RE: Systematically Dismantling Atheism
November 1, 2014 at 10:03 am
(This post was last modified: November 1, 2014 at 10:22 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Not neccessarrily. (The bigger the brain the slower the thought). Independant concurrent processing and heuristic algorithms allow for a model that is both possible and in evidence which serves as a solution to many speed related issues. We may not have any examples of this sort of brain here (arguable) but even if we don't it hardly matters, we're off in hypothetical fairyland afterall. We'd be talking about impressively large brains here, of course- if we talk about any significant slowdown in thought due to signal travel time (because even if my brain were many, many times larger than it currently is - and the signal travel remained constant..the significance or order of any slowdown would only be relevant locally. - but we have no reason to assume that size is some direct correlate for intelligence (or that all brains must be arranged like our own, or fall into the same patterns of observation as our own) to begin with.
However, a bigger brain just might compute 2+2 slower than my smaller brain- if we're willing to posit that humans have a fast brain, relative to any other hypothetical life. Sure. The reasons that this may be so are nearly boundless - but as far as a barrier to a really big brain...I don't think that the speed of the signal would be a very difficult barrier to overcome. I think that finding the resources to build and maintain such a large brain would be a much more daunting prospect -if we're using anything at all about our own biology to make these inferences. Question one has to be -can an organ such as this one be nourished effectively no matter how large it scales up in size. Again, not that it would have to - to get a smarter brain.....I just love this subject. It takes .1 seconds to blink. If size and intelligence where analgous, a brain 100 times the size and 100 times as intelligent could handle the task in ten seconds. That's not bad considering the distance involved (again 1:1) would be 66 feet at a minimum, roughly (my head is about 8 inches wide) - that serves as a (very, very, very low) estimate of both speed and size assuming direct connections both through the brain and to any apparatus that it may be operating.
There's a fantastic "hypothetical" species in the Culture series by Ian Banks (lol) -I forget the name he gave them- that were large, essentially just a nervous system - and incredibly long lived. They thought slowly, they lived slowly, they metabolized slowly. The urgency of the moment to us was a concept entirely alien to them because they were not presented with (nor had they evolved under) the same conditions as ourselves. It is, I'll admit, difficult to imagine why a slower "speed" would not be overridden by a greater breadth of processing ability it an evolutionary model on that metric alone (even if this barrier could not be overcome as it can be in reality as opposed to the hypothetical). There are creatures on earth with very slow (verging on and perhaps even rightly described as mechanical) "nervous systems". They respond over the course of hours or days, some months..or more, not even minutes or seconds...and even though they lack any breadth of ability to compensate for this greatly reduced pace - they have done very very well for themselves here. If they can make it here, then any creature 100x "smarter" than us, 66 feet long/wide/deep - and still many many times faster than plants or fungi (they still send the blink signal in ten seconds) would do just fine anywhere life like our own might be present-at the least. All of this is entirely speculative and may even be baseless - for reasons mentioned in my previous post in this thread.
-but it sure is fun.
However, a bigger brain just might compute 2+2 slower than my smaller brain- if we're willing to posit that humans have a fast brain, relative to any other hypothetical life. Sure. The reasons that this may be so are nearly boundless - but as far as a barrier to a really big brain...I don't think that the speed of the signal would be a very difficult barrier to overcome. I think that finding the resources to build and maintain such a large brain would be a much more daunting prospect -if we're using anything at all about our own biology to make these inferences. Question one has to be -can an organ such as this one be nourished effectively no matter how large it scales up in size. Again, not that it would have to - to get a smarter brain.....I just love this subject. It takes .1 seconds to blink. If size and intelligence where analgous, a brain 100 times the size and 100 times as intelligent could handle the task in ten seconds. That's not bad considering the distance involved (again 1:1) would be 66 feet at a minimum, roughly (my head is about 8 inches wide) - that serves as a (very, very, very low) estimate of both speed and size assuming direct connections both through the brain and to any apparatus that it may be operating.
There's a fantastic "hypothetical" species in the Culture series by Ian Banks (lol) -I forget the name he gave them- that were large, essentially just a nervous system - and incredibly long lived. They thought slowly, they lived slowly, they metabolized slowly. The urgency of the moment to us was a concept entirely alien to them because they were not presented with (nor had they evolved under) the same conditions as ourselves. It is, I'll admit, difficult to imagine why a slower "speed" would not be overridden by a greater breadth of processing ability it an evolutionary model on that metric alone (even if this barrier could not be overcome as it can be in reality as opposed to the hypothetical). There are creatures on earth with very slow (verging on and perhaps even rightly described as mechanical) "nervous systems". They respond over the course of hours or days, some months..or more, not even minutes or seconds...and even though they lack any breadth of ability to compensate for this greatly reduced pace - they have done very very well for themselves here. If they can make it here, then any creature 100x "smarter" than us, 66 feet long/wide/deep - and still many many times faster than plants or fungi (they still send the blink signal in ten seconds) would do just fine anywhere life like our own might be present-at the least. All of this is entirely speculative and may even be baseless - for reasons mentioned in my previous post in this thread.
-but it sure is fun.
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