From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 01:42:21 MDT
We don't even do multitasking well. What is the cost for a human to switch
from one task to another, especially when there is a lot of context? Huge!
When you are in the middle of a complex cognitive task, how happy are you to
stop where you are, do something else for a while, then come back to the
task? If you have to, how much time do you lose in trying to reform the
context of the task, ie: trying to remember what the hell you were doing?
I wonder if a brain enhancement which takes care of context switching would
be speculatively possible? Imagine you are in the middle of a hugely complex
task at work, and it's time to go home. You dump the state of your brain
into persistent storage, and go home. When you come back the next day, you
restore your mental state from storage. I guess you'd forget everything that
you did in the intervening time. Maybe some kind of mental state merge could
be concocted, to restore without forgetting, but that would seem to be an
order of magnitude more difficult than dumping and restoring brain state
(which is not so easy anyway, heh).
Hmmm... you could become two people (keep it at two for simplicity). You'd
have two "processes"; "home" and "work". When you turn up at work, you'd
save your brain to "home" and restore "work". When you were ready to go
home, you'd save "work" and restore "home". Ad infinitum.
So "home" you would experience no work time at all. "Home" would travel to
work, dump brain to storage, load up "work" ...<skip>... then would go home,
noticing that all the clocks had skipped forward. "Work" would experience an
unending work day: work for eight or so hours, dump mental state, load up
"home" ...<skip>... notice it was morning again, work for another eight or
so hours, etc.
Emlyn
Now all the sci fi writers/buffs are going to tell me eight stories which
explore this idea but do it better, including at least three which are older
than I am.
-----Original Message-----
From: Artillo5@cs.com [mailto:Artillo5@cs.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 8 May 2002 4:21 PM
To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: Re: More on human brain vs computer metaphor...
This applies to math problems easily, yes. But with DESIGN problems (I am a
Mechanical Design Engineer), you are solving a system for a large number of
variables all at the same time, trying to satisfy design criteria. Doesn't
this count as Human multithreading? I think so.
Brian
----ypprotection@yahoo.com wrote:
Have you tried solving two different problems at
the same time? Can you solve two problems at the
same time? When you are reading can you solve
a problem at the same time, without swapping.
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