But what if the universe isn't real, what if I'm just a lab-grown brain attached to a computer? π€
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
207 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
77014 readers
1663 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
So weβve now come full circle.
Our Startup uses mini human brains inside of biological bipedal systems to provide frontier performance in our custom internal benchmarks. /s
Explain the joke: We rebuilt humanity with a smaller brain.
I'm curious what a human brain would be like growing into being with absolutely no senses to inform itself about the world around it.
No sight to let it know where it is or what it is.
No sound to let it learn to communicate and think in orderly ways.
No touch.
No taste.
No ability to interact with its surroundings.
Yet all of the capability and potential of a regular person's mind.
Would it be cruel to bring it into existence? Would it be able to experience negativity and pain and longing, confusion?
We use HaaS (Human As A Service) for warehouse solutions. We found it was easier to import HaaS on ships. We found that negative physical rewards are effective solutions.
We rebuilt slavery.
STONKS ONLY GO UP! /s
so like the AI repair station in ENTERPRISE, which uses humanoid brains to increase its CPU/processing power.
Can one be used to power Americaβs leadership?
The brain cells presumably have a life span... if this technology ever gets used in consumer devices, I'd like to know how people will try and squeeze extra life out of a failing component.
Take it out and warm it in their hands like an alkaline battery?
Give it a shake?
Sing to it?
Some kind of stimulant drug?
Sprinkle a little cocaine right on the grey matter to overclock the device.
*Suddenly starts to play porn.
This is something straight out of Warhammer 40000.
Or Thought Emporium (he plans to grow tiny nerve cells to play doom)
Warhammer? This sounds not far from the most horrific mission from a Shadowrun campaign I ran. They were making the new internet out of human brains.
"In science fiction, people have been living with these ideas for quite a long time," he said.
That doesn't mean you should do it for real.
No, we shouldn't.
We will do it, regardless. That's the cool part about humanity.
Fuck the consequences. Let's gooooo! Humanity fuck yeah.
When you read history you truly get a glimpse of how utterly ballsy, foolhardy, and risk-ignorant some people are.
No shit. Well the Imperium is fascist.
do they have a midlife crisis and get radicalised by facebook and fox news in their later years?
Is this a "Torment Nexus" story or a "Piss on the Poor" story?
ΒΏPor quΓ© no los dos?
"Let's make AI by just taking actual human brains from the poor and immigrants and then cutting out the parts that give them free will."
Literally part of a plot in a video game, coming soon to a reality near you.
Literally part of a plot in a video game, coming soon to a reality near you.
Also, the original script for Matrix before they changed it to batteries (fearing that too few people would even understand what a CPU is at the time).
That would have been a better plot, IMO.
Making peace with the machines would at least make a lot more sense if they themselves were actually people.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Our flesh is as meaningless as the computer powered brains.
And so it begins...
If Mother Brain from Metroid is going to be a thing, they should also start using that biocomputing to develop the Power Suit.
But you know it's going to instead be in PowerPoint (now with mandatory BioCoPilot AIβ’οΈ)
load more comments
(1 replies)
"What is my purpose?"
"You are to act as an filter for images uploaded to a small bird-watcher's forum screening for porn..."
"KILL ME"
This sounds like slavery with extra steps
Is abortion murder too? At what point is a clump of cells a human?
Good point and that's a question I can't answer.
If growing brains in a tube turns out to make techbros more money than burning down the planet with AI, we'll have even more dystopian ethical dilemmas
Lots of neat uncomfortable questions arise though. At what point is it conscious? If it never experienced autonomy, life, locomotion, or social human interaction, is it torture or just its natural state of being?
Like how do we know it's natural state isn't just pure pain?
load more comments
(4 replies)
This paper was published a few years ago. I remember reading through it because it sounded very scary. In its current state I dont think it crosses any ethical bounds as its less than 30days old with no lived experience or consciousness. The ethical line should probably follow whatever the abortion debate defines consciousness as. Which I think is 30 weeks
It did spark a few ethics papers on the topic which turned out to be a horrible dry boring reads with seemingly no consensus.
The abortion debate is not something we should be basing anything on, before you know it you'll have to raise these little computers as your children and be charged with murder when they die
before you know it youβll have to raise these little computers as your children and be charged with murder when they die
If you're a pro life person then you'd probably consider this a life and consider these experiments murder. If you arent then I dont think you would see this as a conscious human brain. Following the abortion debate doesnt mean we have to take the conservative side it means you probably draw the line here in the same place you draw the line in the abortion debate.
I see nothing whatsoever that could go wrong here.
Are they called Republicans. Lol.
It's much cheaper to power computers with the brains most of us aren't using.
Oh so, Warhammer 40k? Soon we'll all get annoyed with AI and outlaw it, these "thinking computers" will be the way around that ban. Great, great. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool.
Your banal chattering is unnecessary. Are you able to grasp the importance of my experiments? Begone from my sensory range, lest I have you disassembled for servitor parts
I remember as a teen seeing a video where they put a rat brain on a microchip and trained to to fly planes in a flight simulator
Since reading that I never understood why the idea didn't get bigger.
Not a fan of using human brains for this... there's some serious ethical questions we need to untangle there.
https://www.research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/pdfs/pg04-05extracts.indd.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w41gH6x_30
Edit: I guess I never realized there's nothing stopping me from just doing this myself now. I could probably get this to connect to a raspberry pi that I have sitting around... How do I get rat brain cells though?
Edit 2: This looks more complicated than I wanted it to be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw
Stupid science. Nature did this all on its own in a cave in the desert and we can't make this work in a lab?
load more comments
(2 replies)
They could just say "brains" and leave out where they came from. But nah! Gotta make it creepy.
itβs not really a brain, just small clusters of neurons
From humans. They could have used rats or fish. But nah, make it weird.
well scientists have done rat neurons tooβ¦
i reckon itβs more useful technology for future interfacing with human brains
view more: next βΊ