rapa-nui

First off:

You guys did amazing work. When I saw the paper my jaw dropped. I have a few technical questions (and one super biased philosophical one):

1. When you 'train your brain' how many average examples did you give it? Did performance on the task correlate to the number of training sessions? How does performance compare to a 'traditional' hidden layer neural network?

2. Does SPAUN use stochasticity in its modelling of the firing of individual neurons?

3. There is a reasonable argument to be made here that you have created a model that is complex enough that it might have what philosophers call "phenomenology" (roughly, a perspective with a "what it is to be like" feelings). In the future it may be possible to emulate entire human brains and place them permanently in states that are agonizing. Obviously there are a lot of leaps here, but how do you feel about the prospect that your research is making a literal Hell possible? (Man, I love super loaded questions.)

Anyhow, once again, congratulations... I think.

Unfortunately, I can think of many reasons a repressive state would want to have that kind of technology at their disposal. Would you ever dissent if the government could torture you indefinitely?

Obviously, the simple retort is that it isn't 'you', it's a simulation of you, but that gets philosophically thorny very quickly.

Thank you for your replies (I found the answer to all the questions illuminating and interesting), but I would not be so quick to dismiss my last question as a silly thing.