Technology
PUBLISHED
In an experiment that has already served as a key plot point of several pretty great episodes of Black Mirror, a YouTuber has uploaded a digital copy of a brain into a digital world, and watched what unfolded.
Black Mirror, along with many other works of science fiction, have explored the idea of placing digital copies of people within digital worlds.
The obvious example everyone leaps to is the Black Mirror episode USS Callister in which digital copies of people working at a video games company become trapped inside one of their own games. During the episode, they then have to fight for their own survival, earning credits and scavenging supplies from other spacecraft to continue their journey through digital space.
The episode focuses on the trapped digital humans as they try to convince people out there in the "real" world that they are genuinely conscious. Well, we might not be quite at those levels, but we're certainly taking baby steps towards it.
In a new video, which might be nightmarish depending on which ideas of consciousness turn out to be correct, YouTuber Ro0oney explains how he placed a digital copy of the entire brain of a fruit fly into Minecraft, and then let it interact with its new, digital world.
What actually got uploaded?
In 2024, an international research consortium released the first-ever complete wiring of an entire fruit fly brain.
“Flies can do all kinds of complicated things like walk, fly, navigate, and the males sing to the females,” Dr Gregory Jefferis of the University of Cambridge, one of the co-leaders of the new research, explained in a statement at the time.
“If we want to understand how the brain works, we need a mechanistic understanding of how all the neurons fit together and let you think. For most brains we have no idea how these networks function.”
That fly brain model was great news for any brain researchers, but was also made publicly available. And it was this brain map that YouTuber Ro0ney was working with.
In a video titled "I put a fly's conscious brain into Minecraft", Ro0ney very much did not do that.
However, he did place the fly brain model into a Minecraft environment, having it react to events and actions that took place in the game.
How to build (fly) consciousness
The first step, as every good sci-fi writer would know, was to teach the fly to fear.
"The first thing I added was fear," Ro0ney said in the video, though we're not sure we completely agree with their reasoning.
"Yeah, turns out the main thing that keeps any consciousness alive is the fear of death."
This was induced with a single dark square which expanded in the digital fly brain's "view", mimicking an object like a fly swat coming towards it at some pace. The YouTuber inferred a "fear" response as the digital fly model brain fired its only control at that point, making it spin around desperately in circles and then hop.
The YouTuber also had to attempt to mimic the fly's sensory inputs. He gave it a version of sight, sound, and touch. The fruit fly helped keep these tasks minimal.
"The same underlying pattern controls both touch and hearing in a fruit fly," Ro0ney explained of previous research. "Different organs with the same real biological mechanism."
Ro0ney modeled in sound so that the digital brain would receive an input, or "hear", when something was within a certain radius of its avatar, and "feel" it touch them when they came into contact in the world.
As well as this, Ro0ney had to come up with a hunger system. He made it deplete energy as it flew around – somewhat insulting to Drosophila melanogaster – as a bee avatar.
The result is a model of a fly brain which is able to respond to, and navigate around, a Minecraft environment. The digital brains are even able to "learn" routes as they explore their world, although the YouTuber had to assign the flies their own home square to return to eventually.
So you've caged some digital fly brains inside a digital world and taught them fear, what's next? Sex
Ro0ney was particularly curious about how male flies woo female flies through song, and wanted to see that play out with digital fly brains and Minecraft bee avatars.
The problem was that the fly brain model was female, and they lacked the connectome needed to explore the behavior in the digital fly brain.
Sourcing another model, however, Ro0ney was able to make this nightmare scenario play out, with a digital fly brain playing a bee avatar desperately humming music as it chased around a second bee avatar, in a highly misguided attempt to reproduce.
So is that thing conscious or what?
The overwhelmingly likely answer here is: no.
A simulation of a brain is not a brain, in the same way that if you simulate a hurricane on your computer you don't have to clear the debris out of your motherboard. As impressive as the digital model is, it is also a simplification of a real fly brain, and is receiving highly simplified inputs rather than the complex feedback it would receive in a body.
And though it might look like it is conscious (and wants to have sex with the lady bee), behavior does not necessarily mean consciousness, as people have repeatedly been explaining lately about chatbots.
On the other hand, we are only just beginning to scratch the surface on consciousness, and it would be a little arrogant on our part to rule it out entirely. If that were the case, though, we have more pressing concerns about the 200,000 human cells being forced to play Doom.
Ro0ney hopes to help researchers by releasing it as a "Consciousness" mod on Minecraft, allowing anybody to take a look at what goes on when a digital fly model brain meets a blocky world.
Or torture a digital fly brain in a simplified bee body inside a horror world, depending on which version of consciousness turns out to be correct.
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