Minecraft Reaches Black Mirror Stage After Fly's Brain Is Transplanted Into Game

You may have already heard that after ten years of research, scientists managed to map the entire brain of a fruit fly. You may also have seen headlines saying that this fruit fly brain has since been "forced" to play video games such as Doom. You might even have encountered the claim that a fruit fly killed itself shortly after its consciousness was uploaded into the popular block-building game Minecraft. There is some truth to these astonishing claims, but many come with asterisks. Much of the confusion stems from a basic misunderstanding of what scientists actually achieved with the fruit fly brain map.

Ro0oney is a Minecraft YouTuber who recently became widely known after his YouTube Short titled "I uploaded a consciousness into Minecraft" went viral. In it, he says he digitally created an arachnid with free will—and the first thing it did was suffocate itself. A follow-up video uploaded in early September went into more detail about what Ro0oney actually did and how he accomplished it.

Ro0oney's main goal here is entertainment, but the experiment has some rigor. He opens the video by consulting Dr. Arie Matslian, a research scientist at Princeton who built the public tool people are using to experiment with the digital fruit fly brain. The researcher states plainly that the tool "oversimplifies a lot of biophysics." Even so, it remains a high-fidelity representation of how the brain works.

Because the YouTuber must manually program the fruit fly to react to Minecraft's stimuli, there is considerable room for user error. Early versions of the Minecraft brain lacked active steering neurons—or, in the spider's case, could not even fly. The fruit fly can decide how to react to its environment, but the possibilities are constrained to some degree by Ro0oney. A digital spider with a fly's brain is not exactly set up for success, nor does it reflect some grand philosophical idea about the nature of consciousness.

The first thing Ro0oney adds to the fruit fly is a sense of fear, which he claims is the "main thing that keeps consciousness alive."

We could probably spend hours debating that point, and how the function of fear differs across evolutionary biology, psychology, and neuroscience. It also clearly shows how the finer points of this spectacle get lost in translation. It is easy to mistake his statement for the idea that fear creates consciousness.

Another example: the fruit fly can get hungry, but is it truly "feeling" what a living, breathing creature would? The answer is no, but functionally, the Minecraft fruit fly is more or less doing what our bodies do when we feel hunger. The digital fly tracks its energy level, and if it gets low enough, its hunger neurons activate and tell it to replenish its stores. Our neurons constantly send signals to our bodies as well, and vice versa. At the same time, the fruit fly cannot truly remember anything. It has the same structural pathways, generally speaking, as a real fruit fly—but unlike an actual specimen, that structure cannot be rewired on its own. It is a snapshot of one brain—a dead brain at that—not a living, breathing creature that truly perceives what is going on.

Even with all those caveats in mind, Ro0oney's trial-and-error exploration of consciousness is a fun watch.