-Sep-26 5:11pm ]

Hey I ran my second marathon this last weekend. I wrote about my first one. It was hard (btw people liked that post).

I made my race plan, kept to it while resisting temptation, got round without stopping to walk and without calf cramps (that was the goal), and got a new personal best: chip time 3:37:54.

I want to talk about being hollow.

I've written poetry to running in the New Forest. What a treat to do a marathon there.

A line of horses at a hard gallop across the open heath, racing to intercept and crossing the road just ahead of a group of us runners.

Into the trees and winding through the towering redwoods.

An emotional experience ngl. Suddenly recognising I was running over a common I knew so well and gazed out at for so long when I was single-digit years old…

Anyway, 26 miles, 2,000 ft elevation, roads and gravel bridleways.

What went well:

Yes, after the horrific boiling calf cramps in my first race - pain like I've never had before or since - this time I hydrated well and paid attention to electrolytes.

But also:

My mental unlock was realising that I want room to have choices at 18 miles.

So my mantra for the first half was to run "within myself."

That's not just physically, holding back from running the engine hot.

It's also that I'm not very good at keeping on my own pace while others are passing me.

Which means I had to resist that - be comfortable with that - and remind myself that fatigue does not always feel fatiguing in the moment, it is also the accumulation of time. Restraint is its own effort.

(Whereas in a half marathon I can sit just below red-lining the engine the whole way, it's more straightforward.)

After 3 hours this paid off, this delayed work as a gift for Future Matt, and I was able to hold a steady pace up hills and past others who (like me, last time) had started to walk, and choose what to do.

Similarly:

I wasn't sure I was going to run at all till very late. I entered but didn't commit, unsure of my readiness. So I trained over the summer in order to give myself the option. I didn't want to disqualify myself through not putting in the miles.

Training not for a goal, but to earn a choice. I made a final call about a week out.

If I were to probe at what dark psychology makes a marathon so appealing for me:

When the capability of my body is stripped away after 26 miles and I have become a shell with a body on an automatic loop; when my psyche is peeled away and all that remains is will,

I feel like that is the closest I can come to seeing who I am.

An example…

Coming into the last half mile, I absolutely wanted to be done. My pace had faded some since mile 22, I had felt a twinge or two in the legs. The fatigue and the fear. Dig deep, keep going.

About 100 metres from the finish, the red hot boiling stones moving under the skin did in fact return - maybe my rhythm changed, my legs got confused, the neuromuscular fatigue set in, and that cramp started rising. I could feel myself stumbling and needing to stop.

I remember gritting my teeth and loudly telling my calves "no. No." as I forced them to obey - when nerve signals fail all you have left is yelling - I refused the pain… and then forward across the line.

Was I sure that "no" would be in me? Not until that moment.

At least partially, that's the moment I'm doing it for.

We have two hearts, it turns out:

After the run I lay for a while and that was fine and I walked around for a while and took some selfies and that was fine.

So I stood in line at a food truck but that was not fine.

I kept getting dizzy and had to crouch. And that came and went, and eventually my vision went high contrast I felt sick I couldn't stay upright and I left the line and lay down immediately to avoid collapsing.

What happened?

Later in the hot tub I did some reading.

We used to call it heat exhaustion or dehydration back in the day.

It turns out it is now described as "exercise-associated postural hypotension." i.e. low blood pressure after working out triggered by posture.

Like Philippides who ran from Marathon to Athens in 490 BC. Get this: he ran, stood still, announced "Rejoice, we have won," dropped dead.

Here's the mechanism:

During endurance exercise, heart rate increases to account for subsequent increases in metabolic demand. Increased metabolic demand requires increased vasodilation for the high-demand muscle groups, usually the lower extremities. This vasodilation is offset by the lower extremity muscles functioning as a 'second heart' by moving the increased lower body blood volume back to the heart to support the high cardiac output needed during vigorous exercise. However, this 'second heart' effect is lost with the cessation of exercise. When done abruptly, such as upon crossing the finish line of a marathon, venous pooling in the lower extremities results due to impaired baroreflex control. When coupled with a quick return towards a resting heart rate as seen in trained athletes, insufficient blood supply results, creating a hypotensive setting.
- National Library of Medicine, Exercise-Associated Collapse (2023)

Or to put it another way:

Your blood vessels get wider during strenuous exercise, so blood return up from your legs is harder.
The physical act of locomotion means rhythmically contracting your leg muscles, and that squeezes your veins; it's a pump, a second heart driving the blood round.
After: lying down is fine (blood return is no longer fighting gravity) and walking is fine (the pump is still active)… but standing and not walking means the blood pools in your legs: dizziness, nausea, collapse.

A heart outside your heart!

An exoheart that powers the running, pumping from the act of running itself!

The exoheart is a reminder that organs don't exist:

Take Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen's concept of extelligence which is "all the elements of what it is like to be you which do not reside in that unlikely grey goo in your skull."

As I said in 2015:

Look, I know the time even though that knowledge is on the lock screen of my phone, not in my skull.

My second heart is the pounding of my foot strikes; my intelligent race strategy is encoded in the rate of being passed/passing others; my pace is the habit of my autonomous muscles - which, when asked to change their pace, rebel.

It is no wonder that by 26.2 miles I feel hollow, I have transformed into a body without organs.

A p-zombie is a hollow man.

A p-zombie, a philosophical zombie, is a person who looks identical on the outside but on the inside they have no subjective experience. Like an AI, maybe.

Here's a deft and funny solution to why p-zombies won't exist:

Just ask them to write things down on a notepad.

And then (SMBC comics):

Now it has a physical record of interiority. All you have to do it take that record, shove it up the p-zombie's ass, and now it is literally internal.

Given my experience with my second heart, that tracks. I am inclined to see myself as a loose jumble of barely intelligent parts and looping processes with the illusion of coherent subjectivity.

What abides?

No more than "three irreducible notions: belief, desire, and their point of pure application, pure sense." Belief and desire.

The start and end were the same location.

So I see the race as a kind of travelling into myself.

Anyway, so.

Physically I am rinsed in a way I wasn't last time around. I guess that, because I got bottlenecked on calf cramps last time, I didn't push everything else to its limit, and this time everything else was indeed pushed?

I was 83rd of 727 runners. Of men in their 40s, 17th of 111. I beat my PB by approx 2 minutes.

Mainly: I made a plan, kept to my plan, and given my goal of "get round with no stopping and no drama" I got round with no stopping and no drama. And that is very satisfying.