when would a near-perfect civilization develop space travel and fully understand the brain

this is a society that values science and advances very quickly

Edited by Wild-Starfish on Sep 8th 2022 at 3:06:23 AM

I'm... not sure that we (by which I mean humanity) have the information to answer that question. There's too much that we don't yet know about those things, I feel (the brain in particular).

(Also, different people may have differing ideas of what constitutes as "near-perfect" society, which may affect estimates. Even if we take it that such a society values science, some might expect "near-perfection" to value social science over physics, while another might expect a focus on climate science—and so on.)

The problem with this question is that mostly, this isn't how actual advances work. Space travel had been thought of long before it was actually possible, and part of what made space travel develop quickly is specific geopolitical issues.

Sometimes developments require extremely specific circumstances to occur. Without specific interest in radar crystals and one curious researcher, semiconductors could've been invented decades later or earlier. it's not clear if practical steam engines would ever have become a thing were it not for the extremely specific circumstances in Great Britain. For example, had they not conquered India (and thus developed a serious influx of cottons to spin, coal for heating, deep mines, etc), the industrial revolution may never have happened at all. But equally true, had circumstances elsewhere been different, we may have had an industrial revolution in 10 000 BC.

Something like understanding the brain is even harder because we're talking about molecular biology at that point: You'd need to understand the behavior of cells, and molecules within those cells, and do that simultaneously for all trillions and trillions of cells. But understanding that requires, for example, sufficiently powerful computers, microscopes, analysis machines etc etc etc.

To name another example of fun dependency: only by developing more advanced lens grinding techniques could microscopes be developed, and only by developing better microscopes could we see microbes, and thus develop the necessary biology to understand diseases etc.

Edited by devak on Sep 9th 2022 at 10:48:44 AM

They're nearly perfect, so probably it only took a few minutes after they evolved consciousness. Or before that, even.

The answer is "Never".

Why?

Because the human brain is a mystery that will never be fully understood or solved.

Just like the after-images of dead stars in the starry sky or the deep secrets of the ocean.

Somethings will never be more than mere pondering of the human mind, regardless of the advances in science.

That's a little defeatist.

To make the assumption of "Never", you'd have to have a perfect understanding of the brain to know that it's not understandable, and it seems pretty understandable. It's meat with electronic signals, and from that, consciousness emerges through poorly understood processes. The more signals and fancier meat, the more consciousness.

We have a pretty good idea of what happens if electronic signals go to one place or the other, we have a pretty good idea of what parts you can stab and not kill the person and what parts you can't stab without killing the person.

The intricate details obviously haven't been entirely figured out, but many of the processes are reasonably well understood, and there's no reason to think that the rest are somehow beyond comprehension.

Now, I do agree with as the rate of invention is based largely on the external circumstance. Steam engines were used for what were technically practical purposes during the ancient greek times, but no one bothered to use them for anything other than automatic doors in a couple temples. In theory, an optimized civilization would probably achieve all this in exactly as long as it takes to build everything that allows the next things to happen.

In actuality, farming is not an optimal decision relative to hunter-gathering, so a civilization making only optimal decisions would never get out of hunter-gathering.

It's also not necessarily optimal to have space travel, it may just be more practical to launch solar sail probes, so they might not bother with it at all.

It's not "defeatist" if one take into account that the biggest mystery and the most complex thing in the universe is the brain itself and we lack the means to even figure out how to even begin to study it properly in the first place.

It is being called "realistic" about it.

Besides, even if all the mysteries about it were to be solved, then what?

...

Touching the other half of the question.

"Space Travel"

Is it manned or unmanned travel through space that is being asked about here?

[citation needed]

Yeah, I can name a bunch of things potentially more complex than the brain's interactions and mechanics. Neuroscientists like to bloat their field's difficulty. Granted, it is a difficult and important field, but the brain isn't the most complex thing in the universe.

In fact, here's some other things that are almost certainly more complex.

• Ecosystems in general
• Nuclear Pasta (if there's enough of it, especially the slightly less dense variants)
• Stars
• Politics (though you could argue it's an emergent property of brains)
• Why those tops which flip upside-down when spun work. (no seriously the simplest model uses like seven variables.)
• Infinite pebbles (Not technically in the universe, but infinite pebbles would be more complex than the brain)
• Calculating The Quantum Wave Function of a molecule of any given protein
• Pretty much anything that contains electromagnetically and gravitationally interacting matter that is bigger than a brain if you're only defining unknowability by how big the quantum wave function is, and even then you hit "far too much information to calculate before not only do the stars die but their corpses die four times over" at significantly smaller sizes.

Of course, you could say "but the brain thinks about all those things" which is trivially true and doesn't add to the complexity. An electronic abacus with an image-recognizing camera glued on could count things far more complex than it, and tell the difference between one thing and another.

Also we do know a lot about how the brain works, as I said. We know where not to stab, that different parts do different things, and we only don't understand a few very specific parts and a couple of emergent properties. Consciousness is not the big mystery people portray it as, it's a mid-sized speedbump. (I don't think people will fully accept that consciousness has been solved when it is though, because the mystery of "ooh we don't even know what it is" is a big part of the appeal of the idea of consciousness.)

Would you say we don't understand the liver? It does all kinds of complex chemistry, probably does all sorts of things we have no idea about, it's extremely regenerative, and comes in several extremely distinct colors based on what type of damage it has. It's very complex.

We only understand 10% of the human brain as of now and that's it. (looking this topic up first before posting...)

Add to the difficulty that every single brain is unique in its construction and it becomes even harder to compare notes between two of them as science tries to figure it out.

Also, understanding "What it does" does not equal understanding "How it does it" either.

Edited by TitanJump on Sep 10th 2022 at 12:14:56 PM

10% is pretty good. We understand a hell of a lot less than that about gravity's deal relative to the other three forces than 10%. We know very little about protein folding. We know less than a hundredth of a percent of all the types of bacteria out there, and far, FAR less about viruses. We know probably about 1% of every eukaryote, and that's just counting different types as we see them, not going too in-depth on what exactly they do. Brains are not particularly mysterious relative to other fields of science.

Also every, say, ice plant (that's not clonal) is unique and yet we can make a lot of statements about the general properties of ice plants. Unique is a trivial concept, and brains are not more different than any other given organ. We know what the brain does, and how it does it, mostly. We know how neurons signal, and we mostly know what can break them. Just because we don't immediately know, say, how exactly rabies ruins the signaling so bad that you die doesn't mean it's some super mystery beyond comprehension, it just means we need more things with rabies to look at.

(Revising the infinite pebbles thing, in a flat or negatively curved universe, which we almost certainly are in, there would be infinite pebbles, so infinite pebbles are almost certainly in the universe.)

Edited by Florien on Sep 10th 2022 at 4:07:39 AM

The problem here is that the one asking above (points up at the first post.) is wondering when in time an advanced species could have explored a complete 100% of the brain and not just 10%...

(Pause in mid-conversation... light-bulb lights up!)

Wait, the one asking never made any specifics on what kind of civilization it was, doing all of this, right?

(If it is one that is not based on humans then this could take a whole different turn all together. They only clarified that it valued "Science" after all...and evolves quickly...)

If this is a civilization of, let's say, Tautaras (Which is the fastest evolving species on Earth, as an example) then this whole topic could be turned on its head all together!

I will note that the matter of consciousness is not all that settled. It's not at all established that it's just an emergent property of the brain, nor that it might come to be fully understood.

On the rest I do think that I agree with Florien, however: the function and structure of the brain will likely come to be understood, at least to a high degree, given due time.

>It's not "defeatist" if one take into account that the biggest mystery and the most complex thing in the universe is the brain itself and we lack the means to even figure out how to even begin to study it properly in the first place.

I feel like we kind of glossed over this because it's one hell of a take and also hilariously wrong.

We understand neurons just fine. We are also capable of simulating the behavior of neurons, though only for short periods and small volumes. Not to mention the rich fields of various brain scans.

The idea that we don't even know how to begin to study it is laughable. We already study it. We've been studying it for decades.

The human brain consists on average of about one hundred billion neurons, each of which have up to 10,000 connections to other neurons. To find the total state space potential of the brain, you would have to multiply 10 thousand by itself 100 billion times.

And that underestimates it by a very long shot. You also have to factor in the several dozen different neuro-transmitters that the brain uses, and the way that they interact with each other. In any single synaptic gap, the brain can vary the effect of signals crossing it by emitting more or fewer neurotransmitters, absorbing more or fewer on the other side, or by recycling them for reuse faster or more slowly. Each of these will have a different effect on thought, emotion and behavior. When you add in that the genetic influences and environment stimuli interact in complex ways, that human memory is a constructive process and not a recording, and that it is very likely a nonlinear complex system (ie, it follows "Chaos Theory"), then...

The brain is, by far, the single most complex phenomenon known to mankind. Nothing else even comes close.

And then you factor in the philosophical concept that a system can never fully model itself (Godel's theorem), because to model the brain, you need another brain sized storage device to record the brainstate and the way it changes. Then you need another one to understand that one, and so on.

So it is unlikely that we will ever fully "solve" the brain, or the mind.

This doesn't mean that brain science is useless, mind you. We are making tremendous advances with important real world implications for the treatment of mental conditions, education, and human performance. But we are unlikely to reach the end of this particular journey.

Edited by DeMarquis on Sep 10th 2022 at 2:02:21 PM

It seems a bit silly to insist we can never fully understand brains when we've barely started.

Modeling something and understanding it are two very separate things. Just because we can't fully model a brain without a computer more powerful than whatever meat computer in question is being modeled doesn't mean such a computer is impossible, nor that we can't model the individual parts and their interactions separately and come up with pretty accurate conclusions about the rest of the situation.

A brain may have a very large state space, but it's trivial (in a purely theoretical sense of course) to create a thing with a larger state space. The interior of a star presumably has a larger state space by simple virtue of how much matter is there alone. Information theory tends to favor scale in scenarios where things aren't uniform (basically anywhere outside of a Bose-Einstein condensate or a black hole.)

We don't say we don't understand beaches because we can't keep track of every grain of sand and how exactly it's interacting with every other grain at once. I don't see how the brain is much different.

Explain how it's an inadequate comparison then. Gravel and sand alike make my point perfectly well, unless you ascribe some magical properties to brains. We understand beaches without simulating every grain of sand. We understand brains without being able to currently model a human-sized one.

Brains are made entirely out of normal matter, (citation: what else would they be made of, magic?) so consciousness would have to be an emergent property. To claim otherwise is pretty obviously spiritual woo, because what else would it be? There's no consciousness particle. Consciousness is not a fundamental force, it doesn't have a quantum field, it doesn't have one or more bosons. So explain how comparing a brain to a sufficiently large amount of rocks is wrong. After all, you can build a Turing-complete computer out of infinite rocks across infinite space.

Edited by Florien on Sep 11th 2022 at 1:29:39 AM

I don't think comparing the human brain to a massive pile of gravel and sand is going to prove any points in this discussion...

To be honest, despite your long post, i have no idea what you're actually trying to say.

It's wrong.

Because a pile of rocks is not capable of creating and containing a consciousness.

A brain is.

Comparing the two is like comparing the cranium to a brain.

It just does not add up.

(However, it gets more relevant if it is the cranium that gets compared to the beach since, well, both are made of minerals.)

Edited by TitanJump on Sep 11th 2022 at 3:06:52 PM

A unique state space is an arrangement of variables that contains information. Arranging grains of sand in various ways doesn't describe different state spaces because the different configurations do not contain unique information (they don't do anything differently). Neither does the interior of a star, nor the arrangement of galaxies in the universe. Different arrangements of neural transmissions between neurons very much does represent different information, and so the human brain is the single most complex processor of information we know of, by far (at least until we invent AI).

But the different configurations of sand do do things differently.

Each grain of sand is not "spherical-in-a-frictionless-vacuum", the characteristics of each individual grain (nearly all of which are distinct from any other given grain) do change the characteristics of the beach at large. They can change wind patterns, (slightly) gravitational effects, (slightly), they diffract and refract light differently. The slightly different chemical compositions of each grain also means that if you atomize one part of the beach, you'll get slightly different quantities of whatever atoms you please in the rest of the beach.

The inside of a star is much the same. Chaos theory makes this clear. If you moved a current within the star even slightly, that change will alter the behavior of the star at large.

Also, why other than "it feels wrong" do you think a Turing complete computer made out of rocks couldn't maintain a consciousness? If it's possible any AI could be conscious, then an AI programmed on an infinite field of rocks could be conscious.

Literally all you need is a Turing machine to place the rocks as bits. This is obviously purely theoretical, but it is technically possible.

It is wrong because...

A Turing-Computer isn't Lost Forever if you break it even once.

Good luck "repairing" a human brain back to what it was after it breaks.

That is the huge difference here.

I fail to see the difference. Both a brain and a computer, (whether it be made of unmodified rocks or modified rocks) are subject to time-reversal symmetry.

If you reversed the time of everything in the system (or flipped the charge and the three spatial coordinates, which is equivalent) obviously that would fix the damage done to both a brain and a computer, unless you're going to argue brains aren't constrained by the laws of physics.

They are both technically repairable by identical methods. If anything, the argument that "brains are more fragile" is a non-sequitur.

Except for the irreversible information-loss in the case of the human brain's damage, that is.

Human brain damage is completely irreversible and all you can do about it, is prevent further damage to happen to the damaged brain in question.

Even if the brain's physical structure is re-winded back to normal, the information stored in the damaged parts are absolutely Lost Forever.

There is no way around this.