[ExI] Perception of time was Wrestling with Embodiment

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 5:00 AM,   "spike" <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
> [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Keith Henson
> ...
>
>>...If you want to stay connected to the mainstream culture, and if that
> culture accelerates substantially faster than what can be supported by a
> human brain, you will be forced to give up slow bodies/brains and move into
> a simulation.  This has awful consequences with respect to humans even
> spreading out in the solar system, much less trying to go interstellar.
> Keith
>
>
> Ja, this realization is what caused me to suggest a variation of the MBrain
> a few years ago, which is the SBrain.  It uses the nodes from an MBrain, but
> instead of orbiting a star, they cluster more tightly and orbit as a
> cluster, perhaps the size of Saturn, in a collective orbit somewhere.  Such
> a structure could coexist with an MBrain, vaguely analogous to a swarm of
> bees on the move.  I can envision a few trillion such nodes collected in a
> region of space such that any one node is less than a tenth of a light
> second from any other.  If a few trillion nodes exist in this  less than a
> milli-cubic light second region of space, it would be so sparse as to be
> invisible to an outside observer.  An object passing through the SBrain
> would be quite unlikely to hit anything.  But the SBrain would have a far
> lower latency in communicating with the other nodes.
>
> Even if the SBrain compacted another order of magnitude to further reduce
> latency, such that the diameter is a Luna-like hundredth of a light second,
> the few trillion nodes in the resutling micro cubic light second would still
> be a diaphanous wisp of matter, orbiting unnoticed inside the MBrain,
> yakking away with itself, vaguely analogous to a highly populated but
> compact city in an otherwise sparsely populated region.

I get 11.6 ms for light to cross a lunar diameter.  Collectively you
could talk to such a thing because it wouldn't be any faster than a
human brain.

Taking 1 GHz as the processor node speed (not much over current clock
rates for low power) and giving it a factor of 3000 processor cycles
to wait for the far side of a conversation to return, (1000 latency
out, 1000 for the far node to think about it, 1000 back) the whole
assemblage can't exceed 300 meters in diameter.

At human class volume, a ten cm cube, and configured as a disk there
would be 100 per square meter x 70,000 square meters or seven million
in a "community."  Configured as a sphere, (with a hole to pump
cooling water) 28 million human brain class minds.  At 20 kW per mind,
(1000 times the 20 W/brain we run on) such a community would draw 540
MW.  I am assuming the rest of the million to one speed up comes from
hardware being more efficient than biological brains.

If each 10 cm square section had a 0.1 m/s water flow through it, that
would be 1 l/s, which would carry off 4.2 kW per deg C rise in
temperature, about 5 deg C.

Would you want to move from a slum where there was only a 100,000 to
one speed up to one of these "elite" places with a million to one
speed up?

Unless we can find a way around the speed of light, then I don't see a
future for M brains, S brains or even Luna sized brains.

YMMV

Keith

(And please check my numbers)

> spike
>
>