[John369 (OP)]

I am very confused about futuristic emulated minds.

The signals fired off by human nerves can travel upto 100 m/s. However electronic circuit boards can send signals at 50% the speed of light, so 1.5e+8 m/s.

Please help me answer these questions:

First using the biological approach, suppose we found a way to enhance our senses and speed up our perception of time, by speeding up the speed of our thought signals and operation speed of neurons. Then,
1. Would the outside world appear frozen to us?
2. Would we be able to experience subjective hours or even years for each second that passes for everyone else?
3. Would that increased signal firing speeds result in some heat issues due to huge number of vibrations and molecular motion per second? If so, how can the heating problem be solved? 

Then using the electronic approach, suppose we became futuristic emulated minds, neurons replaced with transistors, we directed our evolution to silicon. Then, would the world appear frozen in time, progressing very very slowly? And could lead to us measuring between nanoseconds and hence living a subjective billion year for each year that passes for everything else? Would the heating issues arise in electronic approach to enhancing ourselves?

And finally, is such a scenario even possible? The passage of time or increasing entropy is dictated by the operation speed of our neurons, not only by how fast things are moving in relation to other things or our position in space. So if we could increase this operation speed, would that really result in a scenario where everything else appears almost frozen to us? Please give me your thoughts on what could happen in such a low amplitude world.

[evan_au]

using the biological approach, suppose we found a way to enhance our senses and speed up our perception of time, by speeding up the speed of our thought signals and operation speed of neurons.

This scenario is based on the premise that silicon is faster than organics.
- However, for many functions, silicon can only match the speed of biological systems by expending huge amounts of energy.
- For some simple functions, silicon is faster, but for many complex functions with a high level of parallel processing, biological systems are faster
- The retina of the human eye has supercomputer-level processing power, but expending far less power.
- A large part of this biological capability is the ability to use the third dimension effectively - this reduces the distance that signals have to travel. Silicon chips use the third dimension for wiring, but most of the active components are restricted to a flat semiconductor sheet.
- Another benefit is massively parallel processing

Silicon processing speed has increased exponentially and declined in power by leaps and bounds since Gordon Moore formulated his eponymous "Moore's Law".
- The growth has slowed down in recent years, as we approach some fundamental limits of silicon
- But if you use a more generic measure than "Number of transistors on a chip" - say "The cost of computing", then this exponential progress extends well before the invention of the transistor - by at least 50 years
- Future developments may not use silicon, but there is a huge demand for computation, and people will compete to find ways to improve the cost-effectiveness of computing
- Google has been notable in promoting quantum computers - but for now, the 25 kiloWatts consumed by the refrigerator puts the cost far above a smartphone (and the several cubic meters for the refrigerator makes portability unlikely in the near future)

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

[Halc]

- A large part of this biological capability is the ability to use the third dimension effectively - this reduces the distance that signals have to travel. Silicon chips use the third dimension for wiring, but most of the active components are restricted to a flat semiconductor sheet.

Biology is remarkably similar to silicon in this respect.  The adult human cortex is actually a two dimensional sheet of area about 2200 sq cm +/- 10%.  That's about a 47cm (19") square napkin.
It needs to fit in our skull so it is all folded up, but that's the reason it has that brainy look to it instead of it just being a solid pink blob.  Scrunching it up like that reduces the lengths of the connections underneath, which makes it faster, but it's all wiring below the surface, and all blood and nutrition coming from above.  The work is all done in that 2-D layer.

[evan_au]

The adult human cortex is actually a two dimensional sheet ...That's about a 47cm (19") square napkin

Within this napkin (2-4mm thick), the cortex manages to pack in 6 layers of neurons, apparently functioning in columns.
- Semiconductor manufacturers would love to stack 6 layers of active components on top of each other...
- Including wires connecting to thousands of other active components
- And still get the power in and carry the heat away...

The retina has several layers of neurons to perform its supercomputer feats.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex#Layers_of_neocortex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina#Retinal_layers

[John369 (OP)]

Please answer the above questions.  What would the world appear for a speed up thought speed? I know such a scenario is not possible in our current age, just like decoherence issue in quantum computers, but this does not mean we should stop thinking about the seemingly impossible things altogether. People thought invention of flight could take centuries or millenia, but at the same year Wright brothers took flight. Neanderthals went extinct because they remained at one place, their perspective was too narrow. We should sometimes think and imagine about such futuristic stuff and have a mental exercise.

Please help me by giving your opinions. We all look at things from a different perspective, so we could get closer to a true picture in seemingly impossible things collectively.

[evan_au]

What would the world appear for a speed up thought speed?

If everyone else had a sped-up thought speed too, it would appear rather unchanged from many teenagers today.
- Their entire focus is on who said what, just 5 seconds ago (often ignoring the truck bearing down on them as they saunter across the street, eyes glued to their smartphone).
- But if thought processes sped up by a factor of 1,000, they might focus on who said what, just 5 milliseconds ago. This would make them even more oblivious to the physical world around them.

If it got much faster than 1000x, then the speed of light would start to become a significant delay in communications.

Of course, in the early days of satellite phone calls, the speed of light imposed a significant delay - calls were often routed through satellites in geosynchronous orbit, and this caused a noticeable and annoying delay in conversation.

[John369 (OP)]

Thank you for responding. I have one final question.

If an accelerated thought speed could perceive extremely small time intervals like in the range of a microsecond or 1e-6 seconds, then considering distance traveled by light in a microsecond to be 1e-6 * 3e+8 = 300 meter, would the emitted light from world around him shift to other forms of EM radiation? Or just slowed down world would be perceived? What if the robotic avatar of accelerated thought speed tried to move around? Assuming his electronic body substrate could also move rapidly in microseconds and heating issues resolved, would the world appear discontinuous or fuzzy due to the robotic avatar capturing slowed down photons by moving around? (Sorry I am unable to imagine this, need some help)

[Colin2B]

Speed of thought within the brain won’t affect photons outside the body so em frequencies won’t shift to different types of radiation.
What would change is the perception of movement so others around would appear to be slow and clumsy.

What @evan_au was saying about the speed of light limit applies within the brain giving delays between separate parts and delays in nerve transmission. Also, the speed of processing would give a communication delay, similar to that experienced with early satellites, which means the higher speed person could get frustrated by slowness of response from ‘normals’.

[evan_au]

If an accelerated thought speed could perceive extremely small time intervals like in the range of a microsecond or 1e-6 seconds, then considering distance traveled by light in a microsecond to be 1e-6 * 3e+8 = 300 meter,

In fact, we have experience with such rapid perception - it operates within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC collides bunches of protons every 25 nanoseconds (40 million times per second).
- The debris of the collision flies out at almost the speed of light (for gamma rays, it's actually at the speed of light).
- Some particles like quarks and the Higgs Boson decay so quickly that they never make it out of the beamline pipe
- But others decay in longer timescales, like a nanosecond or three, so the detectors for these are clustered closely around the collision point
- Others last a microsecond or more, so the detectors for these can be many meters away from the collision point
- There are many debris from each collision, and all of these need to be tracked, identified and categorized, to decide whether this looks "interesting" or not.

All of this has to be fed into the processing pipeline to ready for the next collision, just 25ns later...

If your processing can't wait, start at 1 minute, 15 seconds: