Eugine_Nier comments on Varying amounts of subjective experience - Less Wrong

-7 Post author: DanielLC 16 December 2010 03:02AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (35)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 December 2010 04:43:23AM 2 points [-]

The difference between animals and people isn't simply that they think twice, or a hundred times slower.

Comment author: DanielLC 17 December 2010 05:42:19AM -2 points [-]

No, but if you slowed down a person's mind, it would probably be more similar to that of an animal.

Comment author: Nornagest 17 December 2010 07:31:11AM *  2 points [-]

I don't think so: the human mind doesn't run on a Von Neumann architecture, so any speed/search depth tradeoffs wouldn't behave in a computer-like way and a lot of other intuitions about computational performance don't apply. All else being equal, uniformly slowing down the human brain's operations probably wouldn't impair its ability to exhibit behaviors we'd recognize as conscious; they'd merely increase the time it takes to get an output given some input. Most importantly, human-unique capabilities like language would probably be left more or less intact (if slowed down).

A lot of animals actually have significantly faster nerve conduction than humans, although I don't know if this extends to the brain.