From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Aug 15 1999 - 10:26:59 MDT
> Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org> wrote:
> The main problem I have with planet-sized brains is that
> they seem to contradict our current idea that 'thinking
> in an intellectual vacuum' really doesn't bring much.
Well, its easy enough to divide oneself into a left brain
and a right brain or multi-brains and set them off on
different courses. After about probably 5 seconds they
are different enough to make the conversations interesting.
Given the speed-of-light delays, it is interesting that
the more you divide things, the faster the brains think
and the faster evolution (devolution?) would occur.
> I for one completely fail to see what such a huge brain
> would have to think about -- there's no way we could
> provide it with enough information to keep itself busy...
> (if only because of the maximum speed imposed by RLT)
That is the general consensus. Even people like Greg Bear
and the other people who live in the S.F. world can't
imagine what they think about. They don't have a problem
with a lack of information however. They can build
100 billion telescopes the diameter of the moon and
watch the entire galaxy. They can also have fairly
high bandwidth communications with the other SIs
(because with their observing capacity they know
where the other SIs are). This communication bandwidth
is high relative to what we think of as high bandwidth
communications, but probably not high relative to their
internal thought capacity, due to the power requirements
for transmitting long distances.] In short, lots
of incoming information, but probably much less outgoing.
Robert
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