[ExI] endpoint of evolution

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 12:08 PM,  JOSHUA JOB <nanite1018 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mar 2, 2010, at 5:46 AM, Tom Nowell wrote:
>> Maybe M-brains are too prone to becoming inward-looking and ignoring the outside (I'm thinking the later portions of Accelerando here). Alternatively, maybe the Great Filter keeps smacking down civilisations before they become M-brains, and all you see are single star system civilisations popping up, looking around wondering "where is everyone?" and then disappearing into the night once more.
>
> I think many civilizations will never leave their star system because of precisely the phenomenon you suggested- they become a civilization of navel-gazers. Just as a possible example of how that might happen, if you were to, say, think 1000 times faster than a human, so that your subjective experience of time is 1000x faster than people, communicating with a server on the opposite side of little ol' planet Earth would take about two and a half minutes. Something even a million kilometers away would be a full hour distant for you. People on Mars could only be communicated with on a timescale of days or weeks (subjectively), Saturn would take weeks or months. Traveling to the nearest star at the speed of light would place you out of the loop for 4000 years, and any civilization which attained such a high rate of thinking would never be cohesive, but rather fractured and disjointed.
>
> If you were to think a million times faster, the opposite side of the earth would be a day and a half away, and communicating with the other side of an M-brain would take years. Such a rapid rate of thought (even when that thought is far more advanced than our own) certainly isn't impossible (at least theoretically), so it is quite possible a vast majority of civilizations develop, create all the technologies that we think are amazing (mind uploading, cognitive enhancement, strong AI, etc.) and then stay inside their star system, with an ever increasing computational capacity but permanently bound to a small region of the Universe.
>
> I've never put much into the Great Filter idea. Someone would break through somewhere. I think rapid escalation of subjective time of communication is far more likely. Though I would think some faction would want to stay thoroughly tied to reality, rather than dive into virtual worlds.

You reconstructed my argument against Jupiter brains from September 1991.

http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/JupiterBrains/#KH031223

The general problem has been discussed on his list quite a bit.

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2008-May/043807.html

http://postbiota.org/pipermail/extropy/extropy-chat/2006-May/026617.html

Also on sl4 http://www.sl4.org/archive/0403/8203.html

An unsolved problem related to this topic is what size of brain is
optimal?  Nobody has come up with an answer, even a parametric answer
in almost 20 years.

Keith Henson