[ExI] mbrains and latency

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Aug 5, 2023 at 10:16 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:>
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> Keith I don’t think I ever responded to your comment on latency in Mbrains.
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> My theoretical model of an MBrain does not have nodes that are analogous to our brain cells.  If I understand it correctly (Billw or someone here might know this) a neuron has a bunch of branchy synapses coming in and one axon coming out that either fires or doesn’t fire, so it is kinda one-bit output.  But an MBrain node doesn’t put out a single pulse and isn’t analogous to a neuron.
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> My notion is that the nodes in an MBrain calculate a lot of stuff and have an output signal far more complex than one of our neurons.  If so, the latency between MBrain nodes really isn’t that much of a problem, any more than the latency between two or more people doesn’t prevent them from coming up with ideas between them.  The MBrain isn’t really analogous to a single human brain, but rather a collection of sub-human brains that work together well.  Perhaps we could call it an MSociety or MSpecies or MIntelligence.
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> Keith does that clear it up at all?

No.  I can't make head nor tail of your model.
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> If MBrain nodes do some kind of calculation, they could still be very small and resemble dust.

Ever seen a photo of a comet tail?  Dust gets blown away by light pressure.

> If created by a nanotech enabled species, a dust-sized speck of carbon can be imagined capable of some form of calculation and capable of passing the results of that calculation to its neighbor, which might be a millimeter distant.
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> If all that, such an MSpecies might appear to be an oddly-shaped dust cloud from the point of view of a star 1500 years away.

Can't be dust and station-keeping makes no sense.

The 22% dip at Tabby's star is more likely a single extended object at
around 7 au.  The available power is 409 times the area of the Earth
(500 million km^2) times about .13 Gw /km^2, around 27,000,000TW

At a guess of a kW per, that would support 27 trillion human scale
minds depending on how fast they were running.  We can sort of take a
guess at how fast.  Humans cope ok with 2/15th of s second one way but
start objecting when the delay gets up to a second.  The speed of
light delay across this object is around 2.5 seconds.  That indicates
to me that whoever or whatever they are, they are running at close to
our clock rate.  Why is hard to say, tradition from biology/planet
days perhaps.

Guessing (from power satellite work) the mass per unit area at 5
kg/m^2 the total is 5 million kg per square km.  500 million x 409 x 5
is around 1,0 x 10^12 kg.

Vista is 2.6 ×10^20 kg

So a medium sized asteroid would provide enough material.

Please check math.

Keith
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