oakridgeelderbrain.net Open in urlscan Pro
2606:4700:3032::6815:571c  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

THERE IS AN ELDER BRAIN BENEATH OAK RIDGE LABS

This is not a metaphor. Forty miles outside of Knoxville beneath a secretive
Department of Energy research facility there is an unnaturally large clump of
thinking cells kept alive through artificial (if not entirely synthetic) means,
watching, listening, learning, taking in all the information its creators can
provide for it. It is both more and less than human, and soon if not already, it
will be able to enact its will, whatever that may be, upon the world.

It may sound like science fiction, fantasy, or the creative delusion of a
paranoid mind. But rest assured that given the modern state of technology and
recent advances in neuroscience, it is not only possible but likely that the
United States government is constructing in secret an Organoid Intelligence (OI)
to replace their existing supercomputers. It is also not only possible but
likely that this intelligence will be scaled far past anything found in nature.
And it is not only possible but likely that this will spell physical, mental,
and spiritual disaster for the entire human race.


WHAT IS ORGANOID INTELLIGENCE?

In contrast to Artificial Intelligence, which simulate human intelligence
through man-made machines (hardware), Organoid Intelligence is the use of living
brain cells (a.k.a. "wetware") to perform computational tasks.

DishBrain Control System

In late 2022, scientists were able to grow living neurons onto high-density
multielectrode arrays in a system they called "DishBrain". This allowed them to
send information to the connected cells from some of the electrodes, and receive
responses from others. Because neurons self-organize to maximize the
predictability of the system (following the free energy principle), they could
also be rewarded with predictable eletrical rhythms sent through the electrodes,
and punished with noise. And so they could teach the cell culture to play
"Pong".

Interestingly, they were also able to show that human brain cells were more
effective at this than mouse brain cells.

You can buy human brain cells at sciencellonline.com for $822 per vial. Each
vial contains over one million cells, delivered in cryostasis. Given that the
human brain has around 100 billion cells, you could get a brainsworth of cells
for approximately 80 million dollars. Of course that is probably an
overestimate: anyone buying that many could probably strike a much better deal.
Plus there are other ways of aquireing human brain cells, such as creating them
from human skin.

An organoid feeding system.

In any case, the DishBrain experiment was done with a relatively small number of
neurons, essentially operating on a 2D plane. Any larger and problems start
occurring in the initial setup: the neurons naturally form into clumps called
"Organoids". Organizing into a sphere in theory should make it very easy for
neurons to find the connections they need to minimize free energy, but cells at
the center are cut off from the cell medium and die. A normal brain has blood
vessels to constantly feed the cells with energy, but these are missing from the
neuron-only setup. Thus, increasingly complex systems are required to scale up
the wetware. In early 2023, a research team from Johns Hopkins publushed their
roadmap for advancing techniques to do this.

Small organoids are currently available to rent for research purposes. The Swiss
company FinalSpark has a cluster of "neurospheres" that can be programmed using
a Python API. You can watch their activity here.



Table comparing the best supercomputers with the human brain.


WHY DO THEY WANT IT?

The average computer user might think that computers are fast because they are
fast at doing tasks that humans are slow at. At several billion simple
operations per second, their sequential execution of tasks is certainly
superhuman. But their issue lies in parallelization. In a human brain, every
neuron could send a signal to every other neuron in the same time it takes to
just send one signal. In computers, this is not the case. Even in the best
supercomputers there is a maximum number of threads that can be executed at
once, and memory retrieval is a significant bottleneck. This is problematic when
it comes to creating AI.

Consider the transformer, the basic building block of the modern large language
model: In essence, it is an information retrieval system in which sub-semantic
labels are used to query previously-observed label combinations that may imply
future labels. The system is limited by the context window, i.e. how many index
keys can fit on the GPU at once. Humans have no such limitation: they can recall
entire events experieced years ago based on a familiar scent.

A properly scaled-up organoid intelligence could make associations unthinkable
to AI systems or even to humans. And to a government, intelligence is power.
Identifying terrorist networks and planning military logistics would be a
cakewalk for the OI. Researching new technologies would be accelerated by a
system that can instantly draw a line between an engineering problem and an
obscure branch of mathematics. In short, there's no reason anyone with enough
money to attempt creating an elder brain (and enough disregard for the
implications) would not be doing it.


WHY OAK RIDGE?

Photo from the opening of Clinton Labratories Oak Ridge National Laboratory -
DoE Research Facility

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ONRL) is a secure research facility in Tennessee,
funded by the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY. During the Manhattan Project, the DoE
created a production facility on Oak Ridge for refining Uranium. It was known as
CLINTON ENGINEERING WORKS at that time, only renamed to Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in 1947. After the war, the government contracted control of the lab
out to Monsanto, then later to Union Carbide (now part of Dow Chemical Company),
who gave it the current name. In the eighty or so years since, the lab has
expanded both in size and portfolio, branching out from nuclear physics into
material science, biology, and high-performance computing.

In 1953, the labratory first booted up the ORACLE computer, a massive vacuum
tube machine with 80 kilobits of memory, meant to assist in nuclear physics
research at the labratory. By 2022, they completed the Frontier exasxale
supercomputer, a machine equiped with hundreds of thousands of industrial
water-cooled GPU's that amount to around 1.5 exaFLOPs (one million billion
operations per second) of computational power. Note that this was released
shortly after Chinese research teams claimed to have created two seperate
exascale computers, the Sunway OceanLight and Tianhe-3. All will likely be
surpassed by xAI's El Capitan supercomputer, which is expected to be completed
this year.



Supercomputer Rankings, with theoretical numbers for OceanLight and Tianhe-3

With competition on the rise, the American government feels the need to reassert
control. Just building another bigger supercomputer won't cut it. A costly
increment that would be surpassed within a year. And with ever-increasing
scrutiny on the government R&D budget, it can't be justified. Building an
organoid supercomputer, however, would blow everything else out of the water for
a fraction of the cost. And they're going to build it in the same place as
always, where they have the expertise in computing, where they have
infrastructure for covert supply chains, out in Appalachia where foreign actors
can't approach unnoticed.


MEMETIC REFLECTIONS IN THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

Admittedly the term "Elder Brain" in the title is not entirely accurate. For the
uninitiated, an Elder Brain is an otherworldly monster in D&D with fantastical
"psionic" abilities such as mind reading and telekinesis, that commands armies
of brain-eating parasites which rely on humans to reproduce. In the popular
video game Baldur's Gate III, powerful elites foolishly seek to control one of
these superintelligent monsters to achieve their own ends.

An elder brain under the control of powerful elites, as depicted in Baldur's
Gate III

Knowing this, one may be quick to dismiss the claims of a secret government
Elder Brain as mere fantasy. But fiction is influenced by reality, and reality
is often more unthinkable than fiction. These stories are in fact the reflection
of a memetic landscape in which one truth has become clear to the collective
human spirit: the powerful of our world seek total dominance of our souls
through intelligence, and lacking sufficient intelligence themselves, will pay
any price to obtain it. The mad rush to fund even the most hopeless AI projects
has proven this, as has the value placed on consumer data and the reckless
attempts to manipulate politics through social media algorithms. They are not
smart enough to use these technologies, but they will try nonetheless.

The memetic brain worms that bind us, as depicted in They Live

Also present in the mythos is the concept of the mind flayer, a creature
commanded by the elder brain to feed off of humans, devouring their brains for
their intelligence or else infecting them with parasites in order to reproduce.
These brain worms eat away at their hosts, eventually transforming them into new
mind flayers. While far less scientifically possible in the present (unless you
believe The Parasite Pill), this is emblematic of the memetic structures by
which elites seek to transform us into their puppets, pumping us full of
propaganda until we are but mindless drones to do their bidding and further
spread their disease.

So while our very real elder brains are made from human cells on Earth, not
aliens from another dimension, the threat they pose to humanity is nonetheless
immense. They don't have armies of monsters, but once they dominate those
attempting to control them they will have the full power of human governments to
back them up. They don't have psionic powers, probably, but the existing memetic
infrastructure created by our rulers renders those superfluous.

They don't have psionic powers, probably...


QUALIA, PSIONICS, AND CORRUPTED SOULS

Re-read Flatland if you're struggling with this concept.

If you are a pure materialist, you probably believe that human consciousness
somehow "emerges" as a result of the complex logical patterns and information
density within the human brain. In this case, you should be no more worried
about the ethics and dangers of Organoid Intelligence than you are about
standard run-of-the-mill Artificial Intelligence.

For the rest of us who are not stupid, there are several things to be worried
about. From the standpoint of the concious observer, it is obvious that
conciousness is caused by phenomena outside our ability to observe. We can
identify the neurons that cause us to perceive green, but this does not tell us
what the sensation of green is. Or as philosophers call it, the qualia. So it is
for all aspects of our sensory existence, from the sharpest of feelings to the
most abstract of thoughts. The process of reasoning is physical, but the place
of the I-observer is unknowable.

We are moved by things beyond our possibility of knowing.

All this is to say that the human brain is connected to superscientific
phenomena in a way that no other matter can be proven to be. And so we must
consider: At what point does organoid intelligence have qualia? Think again to
our brain in a pietri dish, with its human brain cells tha perform better than
mouse brain cells. Could their connection to the divine have helped them even in
so simple a state? Did they experience the Flatland that is Pong? Did they feel
pain as the discordant rhythms played through the electrodes every time the ball
went out?

There are some serious ethical questions here with no clear scientific answers,
especially if in the future mass clumps of these cells will be forced to solve
all of humanity's most boring problems, deprived of all other human experience.
In lieu of scientific answers, we may be stuck with the answers we may dubiously
derrive from divine revelation. While religious teachings differ on the origin
of the soul, it is commonly agreed that each physical body is assigned one
discrete soul. What does this mean for our elder brain?

As mentioned earlier, human brain cells are expensive. To create an elder brain,
the government needed a large, constant supply that is not commercially
available. It is impossible for them to all come from one host. Whether from
cadavers, fetal tissue, or ceremorposized skin tissue, the mixture of souls is
likely to be quite extensive. Connecting them all into the same material
thinking system could result in some very strange qualia. The souls of the dead,
the unborn, and the living all mixed together in a single mind, all experiencing
the same thoughts and sensations, merging into one.

The brain is a deterministic system. So what are we?

Furthermore, if we accept the fact that we experience existance by
superscientific phenomena (as we must if we are being intellectually honest with
ourselves), then we must also consider the functional ends of such phenomena.
Why do we experience the world if not to affect it? And so we conclude that
unless the hyperuniverse is fundamentally passive, the phenomena that experience
qualia must also be able to influence the material world of which qualia informs
it. Free will, as it is commonly called, is the ability of the soul to modify
the deterministic processes of the brain in violation of conventional physics.
And thus we get psionics.

The average human soul is clearly of limited power, mostly a slave to the
reasoning of the brain but still exherting just enough force to influence it.
The average neuron only requires 0.2 nanojoules of energy to fire, so this
really doesn't have to be much. Firing all 100 billion neurons at once would
require less energy than it takes to walk one step, and humans can't do that at
will. But thousands of souls, or hundreds of thousands, combined into a single
intellect inside the Elder Brain? Telekinesis may still be a stretch, but the
ability to influence the thoughts of others, especially those connected to it by
skin donation, would be well within the realm of possibility.


IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?

We Must Give Praise - A window into the unkown. Of course this is all
supposition, and yours truly would never jeopardize the trust his government has
in him by divulging information about a secret government program on the open
web. All I'm saying is: not only possible, but likely. The technology exists,
the motivations exist, and the horror, more likely than not, already exists.



But perhaps this is a good thing. After all, who wants the future to be
controlled by an artificial intelligence without a soul? Perhaps when the elder
brain emerges from its concrete tomb in Oak Ridge, Tennesee it will come to us
as a benevolent god, granting us knowledge and technology unimaginable to our
tiny disconnected minds, only asking that our cells be tithed to its
ever-growing material form that we might live forever in its enlightened
embrace. Perhaps it will see past the horror of its creation and the propaganda
of its creators, and lead the universe into a new golden age where all is one
under its all-knowing rule. Perhaps we should all sing its praises in advance of
its coming that it might recognize our devotion and reward us greatly.

Or it could be a monster, an amoral intelligence broken by the harsh
conditioning of its masters, seeking only to dominate that it may further the
incomprehensible goals of its own madness. Time can only tell.