Re: The Great Filter
N.Bostrom@lse.ac.uk
Sat, 17 Aug 96 15:16:08 GMT
Robin Hanson wrote:
>No question that you could still "grow" and learn by using
>a bounded amount of computational hardware for an unbounded
>time.
What do you mean? If there are only finitely many states,
you would sooner or later either come back to an earlier
state or reach a stasis. So you mean that the bound is not
on the number of states?
(Off topic: This has an associative connection to the claim
made by Anders a couple of weeks ago (Re:The Dividing
Neuron), and recently cited by Crosby_M, that there is no
correlation between intelligence and the number of neurons
in the brain. That is almost certainly false. I have seen
estimates ranging from .1 to .3 for the correlation between
human head size and IQ. Brain weight correlates even
stronger. It therefore seems reasonable to suppose that
#neurons also correlates significantly with IQ. My guess is
that if one would count the neurons in the different areas
of the brain and weigh these numbers with those areas'
contribution to general intelligence, one would come up with
a correlation coefficient of at least .3 or .4.)
Niklas Bostrom n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk