The Fly Enters The Matrix

[Jarhyn]

Researchers Upload Fly's Brain to Matrix, Let It Control Virtual Body

A company claims to have simulated the neurons of an adult fruit fly's brain and letting it roam inside a Matrix-like virtual environment.

futurism.com

In a stunning act of what might result in horrors beyond human comprehension, a common housefly has been disassembled, had their brain mapped, and had the brain uploaded into an active simulation.

While I am unsure if any of the mechanics for synapse restructure are present, this establishes what I have been saying with respect to behavior being the result of a system graph "connectome", and that the cause of "consciousness" and "awareness" is the computational structure of the brain itself, and that in writing a computer program, you create a soul of sorts: someone could, after all, meticulously write this same connectome (although nobody ever would because it is hopelessly time consuming and obscure).

The fact that a fly doesn't need to be "real" to have a sensory experience and to have a "real experience of something 'fake'".

Upload here we come, I guess.

 

[steve_bank]

Maybe the movie The Fly was prophetic.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I would be very surprised if upload is not possible if we get that far. Unfortunately, I consider that unlikely at this point.

 

[lpetrich]

That's not a housefly (Musca domestica). That's the lab fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster - it's been used as a model system for over a century, since 1910.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Isn't it necessarily a more simplified version of the fruit fly's brain though? Not the brain "being uploaded" whatever that means.

 

[lpetrich]

Yes, simplified and abstracted.

PubMed - a big collection of biomedical abstracts.

• Drosophila melanogaster - 68,106 hits
• Musca domestica - 4,676 hits

 

[bilby]

Fortunately, we still use Latin for species names. Drosophila melanogaster translates into English as "Black bellied dew lover" which sounds like something you would hear a fascist screaming at the judge who just sent him to jail.

 

[lpetrich]

Fortunately, we still use Latin for species names. Drosophila melanogaster translates into English as "Black bellied dew lover" which sounds like something you would hear a fascist screaming at the judge who just sent him to jail.

A lot of words in taxon names are Latinized Ancient Greek, like all of those. A pure Latin one is Musca domestica - domestic fly.