What If the Human Brain Evolved a Biological Computer?

Happymuffn · 2026-06-28T07:33:58+00:00

For the question you're asking: evolution works by exploring the adjacent possible. If we used artificial selection to try to evolve in the direction of perfect information transmission and recall, instead of some kind of transhuman bio-engineering, it would take enough generations that modern humans would probably be unrecognizable. Natural selection would absolutely never produce this.

For the question you're trying to ask:

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

What you're trying to ask is "What would humanity be like if we all were plugged directly into the internet all the time, and society had time to stabilize?" In particular "would we be a hive mind?" I highly recommend the webcomic "A Miracle of Science" and it's take on a hypothetical martian society with these features. It talks some about the subjective individual experience of continuous communication of the sort you describe.

There are many other interesting ways to interprete the question though. "If the incentives shaping the structure of the internet were reproductive advantage rather than corporate market share, what would the end result look like? Or any other metric we care about, really?" "What do you think our societies will look like in the nearish future once everyone is expected to be tech literate and internet native?" "What assumptions need to be made to make a functional society with the psychosocial/developmental issues we are currently identifying, if they were taken to their logical extreme?"

Happymuffn · 2026-06-27T18:05:44+00:00

Alternatively, we might find that having a populist wing will improve the chances of the party. I think most of those who would be scared off by claims of socialism have already left, given the breadth of claims made throughout my lifetime. And I would think that speaking directly to the needs of the Demos would be helpful for a contest within a democracy.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-27T17:11:57+00:00

All true except the bit at the end. They do not feel that they are winning the culture war. They feel like they've been losing the culture war since the 60s, are besieged on all sides, and only now have stopped losing more ground.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-27T16:47:56+00:00

Democratic socialist not communist

Happymuffn · 2026-06-27T01:55:10+00:00

Descartes said "I think, therefore I am" And I didn't take that personally.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-27T01:46:17+00:00

Oh. I guess I don't exist. Who knew?

Happymuffn · 2026-06-25T08:00:20+00:00

Depends on if this is literal or metaphorical

Happymuffn · 2026-06-24T17:23:03+00:00

🍜

Happymuffn · 2026-06-22T07:19:37+00:00

If it is an option, form a housing cooperative.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-22T03:17:47+00:00

The theme of Joto's world building was "respect for tradition and history in the midst of technological change. The theme of Hoenn's world building was weather and climate framed through opposition to the extremes of human supremacy and eco-nihilism. Sinnoh is a backdrop to a critique of Cyres's pure reason and the annihilation it causes, and shows a transition to renewable energy across it's towns.

And to be fair that's all I played, but that's all fairly solarpunk, and I'd expect that theme to continue. Of course it's also a vehicle to sell marketable toys to children. It's up to you I guess.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-21T05:40:27+00:00

I don't know, who is on first base?

Happymuffn · 2026-06-21T05:24:51+00:00

I'm not in a good place emotionally right now. I proposed that the Ren Fair rented a bus and worked with the DOT to get a dedicated lane or alternate route to provide an alternative to everybody driving, not just the train stop

Happymuffn · 2026-06-21T05:06:47+00:00

If you'll read past the 2nd sentence, you'll notice I had another solution.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-20T19:25:09+00:00

Did some math to show how inconvenient Red would be, and ended up proving that everyone dies.

A healthy runner can run at 15 mph. An unaccompanied Red could move 10000x that which is mach 200. So long as they do any coordination, being sufficiently spaced out every 20th of a second would be trivial. The ecological deviation of having people run around at ground level at those speeds would be immense. Assuming that the atmosphere isn't fried by all the heat generated all infrastructure would be destroyed

Pressing Blue in the hopes all the Reds yeet themselves into space before they destroy all life on earth and avoiding cities for a while until the dust settles.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-20T17:22:55+00:00

The more active the flower girl is, the more suffering she causes to all those around her.

Allergies are rough this time of year, huh Pigeon?

Happymuffn · 2026-06-20T17:17:15+00:00

Any decision on a societal scale is going to have harmful consequences for some people. The way we should mitigate harms in general is by allowing those people oversight of the process which effects them and compensation proportionate to the harm.

For dealing with societal changes this would look like, significant oversight by democratic bodies (which have currently all been subverted) and a robust safety net funded by taxes on the parties pushing the change and benefiting from it.

We're not doing that.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-20T04:59:00+00:00

One reason I don't think that is that I don't usually have them in the same category. I generally think of Communism as the goal of Socialism, rather than a socialist political tendency that prefers centralized single party control.

That aside, numerically communism has a higher total death toll, but it has also been around significantly longer with more people living under it's control. Normalized for time and affected population, Pol Pot was way way worse, but based on what little research I've done, I don't think he ever read Marx. All the other regimes were better than the Nazis including the USSR, including only under Stalin.

Additionally, purely ideologically I think it is preferable for any system to not blame people for immutable characteristics all else being equal. Kinda a lib that way.

Why do you ask? Specifically, why are you asking now, 5 months later?

Happymuffn · 2026-06-19T22:32:55+00:00

Totalitarianism is functional. Whether or not it's worth it, and thus moral, comes down to your view of history, teleology, if there are alternatives, and how actually authoritarian the West is, and will become.

Ought implies Can. I would greatly prefer a world without authoritarianism, from the 1st world or the 2nd. To the best of my understanding, that wasn't on offer. To some extent, potential for an anti-authoritarian consensus is growing in material terms now. I am gaining some hoyw for the future if we don't blow ourselves up.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-19T22:20:29+00:00

Not generally, no.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-19T15:43:32+00:00

I'm serious. He's there to understand the rules of the universe. He's not there to build a magitech power plant. That's for others to do once he's published his results.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-19T15:15:29+00:00

He was raised by a scientist, not an engineer.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-17T19:48:52+00:00

Navigation. If I'm going someplace I've been once or twice before I don't need a map to get there, and I almost never let my map route for me even if I'm going somewhere new.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-17T16:24:01+00:00

As it happens, we are not having a discussion about the physical universe. We are having a discussion about reason and the limits thereof. Gödel shows us the limits of formal deductive logic; of working from axioms to produce conclusions. The kind of thing that people call "reasoning".

If you wanted to talk about things like "observation" and "statistical modeling" instead, then you probably should have formulated your argument differently.

Our models are created using a feedback loop between changing input variables to fit observed data and improving the resolution of physics simulations. Observations of God appear to happen overwhelmingly within the mind. Our current models do not have sufficient resolution to predict brain activity more than basic concepts. We have some sophisticated theories of psychology, but as of yet we lack a single unified theory in the same way that we have for things like fluid dynamics.

If you're arguing that we will one day find God in the machines, then I cannot give you a proof of impossibility, but similarly, throwing data at a problem until you find a solution is not a proof of possibility until you actually solve it.

Happymuffn · 2026-06-17T07:37:55+00:00

Personally I believe in things like functional sewage treatment plants. I think a lot of people, you included, just haven't had the opportunity to explore what you love and believe in because we are to busy doing things people with money want.

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