[extropy-chat] Singularity Drugs

[Neil H.]

On 4/14/06, Russell Wallace <russell.wallace at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/14/06, Neil H. <neuronexmachina at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Not necessarily. For example, one might imagine some sort of "tweak"
> > which would enhance intelligence at the cost of dramatically increased
> > energy consumption. Something like this would be selected against over the
> > millenia of human evolution, as energy/food was generally hard to come by.
> > In contemporary society however, energy/food is quite easy to get -- indeed,
> > we have huge diet/exercise industries dedicated to trying to get people to
> > consume less food or use more energy.
> >
>
> In principle, sure; the extreme case of this would be uploading to a
> digital substrate that gives 1000-fold speedup by using 20 kilowatts of
> power instead of 20 watts. My guess, for what it's worth, is that you won't
> get any significant degree of that with a simple chemical tweak to the
> existing hardware. (I remember reading that the mitochondria in the brain
> aren't far from their limits already.)
>


Another random thought: What if something managed to increase the
mitochondria count? Of course, if one did this too much, you'd probably also
need to pursue artificial cooling measures so one wouldn't be in a permanent
fever from all the waste heat:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050128223639.htm (article on a
brain cooling helmet for sick newborns)

In relation to my post a few minutes ago, I wonder if there are any
substantial differences in neural mitochondria counts for people of
different ages/intelligences.

-- Neil
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