this is probably only a fraction of it.
You can say that again. The Eurekalert piece left out the title of the paper - "In vitro neurons learn and
exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world".
I guess "We created a sentient Pong slave! Look at it go!" was too incendiary.
It does mention the free energy principle, but not that the guy who came up with it, Karl J. Friston, is a co-author on the paper. The math is so far beyond me it's not even funny, but the basic idea (which I am probably mangling beyond recognition) is fascinating. It essentially boils down to: systems try to minimize surprise. We model our surroundings and try to predict what will happen, and if our predictions fail we reassess our model or change our surroundings to fit our predictions (in other words, politics are hardwired into reality. Damn it!).
Can't wait to see what happens when a more advanced experiment (maybe with robot arms. Robot arms are cool) fails to predict an outcome and decides to change its surroundings to fit.
Peter Watts has his usual uplifting take on the whole thing:
https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10307A completely different tangent: I'm pretty (a little) sure that entropy plays a part in the above. Minimizing energy spent is usually beneficial, and having to spend time and energy organizing things to fit our predictions or reorganize our internal models spends energy and goes against entropy.
All life really goes against entropy. It's a high-energy state that will naturally decay into a low-energy state if left alone.
Throw in pan-psychism and the implications are a little unnerving. If the universe is sentient/conscious and we're just tiny parts of it, what else follows that basic layout? Our bodies and the cells inside them. In our case, specifically the type of cells that throw their weight around, gobbling up everything around them to spread, also known as cancer. What does our bodies do about that? Immune system GO! Our immune system wipes out cancers all the time and they never amount to anything. How would that apply on the scale of the universe? What if the universe has an immune system, we just haven't become enough of a nuisance to trigger it yet (spreading to another solar system might do the trick)? What if the reason we haven't found anyone else is because the Great Filter is the universe's immune system kicking in whenever someone gets too European?
Anyway, sorry about the detour. The idea "what if life itself is evil" just popped into my head a couple of weeks ago and has been sloshing around in there since, so I just wanted to lay it out and hopefully have someone explain why it has to be wrong.