[ExI] Unsolved problems

[Bryan Bishop]

On Tuesday 27 May 2008, Keith Henson wrote:
> One problem I can express, but have no idea of how to solve is the
> localization problem.
<snip>
> It leads to fundamental economics in that nearby resources are much
> more valuable than far away ones.

My favorite formulation of this problem is the caching problem and i.e., 
you are what you cache, or from Salthe's interpretation, integrating 
the second law and gravitational acceleration, all (info) consumers 
must be specialists to some degree. 

> This leads to a human being able to think rings around a "Jupiter
> brain" because of speed of light delays. 

On Orion's Arm, it has been pointed out a few times by Todd Drashner 
that the jbrains and other large brainal bodies would be thinking 
*slower* on the massive scale, while possibly faster at the smaller 
scale. But at the top of it all (jbrain scale) the thoughts are 
significantly more elaborate; in Zindell's books, the moonbrains 
thought up entire language systems, and the even larger Ede would think 
up brains as the units of thought, although making those fundamental 
architecture comparisons across the toposophic barrier seems 
presumptuous.

Toposophic barrier conjecture:
http://www.orionsarm.com/sophontology/toposophy.html
> Toposophy deals with the theoretical problems and possibilities of
> attempts to extend and amplify one's mental potential. While
> technically speaking it applies to all mental growth, it is mainly
> used to denote the science of major mental paradigm shifts. Most
> mental enhancement is incremental, involving merely adding on new
> capabilities and integrating them with the already existing
> framework. Typical cyborgisation procedures as memory enhancement,
> skill libraries, coprocessors, extended neural networks and pidgin
> lobes fall in this category. While such additions may cause mental
> shifts and re-evaluations of identity, they merely extend the basic
> architecture of the underlying mind. This kind of bootstrapping can
> be self-supporting, each improvement making it easier to add new
> improvements, producing an accelerating mental expansion, a
> singularity. As was discovered by the Information Era AIs, this
> process eventually saturates: while more capacity can be added, it
> will not improve mental performance qualitatively. This was true for
> the initial AIs regardless of model, and has been found for
> cyborgized humans. The phenomenon is sometimes called Toposophic
> Barriers, the name originally coined by the great 20th century (Old
> Earth dating) prognosticator Stanislaw Lem's surprisingly accurate
> description in Golem XIV. The Borodin Conjecture (proposed in 275
> a.t. by the AI Borodin at the Novokir Habitat) implies that all
> possible minds fulfilling certain basic intelligence criteria are
> upwardly limited by a toposophic barrier. It remains the most
> important unproven conjecture in toposophy.

So, does the fact that human brains can run circles around the overall 
otuput of a jbrain in a split second (due to caching), really play much 
of a role when we consider that the jbrain has a fundamentally 
different architecture for whatever it is that it is doing?

- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/