| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 6/28/2008 7:13:34 PM | Beaugrand®™©, I don't know if I am using the right terms, but I heard when we hit our 30s we start losing more neurons than we are producing. Our neuron peak is supposed to end around there.
But when we get older, as you said, we get better at finding ways to circumvent unnecessary factors in our pursuit of mental growth.
Our processes may be computed slower, but they are far more efficient in calculating the same results. lol | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 6/28/2008 9:06:48 PM | Now I'm picturing people growing up to be trickters and illusionists. 
I am super suspicious now.
>_>
<_< | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 6/29/2008 12:23:32 AM | The average time for the human brain to process an image is roughly 1/10 seconds. Everyone, without their knowledge is living in the past, just a little. This should come as no suprise to anyone living in a world where time is a relevant factor.
As for the rest of the quantum-pseudoscientists, I say good luck and have fun for now and until the day you bring real, emperical evidence into the discussion. Until then, you're dillusionals. | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 6/29/2008 12:53:21 AM | To decode reality, you must use Physics. Anything else is rubbish. Physics is mans best way to describe reality because it requires hard evidence. To get in the physics books you must supply this evidence. To say that thought is instantanious means you need to write a new part in the physics book. Einstein And Newton were amoung the few able to do so. You can only start your inquirery by what we know as scientific facts, because these facts are hard-worked. We know very little about the brain. We do know the brains neurons communicate electrically. This cannot travel faster than light.
I do beleive that thoughts are stored in neurons. But for a thought to happen or initiate, it has to move through time, and therefore has speed. A thought cannot be one single entity, it is built from a mulitude of aquired sensory information. And since it is not a single entity, it has to comunicate to all its componets to be complete.... This it cannot do faster than light. | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 6/29/2008 4:46:24 AM | Thought happens in finite speeds, like any processor there are several factors that determine the speed, and several context to be considered.
First comes the speed at which the electrical impulses go from point a to point b.
Second comes the number of nodes that impulse must travel to get from point a to point b.
Third comes logic, when you say if, it's not just a 0 or 1 choice, it's actually a weighted formula A - B(A + B) with values being added or subtracted to A and B respectively, each of those values adds another set of nodes to be traversed to solve the if.
Fourth is optimization, one optimization I can think of it to understand how remainders work, it allows you to skip the division and move right on to the remainder, example say you are getting the remainder out of 4, getting the remainder of 1 through 4 into 4 would result in 3 2 1 0. Knowing that lets you skip the division and instead do a subtraction.
While my examples are mostly in numbers, the traverse to visualization easily once you look at why you came to a particular thought and each factor involved in doing that. | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 6/29/2008 8:19:18 AM | As I have said, the speed of thought is fast, it is the PROCESSING speed that is much slower. The speed that it takes to process information does slow down as we age. It is also a function of many other factors too such as our diet and over-all health. Cardivascular disease and Alzheimer's disease is also a huge factor.
In response to thread 47, seat-belts were made to protect us from the total impact of a collision, regardless of how fast our response time is. Our arms would not be able to protect us from that kind of impact, which involves thousands of pounds of an automobile at top speed.
Our speed of thoughts do slow down as our brains decide on what course of action it takes. | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 6/29/2008 11:43:19 AM | Okay philosophygirl, but what is fast? What are we suppose to be comparing ourselves to here? The point was that if our thought process was infinite then there would be no lag between the point of impact and our reaction to it, further more there would be no collision because we would put all the factors together long before we arrived.
Another question would be, "what is the difference between thought and processing?" Since several points of information must come together to process a thought, wouldn't the two be one and the same?
Perhaps some of us are comparing our brains to our computers, this would be wrong. Our minds use an electro-chemical process where as a computer is just electrical. This makes our brains much slower at calculating problems than computers. The difference is the brains ability to process more information from our senses and it uses a large amount of its processing power just for that. If our retina for example has 100 million neurons, than we can say our brain has the capacity to process instruction at 100 million instructions per second. Of course that doesn't include all of our other senses, autonomic processes and conscious thought, but the fastest computer in the world can only process at a few million processes per second.
But if we are just talking about conscious thought then we are in the stone ages compared to computers. Take martial arts for example, if we learn it well we can have what seems to be almost instantaneous thought in reaction to something, but in fact all of those reactions are learned, just as most of what we do is learned. It takes hundreds and even sometimes thousands of repetitions to learn one block or one move. If we were electrically driven computer proccesors we would only have to learn the move once and we are done.
At the rate computer power is advancing it will only take another decade or two for people to design a computer that will rival anything a human mind can do now. Then a few years after that it will exceed what we can do... | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 6/29/2008 12:04:49 PM | | I should point out that our brains act as a network, not as a single computer with a single processor; consider left-brain and right-brain thinking- if the connection is broken, you have essentially two brains acting independently. Certain parts of the brain handle different kinds of tasks, the "highest" function being self-awareness and "intelligent" thought, whatever that is. Our thoughts are comprised of a constant dialog between many parts of the brain, thus finite. | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 6/29/2008 3:12:14 PM | | Thought is a combination of electrical impulse in the brain and the bio-chemical reactions in each cell of the central nervous system. Electricity is said to travel at or near the speed of light. Both have been measured. The bio componants would be considerably slower, leaving no other answer other than that the speed of thought must be finite. | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 6/30/2008 9:55:19 AM | | Thought does not even happen at the speed of light, much less faster. The formation of a thought involves the activity of many synapses, which depends on chemical reactions. Nothing in human conciousness can take place faster than these chemical reactions. | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 7/8/2008 10:54:13 PM | It seems you are confusing the two Art. The Neuro-chemical reactions in the body are the result of consciousness on the brain.
So you are correct that the Neuro-chemical process of thinking is finite, but the consciousness that initiats that process is instantaneous and ironically enough unmeasurable in as much as science is able to measure.
That will change of course, hopefully sooner than later. | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 7/9/2008 2:01:12 AM | | I should really just say nothing, but i can't help but point out that this is the biggest bullshit thread that i have ever read, and you all need a reality check ha ha. | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 7/9/2008 2:58:47 AM | Sometimes the speed of light just isn't fast enough.
Why does it take so long for your computer to do some processes ?
All those electrons are going at the speed of light in your little computer, so one would suppose it should happen instantaneously.
There are lots of things your brain can do much faster than a computer.
When I was about 13 yrs old and in Jr. High School. One winter morning there was snow on the ground and some kids were throwing snow balls at other kids coming out of gym class.
At the end of the class, I opened the door and stepped outside and in that instant I saw a snowball on it's way towards me. I ducked and the snowball went just over my head and missed me. In that split second I could clearly see the snowball traveling towards me, rotating, as if in slow motion.
This sort of phenomena is very common in peoples lives. Sometimes, under the right circumstances, the mind can be so focused that time seems to slow down. A split second can be stretched out much longer.
Is this an hallucination ?
Or is it a function of the brains processing power ? | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 7/9/2008 5:15:46 PM | sorry but no, the electrons actually take it real easy when on a long distance hike. their speed is in fact quite pedestrian. How electronics seem to operate at approx 95% of the speed of light is that the electrons are so tightly packed up to one another, that even though the speed of movement is slow, the distance they need to cover is much smaller so when one moves the next starts to move almost immediately, and so on. So it's the speed of the wave that is very high.
In a few years it's possible that computers built around light instead of current are sold, which will speed up data flow, but given the distances involved not by lots.
Look out a moving vehicle. You can either look fixed seeing a rapidly changing view, or you can keep fixing your gaze on one spot, following it until out of range. In the first instance you get a little giddy with the rapid change, in the second instance you seem to freeze movement each time.
Most people when they are having an accident, feel that time slows down, the crash happens sl o w l y . It's just the ability of the mind, that normally we only use 10 or 20% of, to speed up in action, we focus on that snowball and nothing else. I bet somebody could of stolen your wallet out of your jeans pocket without you noticing at that instance. Time would of been going by at the normal rate for the other boys. They saw you duck in time and might of thought, "bleeding ell, he is quicker than superman"  | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 7/10/2008 7:10:45 PM | if human thought is finite then it can beat the speed of light
and if it gos faster than the speed of light
then if could be sparked by a event which hasn't even happened yet in your part of time ?
and it disproves the idea that anything going even near the speed of light would become pure energy and disproves the entire field of quantum mechanics
and makes us infect able to alter the very fabric of time by reacting to things based on events which have not yet transpired and may not transpire if every one dose it
the ramifications of that are mind split tingly confusing
so nope i think its either untrue or the biggest thing since we realized that some kind of force makes things fall to the ground | |
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| Is the speed of thought finite?
Posted: 8/9/2008 11:41:55 PM | | it doesn't really disprove the theory that anything going faster than the speed of light is pure energy. It espouses if thought is faster than the speeed of light it is therefore pure energy supporting that theory. Yes that would be pretty big. It is something quantum physics discusses-and examines - but many posters believe that is delusional. | |
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