On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 4:19 PM, Steve Richfield <steve.richfi...@gmail.com> wrote: > That being the case, why don't elephants and other large creatures have > really gigantic brains? This seems to be SUCH an obvious evolutionary step.
Personally I've always wondered how elephants managed to evolve brains as large as they currently have. How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf? (Granted, intraspecies social interactions seem to provide at least part of the answer.) > There are all sorts of network-destroying phenomena that rise from complex > networks, e.g. phase shift oscillators there circular analysis paths enforce > themselves, computational noise is endlessly analyzed, etc. We know that our > own brains are just barely stable, as flashing lights throw some people into > epileptic attacks, etc. Perhaps network stability is the intelligence limiter? Empirically, it isn't. > Suppose for a moment that theoretically perfect neurons could work in a brain > of limitless size, but their imperfections accumulate (or multiply) to > destroy network operation when you get enough of them together. Brains have > grown larger because neurons have evolved to become more nearly perfect Actually it's the other way around. Brains compensate for imperfections (both transient error and permanent failure) in neurons by using more of them. Note that, as the number of transistors on a silicon chip increases, the extent to which our chip designs do the same thing also increases. > There are some medium-scale network similes in the world, e.g. the power > grid. However, there they have high-level central control and lots of crashes The power in my neighborhood fails once every few years (and that's from all causes, including 'the cable guys working up the street put a JCB through the line', not just network crashes). If you're getting lots of power failures in your neighborhood, your electricity supply company is doing something wrong. > I wonder, does the very-large-scale network problem even have a prospective > solution? Is there any sort of existence proof of this? Yes, our repeated successes in simultaneously improving both the size and stability of very large scale networks (trade, postage, telegraph, electricity, road, telephone, Internet) serve as very nice existence proofs. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
