10 ms·

The article makes the argument that intelligent life a couple orders of magnitude larger than human would think very slowly, since the time for a single message

The article makes the argument that intelligent life a couple orders of magnitude larger than human would think very slowly, since the time for a single message to cross a brain 10 times the size is 10 times longer. This necessitates that every thought traverses the entire brain. But, taking not too much poetic license, we can argue that human society at a whole is a 10^6m scale intelligence (well, more like 10^3 if we are only counting the pile of human brains, but the distances are still in the 10^6 scale). It furthermore has incredibly slow thought transmission outside of very small "fast" nodes. Yet it solves the problem by not requiring most signals to propagate very far. Only a few ideas need to be globally known by humankind, the intermediate filtering is still mostly local. So, a galaxy-sized "brain" can exist, it just needs to be very hierarchical, since any global consensus would take hundreds of thousands of years to formulate, even at the speed of light. In computing / distributed system terms: locality matters.

millstone 11y ago
Yes, and also, who cares how long it takes to think? The article points out: > If our brains grew enormously to say, the size of our solar system, and featured speed-of-light signaling, the same number of message crossings would require more than the entire current age of the universe, leaving no time for evolution to work its course. but this argues that stellar-scale life doesn't exist yet, not that it can't exist. The universe is extremely young, ~10^10 years. Stars will continue to form for 10^14 years - ten thousand times longer than the universe has existed so far. And the universe will continue to evolve for many many orders of magnitude after that. There is plenty of time.
- vidarh 11y ago
  That argument also assumes that such an intelligence must evolve. If you were to build it out of individual cells, that seems reasonable. But such an intelligence could also be an emergent property of civilizations of intelligent beings, for example. We know too little of what sentience involves to be able to rule out such hive minds.
  - riprowan 11y ago
    That's right. We humans are individualized at the organism level and tend to think entirely from the perspective of a single organism. However it seems clear to me that networked intelligence, of the sort that has only existed on Earth for a couple of decades, is actually a new form of intelligence than individual intelligence. Networked intelligence on Earth is extremely new and weak, however I am confident that in my lifetime we will recognize it as an "emergent intelligence".
    - meric 11y ago
      I'd say our markets are a form of network intelligence.
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      With all the GPUs and cheap memory these days, I wonder why I am not reading about more attempts to evolve life in a computer than trying to design it.
      - jodrellblank 11y ago
        If you want to read about evolving life in a computer, have you tried Greg Egan's short story Crystal Nights - http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ ? It's fiction, but it's good.
        WalterBright 11y ago
        Good story!
        Artistry121 11y ago
        Just read this. Thank you for the recommendation. It was good.
    - Angostura 11y ago
      > However it seems clear to me that networked intelligence, of the sort that has only existed on Earth for a couple of decades Or 120 million years, if you think that ants fit the description.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
Human society is certainly a distributed intelligence. Elements of collective memory are external and persistent, and communication between individual units can be both remote and highly abstract. Unfortunately it's not a very bright distributed intelligence. Memory has scaled successfully, but the strategic insight needed to guarantee self-preservation hasn't. >So, a galaxy-sized "brain" can exist, it just needs to be very hierarchical Or it could just think very slowly. For an entity that big there probably isn't any real hurry or much need to worry about external threats. Slow thinking also means that the speed of light stops being a problem. It's a huge problem for humans because we don't live very long. If we lived for millions of years at one millionth of our usual pace we wouldn't find it limiting at all.
- onion2k 11y ago
  Human society is certainly a distributed intelligence. That doesn't mean we should think of society as a singular "living creature".
  - duaneb 11y ago
    Nobody is telling you how to think. I like the idea.
  - lgas 11y ago
    What would mean that? What qualities is it lacking to be thought of as a singular living creature? We are a collection of, among other things, much smaller living creatures...
  - pantalaimon 11y ago
    I think there is a layer in between. People's social circle, the subculture they belong to are the first meta-organism. Society as a whole is then a meta-organism made from subcultures.
mortdeus 11y ago
Well essentially thats how a hive mind works but I think it's a stretch to classify, idk say a bee colony, as constituting a single organism. Considering my lacking but informed understanding of the fundamental requirements of life as it exists here on earth, I see a fundamental flaw with the idea that a galaxy sized organism could sustain the engine of life, protein folding. There has to be some source of external energy that is fueling these organisms and galaxy sized anything make even the most massive stars in the galaxy look infitismally tiny in comparison. Perhaps gravity of a super massive black hole could kick-start and spin some sort of electric turbine like biological organ or something to get things put into motion but considering life starts small such a scale would hit hurdles. Of course this is assuming that life on distance planets all use the primarily carbon based deoxyribonucleic acid system of life.
- mortdeus 11y ago
  Their could be forms of life that we don't even have a clue about the biological nature of itz composition.
- codeulike 11y ago
  We are colonies of cells.
  - mcguire 11y ago
    Speak for yourselves. I'm a miniscule subcomponent of Gaia.
- spacehome 11y ago
  > idk say a bee colony, as constituting a single organism. Humans try to classify collections of matter into coherent objects. Otherwise there would be no way we'd be able to understand the world without that abstraction. But you live in that world long enough, and you begin to believe that reality neatly fits into the categories, however the categories exist only in our minds. But you can always make the categories break if you push them far enough. Plenty of philosophical discussions are really just about definitions of words and not anything 'real': Does life begin at conception? Is Theseus' ship the same? Is a bee colony a single organism? From http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html: > Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings. Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.
duaneb 11y ago
Consensus is overrated. Humans agree to do stupid things all the time.
- nxzero 11y ago
  Being right is overrated, people agree about it all the time.
  - duaneb 11y ago
    I don't think this exists without consensus.
    - nxzero 11y ago
      Would it be possible for you to restate and/or expand on your comment above.
      - duaneb 11y ago
        The concept of being right only makes sense across a dialectic of (perceived) truths. Obviously absolute truths about the state of the universe are still utterly inaccessible, and a priori truths never required consensus to begin with.
arethuza 11y ago
I can't help thinking about one of my favourite SF ideas - that the rules of computation vary depending on where in the galaxy you are (Vinge's "Zones of Thought").
hellofunk 11y ago
That speed limit for biological activity might not exist in the universe if you consider the interesting natural "applications" of quantum phenomena. The ability for a particle to travel infinite paths simultaneously has been shown in photosynthesis, and fascinating examples of entanglement are in the literature. So it makes you wonder if distance has anything to do with the capabilities such a large brain.
- akiselev 11y ago
  It's hard to say whether those kinds of mechanisms could evolve for such a large organism. Photosynthetic molecules with interesting quantum effects developed while piggybacking on early bacterial evolution which was extremely fast because of the abundant radiation and their rapid reproduction. The chemical reactions in space might not be fast enough and may not have enough reaction energy (near absolute zero temperature) to evolve molecules with interesting effects.
Juliate 11y ago
> would think very slowly Very slowly for us humans, at our scale. But "it" would think at its own, regular pace (which might, in turn, be very fast for an even larger entity). In regard, we humans may not even be a perceptible event on this time scale. It's a matter of metabolism and of perception of time: we, as humans, think & react very slowly for smaller animals (and are even slower on the time scale of basic chemical reactions).
- Gravityloss 11y ago
  Well, the speed of thinking and control must be roughly related to the speed of actions. If you look at the giraffe, it's probably near the upper limit for an animal that still can run. Not about the muscles, but the brain couldn't be much further from the hooves or it would trip a lot, because the signals take so long to travel and there are limits to local "automation". Larger animals can exist, but they can't run, they must walk or swim slowly. Or the neural pathways would need to evolve into something faster. If you look at human society, once we industrialized and developed things like strip mining, synthetic fertilizers, plastic bags, chlorofluorocarbons, trawling or nuclear technology, it's clear that our capability of doing things multiplied. Sometimes the thinking and values part to actually control what we're doing comes a little bit belatedly.
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    > * Larger animals can exist, but they can't run, they must walk or swim slowly. Or the neural pathways would need to evolve into something faster.* Or the head-brain could farm out the running to a different control point - a second brain that controls running. It seems like we may have already done this, ourselves: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/
    - Gravityloss 11y ago
      But some part of running requires vision since you must see obstacles and plan your footings. More the bigger and more fragile you are. So there would need to be another set of eyes and some basic processing then as well. And then, what about 3d perception, moving obstacles, predator recognition? You have to know what's just tall grass and what's a rock. You'd be better off moving the brain down and just having a really long mouth / snout / tongue. And then you'd have an elephant... You can only have very basic processing near the actual actuator.
madaxe_again 11y ago
There's a nice sf short story, I think by Alastair Reynolds, which concerns worms in a glacier essentially acting as neurons in a vast, slow brain. Found. "Glacial", Galactic North anthology.
- omerhj 11y ago
  Another Alastair Reynolds short story in the same vein is "A Murmuration" that I read (on my Kindle) in Interzone #257. In the story a flock of birds exhibits intelligence independently from the individual birds.
jerf 11y ago
You still can't call that a meaningful organism. The speed of light still means it can't have had more than a few dozen "clock cycles" since the galaxy stabilized enough to permit it, and it doesn't have all that many more "cycles" before the galaxy will be too dead to sustain it. There is no activity it could set itself out to do and then actually do it that would not be literally at least tens of thousands of years behind the stimulus that produced it, and that would be an incredibly quick reaction. There is no force of "evolution" or anything else that could drive this entity. It's just not useful to model it as an "organism". Even human society can only be analogized to an organism. It isn't one either. It's not enough to point out there's vague similarities but ignore the multiple-orders-of-magnitude differences in the various scales. And there's no need for "everything to be an organism". There's no physical reality to that idea. It's merely a reflection of our own predisposition towards weak analogical thinking when we should be dealing with things on their own terms. For human society, analogical thinking can easily lead us astray; for galactic scale society it's even harder to get away from analogical thinking because there isn't one (so far as we know) from which we can derive any observations at all, so there's no concrete facts in which we can ground our thinking. As a stepping stone, "human society as an organism" may be the beginning of understanding. But when you start doing things like bemoaning its lack of self-preservation instinct, it's a sign you've gone too far with the analogy at the expense of dealing with what is really there.
- alanwatts 11y ago
  I'm curious how you define "organism", and what it means to be a "meaningful organism"?
  - eternalban 11y ago
    (1) substrate -> (2) corpus -> (3) metabolic order. Let's build one: (1): plasma (2): plasma cloud contained by EM (3): Charged particle flows in context of a network of causality.
    - alanwatts 11y ago
      Does EM stand for electromagnetism? If so it seems that force is the most important factor in an organism?
diskcat 11y ago
Well if it's too local it kinda begs the question of whether it's one brain or multiple brains loosely linked together just as in your example it's not clear if the human society as a whole is a planet scale intelligence or a bunch of human scale intelligences bundled together. a galaxy size brain would disagree with itself a lot. My skull size brain is alreayd disagreeing with itself plenty.
sametmax 11y ago
It also makes a dangerous assumption : that all forms of life is designed according to our idea of what life is. But life may very well exists outside of the concept of thoughts, or may not be constrained by space, time or causality. Or maybe span on severeal spaces/times. For what we know anything could be alive, we just have now way to be verify it. Our concept of "life" is very limited, because it's limited to what we can perceive or imagine.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  > or may not be constrained by space, time or causality If something isn't constrained by causality, can we even classify it in the same "life" bucket that we define ourselves to be in? Can we even reason about it?
  - sametmax 11y ago
    Well, the life bucket we define ourselves in may very well not be causal either. Maybe we just see it that way because of our limits. It's impossible to prove. This is the limit of our condition: at a certain point, everything is a believe. I believe in causality because I have been perceiving the reality this way. And this believe is strong enough to prevent myself from jumping outside of the windows, fearing the consequence of my action. But nothing proves that the universe is causal. You can imagine a non causal universe, and some mecanismes making us not see it. You can imagine many totally randoms universe, but our conscienciouness only focus on the one we think make sense. You can imagine that each individual live in it's own universe, but none of them are influencing each others. You can imagine no universe and just a dream, or a virtual one projected to get a restult. You can imagine a universe that is created and dying at every moment, replaced by another one in order to try to find the perfect combination or particules or to restore some kind of balance.
- mcguire 11y ago
  Thank you, Herbert Phillips Lovecraft.
rcthompson 11y ago
If you want to read a sci-fi exploration of a similar idea, pick up Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. (I can't say more than that without spoiling things.)
pookeh 11y ago
Or maybe within the brain of this large organism, the signals do propagate one end to another but through wormholes, thus not being limited to speed of light.
razster 11y ago
A galaxy size brain with a quantum entanglement.
- outworlder 11y ago
  Which is not supposed to help in transmitting information at superluminal speeds.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
It takes more than one traversal to make a thought. It probably takes a volume of brain to process a thought. So the speed might decrease geometrically with size? It could take 1000X as long.
zurn 11y ago
Human nerve impulses travel at ballpark of 1e-7 c though, so limits of physics let you keep the relative signaling speed constant while making the system between enormously larger in radius. And the volume (and hence number of neurons) of course grows approximately as a cube of radius!
theoh 11y ago
Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit#Asynchronous_CPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit#Asynchron...

millstone 11y ago

Yes, and also, who cares how long it takes to think? The article points out: > If our brains grew enormously to say, the size of our solar system, and featured speed-of-light signaling, the same number of message crossings would require more than the entire current age of the universe, leaving no time for evolution to work its course. but this argues that stellar-scale life doesn't exist yet, not that it can't exist. The universe is extremely young, ~10^10 years. Stars will continue to form for 10^14 years - ten thousand times longer than the universe has existed so far. And the universe will continue to evolve for many many orders of magnitude after that. There is plenty of time.

vidarh 11y ago
That argument also assumes that such an intelligence must evolve. If you were to build it out of individual cells, that seems reasonable. But such an intelligence could also be an emergent property of civilizations of intelligent beings, for example. We know too little of what sentience involves to be able to rule out such hive minds.
- riprowan 11y ago
  That's right. We humans are individualized at the organism level and tend to think entirely from the perspective of a single organism. However it seems clear to me that networked intelligence, of the sort that has only existed on Earth for a couple of decades, is actually a new form of intelligence than individual intelligence. Networked intelligence on Earth is extremely new and weak, however I am confident that in my lifetime we will recognize it as an "emergent intelligence".
  - meric 11y ago
    I'd say our markets are a form of network intelligence.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    With all the GPUs and cheap memory these days, I wonder why I am not reading about more attempts to evolve life in a computer than trying to design it.
    - jodrellblank 11y ago
      If you want to read about evolving life in a computer, have you tried Greg Egan's short story Crystal Nights - http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ ? It's fiction, but it's good.
      - WalterBright 11y ago
        Good story!
      - Artistry121 11y ago
        Just read this. Thank you for the recommendation. It was good.
  - Angostura 11y ago
    > However it seems clear to me that networked intelligence, of the sort that has only existed on Earth for a couple of decades Or 120 million years, if you think that ants fit the description.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

Human society is certainly a distributed intelligence. Elements of collective memory are external and persistent, and communication between individual units can be both remote and highly abstract. Unfortunately it's not a very bright distributed intelligence. Memory has scaled successfully, but the strategic insight needed to guarantee self-preservation hasn't. >So, a galaxy-sized "brain" can exist, it just needs to be very hierarchical Or it could just think very slowly. For an entity that big there probably isn't any real hurry or much need to worry about external threats. Slow thinking also means that the speed of light stops being a problem. It's a huge problem for humans because we don't live very long. If we lived for millions of years at one millionth of our usual pace we wouldn't find it limiting at all.

onion2k 11y ago
Human society is certainly a distributed intelligence. That doesn't mean we should think of society as a singular "living creature".
- duaneb 11y ago
  Nobody is telling you how to think. I like the idea.
- lgas 11y ago
  What would mean that? What qualities is it lacking to be thought of as a singular living creature? We are a collection of, among other things, much smaller living creatures...
- pantalaimon 11y ago
  I think there is a layer in between. People's social circle, the subculture they belong to are the first meta-organism. Society as a whole is then a meta-organism made from subcultures.

mortdeus 11y ago

Well essentially thats how a hive mind works but I think it's a stretch to classify, idk say a bee colony, as constituting a single organism. Considering my lacking but informed understanding of the fundamental requirements of life as it exists here on earth, I see a fundamental flaw with the idea that a galaxy sized organism could sustain the engine of life, protein folding. There has to be some source of external energy that is fueling these organisms and galaxy sized anything make even the most massive stars in the galaxy look infitismally tiny in comparison. Perhaps gravity of a super massive black hole could kick-start and spin some sort of electric turbine like biological organ or something to get things put into motion but considering life starts small such a scale would hit hurdles. Of course this is assuming that life on distance planets all use the primarily carbon based deoxyribonucleic acid system of life.

mortdeus 11y ago
Their could be forms of life that we don't even have a clue about the biological nature of itz composition.
codeulike 11y ago
We are colonies of cells.
- mcguire 11y ago
  Speak for yourselves. I'm a miniscule subcomponent of Gaia.
spacehome 11y ago
> idk say a bee colony, as constituting a single organism. Humans try to classify collections of matter into coherent objects. Otherwise there would be no way we'd be able to understand the world without that abstraction. But you live in that world long enough, and you begin to believe that reality neatly fits into the categories, however the categories exist only in our minds. But you can always make the categories break if you push them far enough. Plenty of philosophical discussions are really just about definitions of words and not anything 'real': Does life begin at conception? Is Theseus' ship the same? Is a bee colony a single organism? From http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html: > Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings. Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.

duaneb 11y ago

Consensus is overrated. Humans agree to do stupid things all the time.

nxzero 11y ago
Being right is overrated, people agree about it all the time.
- duaneb 11y ago
  I don't think this exists without consensus.
  - nxzero 11y ago
    Would it be possible for you to restate and/or expand on your comment above.
    - duaneb 11y ago
      The concept of being right only makes sense across a dialectic of (perceived) truths. Obviously absolute truths about the state of the universe are still utterly inaccessible, and a priori truths never required consensus to begin with.

arethuza 11y ago

I can't help thinking about one of my favourite SF ideas - that the rules of computation vary depending on where in the galaxy you are (Vinge's "Zones of Thought").

hellofunk 11y ago

That speed limit for biological activity might not exist in the universe if you consider the interesting natural "applications" of quantum phenomena. The ability for a particle to travel infinite paths simultaneously has been shown in photosynthesis, and fascinating examples of entanglement are in the literature. So it makes you wonder if distance has anything to do with the capabilities such a large brain.

akiselev 11y ago
It's hard to say whether those kinds of mechanisms could evolve for such a large organism. Photosynthetic molecules with interesting quantum effects developed while piggybacking on early bacterial evolution which was extremely fast because of the abundant radiation and their rapid reproduction. The chemical reactions in space might not be fast enough and may not have enough reaction energy (near absolute zero temperature) to evolve molecules with interesting effects.

Juliate 11y ago

> would think very slowly Very slowly for us humans, at our scale. But "it" would think at its own, regular pace (which might, in turn, be very fast for an even larger entity). In regard, we humans may not even be a perceptible event on this time scale. It's a matter of metabolism and of perception of time: we, as humans, think & react very slowly for smaller animals (and are even slower on the time scale of basic chemical reactions).

Gravityloss 11y ago
Well, the speed of thinking and control must be roughly related to the speed of actions. If you look at the giraffe, it's probably near the upper limit for an animal that still can run. Not about the muscles, but the brain couldn't be much further from the hooves or it would trip a lot, because the signals take so long to travel and there are limits to local "automation". Larger animals can exist, but they can't run, they must walk or swim slowly. Or the neural pathways would need to evolve into something faster. If you look at human society, once we industrialized and developed things like strip mining, synthetic fertilizers, plastic bags, chlorofluorocarbons, trawling or nuclear technology, it's clear that our capability of doing things multiplied. Sometimes the thinking and values part to actually control what we're doing comes a little bit belatedly.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  > * Larger animals can exist, but they can't run, they must walk or swim slowly. Or the neural pathways would need to evolve into something faster.* Or the head-brain could farm out the running to a different control point - a second brain that controls running. It seems like we may have already done this, ourselves: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/
  - Gravityloss 11y ago
    But some part of running requires vision since you must see obstacles and plan your footings. More the bigger and more fragile you are. So there would need to be another set of eyes and some basic processing then as well. And then, what about 3d perception, moving obstacles, predator recognition? You have to know what's just tall grass and what's a rock. You'd be better off moving the brain down and just having a really long mouth / snout / tongue. And then you'd have an elephant... You can only have very basic processing near the actual actuator.

madaxe_again 11y ago

There's a nice sf short story, I think by Alastair Reynolds, which concerns worms in a glacier essentially acting as neurons in a vast, slow brain. Found. "Glacial", Galactic North anthology.

omerhj 11y ago
Another Alastair Reynolds short story in the same vein is "A Murmuration" that I read (on my Kindle) in Interzone #257. In the story a flock of birds exhibits intelligence independently from the individual birds.

jerf 11y ago

You still can't call that a meaningful organism. The speed of light still means it can't have had more than a few dozen "clock cycles" since the galaxy stabilized enough to permit it, and it doesn't have all that many more "cycles" before the galaxy will be too dead to sustain it. There is no activity it could set itself out to do and then actually do it that would not be literally at least tens of thousands of years behind the stimulus that produced it, and that would be an incredibly quick reaction. There is no force of "evolution" or anything else that could drive this entity. It's just not useful to model it as an "organism". Even human society can only be analogized to an organism. It isn't one either. It's not enough to point out there's vague similarities but ignore the multiple-orders-of-magnitude differences in the various scales. And there's no need for "everything to be an organism". There's no physical reality to that idea. It's merely a reflection of our own predisposition towards weak analogical thinking when we should be dealing with things on their own terms. For human society, analogical thinking can easily lead us astray; for galactic scale society it's even harder to get away from analogical thinking because there isn't one (so far as we know) from which we can derive any observations at all, so there's no concrete facts in which we can ground our thinking. As a stepping stone, "human society as an organism" may be the beginning of understanding. But when you start doing things like bemoaning its lack of self-preservation instinct, it's a sign you've gone too far with the analogy at the expense of dealing with what is really there.

alanwatts 11y ago
I'm curious how you define "organism", and what it means to be a "meaningful organism"?
- eternalban 11y ago
  (1) substrate -> (2) corpus -> (3) metabolic order. Let's build one: (1): plasma (2): plasma cloud contained by EM (3): Charged particle flows in context of a network of causality.
  - alanwatts 11y ago
    Does EM stand for electromagnetism? If so it seems that force is the most important factor in an organism?

diskcat 11y ago

Well if it's too local it kinda begs the question of whether it's one brain or multiple brains loosely linked together just as in your example it's not clear if the human society as a whole is a planet scale intelligence or a bunch of human scale intelligences bundled together. a galaxy size brain would disagree with itself a lot. My skull size brain is alreayd disagreeing with itself plenty.

sametmax 11y ago

It also makes a dangerous assumption : that all forms of life is designed according to our idea of what life is. But life may very well exists outside of the concept of thoughts, or may not be constrained by space, time or causality. Or maybe span on severeal spaces/times. For what we know anything could be alive, we just have now way to be verify it. Our concept of "life" is very limited, because it's limited to what we can perceive or imagine.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
> or may not be constrained by space, time or causality If something isn't constrained by causality, can we even classify it in the same "life" bucket that we define ourselves to be in? Can we even reason about it?
- sametmax 11y ago
  Well, the life bucket we define ourselves in may very well not be causal either. Maybe we just see it that way because of our limits. It's impossible to prove. This is the limit of our condition: at a certain point, everything is a believe. I believe in causality because I have been perceiving the reality this way. And this believe is strong enough to prevent myself from jumping outside of the windows, fearing the consequence of my action. But nothing proves that the universe is causal. You can imagine a non causal universe, and some mecanismes making us not see it. You can imagine many totally randoms universe, but our conscienciouness only focus on the one we think make sense. You can imagine that each individual live in it's own universe, but none of them are influencing each others. You can imagine no universe and just a dream, or a virtual one projected to get a restult. You can imagine a universe that is created and dying at every moment, replaced by another one in order to try to find the perfect combination or particules or to restore some kind of balance.
mcguire 11y ago
Thank you, Herbert Phillips Lovecraft.

rcthompson 11y ago

If you want to read a sci-fi exploration of a similar idea, pick up Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. (I can't say more than that without spoiling things.)

pookeh 11y ago

Or maybe within the brain of this large organism, the signals do propagate one end to another but through wormholes, thus not being limited to speed of light.

razster 11y ago

A galaxy size brain with a quantum entanglement.

outworlder 11y ago
Which is not supposed to help in transmitting information at superluminal speeds.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

It takes more than one traversal to make a thought. It probably takes a volume of brain to process a thought. So the speed might decrease geometrically with size? It could take 1000X as long.

zurn 11y ago

Human nerve impulses travel at ballpark of 1e-7 c though, so limits of physics let you keep the relative signaling speed constant while making the system between enormously larger in radius. And the volume (and hence number of neurons) of course grows approximately as a cube of radius!

theoh 11y ago

Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit#Asynchronous_CPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit#Asynchron...