(urth) Re: urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 5, Issue 41

[maru]

I'm afraid I'll have to disagree here: there are good reasons to think 
that our current counsciousness
is fairly low on the intelligence possibilty-totem pole.  (I'm not 
talking about any 'c' -ish limit
on intelligence here: as long as current physics hold, intelligences are 
limited by the Berkenstein bound
and the Hubble volume.  O' course, the caveat is assuming that physics 
as we know it has no loopholes.
But then we're getting into deep anarchism, and I'd rather not go there. 
Too many transfinites.)
Consider: human brains are massively parallel. They have to be, since 
neurons are limited to 200 hz.
You could very easily bring that up several megs or gigahertz.  Without 
any splitting of counsciousness or anything-
subjectively the mind simply has more time.  You can vastly increase the 
amount of "stuff" (amount/time is whats relevant) and it makes no 
difference.
Caffeine speeds up the brain slightly, and that shows on IQ tests.  
Having been 'wired' a few time, I can say my counsciousness
felt as unitary as ever (Unless that's what each split section *wants* 
me to think!).  The only way I see greater intelligence
causing a split is if either the communications lag
is so great that each segment thinks enough on its own to be considered 
another counsciousness; or if there is so much
computing horsepower that it becomes feasible enough to literally devote 
a mind to each problem/task.

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

>
>That seems to me another presupposition. I don't assume that it _couldn't_
>be, but, as long as we don't know how consciousness and intelligence 
>actually arise in physical systems like brains, we don't know whether any
>_c_-like limit to what a consciousness can do exists. There is a reasonable
>(but not empirically testable at this time) argument to the effect
>that a single
>consciousness cannot handle more than some (undetermined) amount of 
>"stuff" at a time without splitting into multiple consciousnesses.
>
>--Dan'l
>
>  
>