[extropy-chat] Is our Universe in a Brain?

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Mon Apr 4 09:37:08 UTC 2005


On Sun, Apr 03, 2005 at 05:37:40PM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote:

> Unlikely. Our universe exhibits the ability to run long chains of
> serial computation quickly and with high precision; this is something
> that organic brains are notoriously bad at.

Low error rate, speed, power efficiency: pick two.

Biological systems (which have their large legacy baggage) do so dramatically
better than any current artificial systems that a generic comparison is laughable.

The fitness function of predator/prey in a limited resource environment
doesn't take kindly to brittle, nonrealtime systems with a very large power
envelope. There has been no evolutionary drive to evolve systems capable of
doing cryptography -- pattern recognition and molecular diversity has been
more than adequate for the task.

Computers don't get eaten nor do they starve -- yet. 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144            http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20050404/da00d63d/attachment.bin>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list