Brain in petri jar flies plane

Ok, this story just fascinates, confuses, and frightens me all at the same time.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/12/06/1102182227308.html?oneclick=true

Can someone explain how this works and then put it into a philsophical context that doesn’t reduce my sense of self to a random blob of goo?

All I got was some registration page :frowning:

Tuckerfan beat you to it.

I’ve been flying planes for years and my brain is barely more sophisticated than this thing, so don’t be worried. This isn’t new ground. :wink:

I was blown away when I read that article yesterday. This is by far the most advanced work I have seen done in this area, if indeed the quasi-brain did everything the article claims it did. It seems to me it amy be just a tad overblown, and they didn’t mention how long the brain lived? But they seemingly did achieve a successful biological computer with hardware/wetware integration.
All must now bow before our new rat-brained (mutine?) Borg overlords.

Can’t be any worse than Bush.

Have they solved the problem of your computer literally dying?

And that article is amazing, btw.

Simple: You are a blob of goo. But you are a lot more complex than 25,000 neurons spread out over a set of electrodes.

What they did was use neurons in a self-organizing pattern to perform a bunch of processing in a feedback loop. That is, the neurons arranged themselves in the best pattern to keep the outside in a steady state, which seems to be a strong tropsim for neurons in general.

The slashdot story about this dates to October 23. Y’all are a little slow on the trigger.

Oops, well maybe a mod can blend this thread in or something.

Well, that’s only because it took us a while to arrange our neurons in the best pattern to keep the outside in a steady state.

I fell off my bike today. Afterward I became quite depressed that a mutant rat brain can fly an F-22 fighter jet.