[ExI] Perception of time was Wrestling with Embodiment

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Thu Jan 26 15:52:06 UTC 2012


On 24 January 2012 19:00, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Mmhhhh. I do not take it for a minute as a justification for the
deafening silence out there or as an intrinsic limitation for the size
of computational systems.

Going from A to B takes the same time of going from B to C if the
distance is identical, so if it makes sense to expand from A to B, it
identically makes sense to expand from B to C.

Sure, the latency involve in A to C communications will be doubled,
but who says that communication between extremes is all that matters?
This simply means that computational dividends of integration are
going to be weighed against those involved in higher degrees of
autonomy of subcomponents. Moreover, even the peripheral subcomponents
would profit from a more than bidimensional access to neighbouring
units (say, those adiacent on the sphere surface and those adiacent in
the direction of the centre).

But this is also true for trivial systems such as human societies, or
contemporary supercomputing clusters (take for instance the approaches
to proteomics of respectively Andon and Folding at Home). What else is
new?

Our own brain often makes only use of proximity nodes, and need not
involve the whole of them for everything it does. An M-brain would
probably have an even more scattered and decentralised way of working,
but nothing prevents us to consider it nevertheless a single system as
long as at least *some* communication takes place between its
"processors".

-- 
Stefano Vaj



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