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

That's incorrect.

Information can neither be created nor destroyed (excepting possibly in a black hole but no one's entirely clear on that yet because we haven't figured out a way to test that.) Therefore, CPT symmetry holds.

The laws of physics say pretty clearly that you can fix a brain and a computer both by reversing time. (or charge and parity). They are repairable through the same method. Conservation of information is nonnegotiable. If you reverse time (or charge and parity) for the system, the brain will no longer be damage. A brain is perfectly repairable, if less so than certain kinds of computers.

You could, in fact, argue that a computer isn't repairable if you damage it. If you stab a hard drive, you can't get everything off of that hard drive, but there's no argument that hard drives are mysterious and may never be fully understood despite the fact that if you damage them you can't retrieve everything from them.

But "time-reversal" isn't going to solve the problem that once a brain dies, the charge within it will be gone.

If someone gets fatally shot in the head, and gets exposed to "time-reversal" to try and fix that, all you get is still going to be a corpse but without a bullet-wound in its skull.

It only works on computers, because they are already "dead as door-nails" and artificial.

A brain isn't.

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"Time-reversal" is a dead end as a treatment for living things and if used on corpses, all you get are still going to be corpses.

Because once you release the thing called "life" out from its cranium-box, you won't get it back in there.

Never.

Are you seriously arguing that life is some kind of magical force?

First, you're wrong, time reversal (or charge and parity reversal) by definition works the way I've described, unless you wish to say Nother's Theorem and conservation of charge and momentum are incorrect.

Second, again, you just argued that natural things can be alive and artificial things can't. You have, in essence, argued that abiogenesis, which we know for a fact to have happened, is impossible. You have argued that there is a meaningful distinction between artificial and "natural", that there is a "natural" world and an "artificial" world and that they are somehow separate things.

This is an unambiguously incorrect position to take in matters of science. I suggest you reconsider your position, assuming you took it in good faith.

In order to not derail the Main purpose of this thread (The the first post), I will not continue this discussion, since it has nothing with the topic at hand to begin with.

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Return to zero and to the main topic at hand.

The original question was wrong, so if talking about why is off-topic then no on-topic is possible.

Really? How can you tell? Humans are notoriously bad at detecting sapience except by comparison to themselves. I don't think I could distinguish a living beach from a dead one if neither of them can do anything anthropomorphic.

Yes, that's probably more succinct than how I was putting it.

There's really no way to know whether or not a particular computer, (be it made of rocks or processed rocks) is capable of consciousness, but it seems reasonable to assume at least some hypothetical one is, whether it's been built or not yet, because obviously at least one kind of meat computer is, and they're made out of the same elements, albeit in different ratios, so a brain is, for all intents and purposes, a meat computer, whether it be a quantum computer or an analog computer or (probably not) a normal digital one.

It also seems that consciousness, creativity, and what counts as thinking are continuously redefined to make meat-brains and humans in particular feel special and unique.

Quite besides that, just because something may not be fully understood as of yet or even before everyone dies when the oceans boil away or something doesn't mean it's literally impossible to understand it. It just means we failed to. The world, as far as we can tell, doesn't actually contain anything meaningfully beyond comprehension, because we've invented tools that allow us to comprehend it. (Mostly math.)

Complex numbers sound like they should be beyond comprehension. They're completely unrelated to hunting and gathering, but we figured out how to count in two directions at once. Then we figured out how to count in four with quaternion multiplication. Four dimensions of space comes up approximately never in an agricultural civilization, and yet we invented math that not only tells us how to count and multiply on a four-dimensional grid, but what that grid would look like intersecting with a three-dimensional space.

To say something is beyond comprehension is extremely defeatist, because we can comprehend far higher spatial dimensions than our own by using math. We have extended our range of comprehension before, and it's likely we could do that again.

Except that in order to fully "understand" the human brain, you would have to rely on the answers provided and calculated by super-computers which, I might add, we ourselves have no idea regarding if those answers are actually correct or not.

Aside from that, don't make it sound like "Will never understand X" equals "Progress = 0%" because that is just straight up a lie.

You can progress in neuroscience all the way up to a 99% and never reach that final 1% in order for this mystery to remain "unresolved" forever.

This is not the "defeatist" take, this is the "realistic" one.

Simple put.

You don't seem to have an actual consistent position in this argument.

Your position has shifted from "we can't know everything about the brain because it's very mysterious and complicated" to "you can't compare a brain to an arbitrarily complex computer because computers can't be conscious" to "natural and artificial things are quantifiably different and life is some vague spiritual quality that isn't constrained by physics" and now to "maybe you can know everything about the brain, but only with supercomputers and what if the supercomputers are wrong, and even if they're right and we know they're right what if there's still one percent we don't know?"

You've gone from a vague argument which on the face is unprovable, to a somewhat self-serving (though common) (re)definition of consciousness, cited frailty of a brain in a complete non-sequitur argument against why a computer can't be conscious, then shifted to a position that life is some pseudo-magical quality not constrained by physics and that reality can be divided into nature and not nature, a take that's unmoored from science and indeed, most philosophy. When called out on that last position, you declared the whole subject to be off-topic (most likely incorrectly.) Then, you return to present a philosophical question of "how do we really know anything" as an argument against understanding the brain, cloaked in an argument about what-if-supercomputers-are-wrong, despite there not being any actual proven need for supercomputers to be involved in the process of understanding the brain, or indeed any previous reference to needing a supercomputer to deal with any of this, yet another non-sequitur. Then you couch it in a hypothetical "but what if I'm right and there's something we never learn about brains" and then present "what if I'm right though" as a well-reasoned and quote unquote "realistic" argument.

I'm finding it increasingly hard to believe you're arguing in good faith.

Then let's just stop arguing, agree to disagree, and return to the question that the creator of the thread asked instead rather than just waste energy on this, okay?

(Because right now, what is going on is no different from "The ocean waves hitting the shore" in terms of argument.)

(It's not worth it. A waste of words, energy and time.)

(So I will withdraw, because this is not the proper place, like the medical thread for example, to have this discussion without derailing this whole thread from its original purpose.)

(And when I answered the first time, I answered with an opinion. Nothing else. And kept it as such.)

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A (possibly non-human?) civilization's timeline for both space travel and neuroscience.

Go.

Edited by TitanJump on Sep 13th 2022 at 2:06:49 PM

I would like to add, for the record, that just because the evolution of quantum information may be time-reversal symmetric does not mean we can actually rewind a brain, computer, or indeed any object to a past state. The reason is entropy.

We can use our knowledge of physics to trace future states back to past states, but entropy says that we cannot literally reverse the clock. Stated in quantum-mechanical terms, the complexity of entanglement must always increase.

This also suggests that time travel in the classical sense must be impossible, but that's an entirely different discussion.

Put another way, if we could literally reverse time, we could rewind anything to a past state (a brain, a computer, a smashed vase, eaten food, etc.) but the laws of the universe prevent this from being done. ^note More rigorously, reversing time would also reverse our perception of time, so we would still seem to be going forward. This may seem paradoxical but is borne out by the math.

Going back to the OP, it is interesting that this thread has gone here from such a vague topic... I probably should have just locked it and reprimanded them.

There are a large number of weasel words here, most particularly what a "near-perfect civilization" is. Does that mean they have no internal strife, are perfectly responsible for their environment, don't engage in logical fallacies and cognitive biases? Such a civilization is difficult to imagine, but there are several broad ways it could go.

1. Without preconceptions, without neophobia, and without appeal to tradition, it discovers everything there is to know about reality and becomes near-godlike as a result.
2. Without caution or a sense of historical restraint, its technology rapidly overreaches and destroys itself — imagine someone inventing the nuclear bomb and setting a bunch off because why not?
3. Without strife, it has no drive to innovate and remains completely stagnant forever.

It is impossible to put a time scale on these outcomes.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 13th 2022 at 2:06:20 PM

That's a simplification. Entropy doesn't actually always increase. It's a purely statistical phenomenon. At a maximum state of entropy, time no longer meaningfully exists, so entropy can decrease, or even decrease significantly. No direction in time is privileged, that's why it's called time symmetry. The idea Entropy always increases is the simplification of a much more complicated concept.

A universe with very high entropy most of the time with occasional dips due to statistics, some of them very large, would appear to have a forward time direction, (there are times when entropy can be said to be increasing) but observers could disagree on which direction the forward time actually is, because the dips look like rises in entropy from the other direction. This likely describes our universe in the extremely distant future. (And under some currently rather dubious interpretations with no evidence, describes our universe today)

There's no real reason classical time travel is forbidden either, in principle. There are ways to move parts of space faster than light while the stuff within remains stationary, (though it requires enormous amounts of energy) which, if a way to stop once the space is moving is figured out, does effectively result in travel back in time, though of course it does raise the question of whether or not the conservation laws apply or not. It's possible this is a QM-GR conflict, but I'm not entirely sure on that point.

Quite besides that, time reversal or charge-parity reversal may be beyond unlikely, but the fact that it would, if it could meaningfully be done, repair both a meat computer and a rock computer remains true and does support my argument.

"Also, why other than "it feels wrong" do you think a Turing complete computer made out of rocks couldn't maintain a consciousness?"

It very possibly could, in which case it would be a brain, just one made out of rocks. You start running into practical limitations, though, at least if this entity has to evolve competing for scarce resources with more organic brains.

If the mind is a nonlinear dynamic system which is sensitive enough to react to fluctuations in quantum states, then it might not time reversible, which could be interpreted as preserving a form of free will.

It might not be "time forwardable" either, meaning that if you could somehow rewind it to a previous state, then let it run again, it might not arrive at the exact same end state as before.

A thing doesn't have to be ineffible to be beyond perfect understanding, it just has to be more complex than a mind can meaningfully model.

Edited by DeMarquis on Sep 14th 2022 at 4:25:54 AM

Let's get back on topic and rephrase this conversation; Which one would likely happen first and what amount of time would separate these two achievements? (and also let's also consider the possibility that space travel has progressed to the point of being able to visit other planets as easily as visiting other countries) edit: let's also just say that "near-perfect" means Perfect Pacifist People mixed with Proud Scholar Race and leave it at that

Edited by Wild-Starfish on Oct 14th 2022 at 6:36:45 AM

What you are asking makes no sense. There's no obvious or necessary correlation between spaceflight and understanding the human brain. They are completely distinct scientific fields.

Seconded.

It's pretty trivial to point out that a civilization on a superheavy world may never develop space travel, and it's also pretty trivial to point out that we have space travel but not fully understood the brain.

Cultural characteristics like "pacifist" and "scholarly" are local. (Not even universal to a culture.) Even assuming a planet where space flight is possible, it takes more time to invent brain surgery and rocket science than it does for a civilisation to be gradually overwhelmed by more immediate problems and evolve into one that can deal with them, leading to new unforeseen problems several generations later and collapsing and being replaced by its own successor...

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Oct 23rd 2022 at 11:40:59 AM