Human Brain: unlimited potential?

[salsa086]

How long will it be until scientific concepts become too difficult for even the elite geniuses of our civilization to comprehend? Or will the human genome continue to produce genetic mutations creating the rare genius that carries our world to a higher level of understanding.

If a comprehension limit is reached, how will we compensate? Computers? Human augmentation?

 

[Fencer128]

Originally posted by: salsa086
How long will it be until scientific concepts become too difficult for even the elite geniuses of our civilization to comprehend? Or will the human genome continue to produce genetic mutations creating the rare genius that carries our world to a higher level of understanding.

If a comprehension limit is reached, how will we compensate? Computers? Human augmentation?

Resistance will be futile

 

[Fencer128]

Originally posted by: salsa086
How long will it be until scientific concepts become too difficult for even the elite geniuses of our civilization to comprehend? Or will the human genome continue to produce genetic mutations creating the rare genius that carries our world to a higher level of understanding.

If a comprehension limit is reached, how will we compensate? Computers? Human augmentation?

Seriously, there are a couple of points to be made here:

1. I'm not quite sure what's meant by "a concept being incomprehensible". Nature is often incomprehensible, but science allows us glimpses or structure, pattern and logic often in very limited circumstances.

Thinking of the physical sciences, that which we understand can be derived mathematically. To be able to deduce the mathematics is not the same as understanding the underlying physics, say, but it would still give an element of comprehension.

2. Rare genius may be a genetic trait - more likely it is a coming together of circumstance. A gifted person who is educated in a particularly apt discpline who then gets a little lucky with their area of research. I'm not convinced, say, that to come up with a successful unified theory we need to await the birth of Einstein Mk. 2.

Cheers,

Andy

 

[DrPizza]

"how long will it be?"
I think it's already happened. I don't think people actually comprehend or can comprehend some things such as the sheer size of the universe, or at the other end of the spectrum, the amount of time that a top quark exists before decaying. Sure, we can give them terms... billions of light years across, or a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, but the mind still can't comprehend the size.

 

[jagec]

you have to break it down into manageable sizes...modular contruction allows a large scale program/machine/etc to work without having to have a single guy build the whole thing.

 

[gsellis]

Occum's Razor always adjusts. We also learn the shortcuts and how to specialize. The 'unknown' is not infinite either. We are just learning how to break the discrete parts into smaller, measurable units.

That is why current technology becomes (edit - becauses? lesdyxia stikes again) more difficult to recreate from scratch as it takes more and more specialist to create the tools and infrastructure to build the tools and infrastructure to build the tools and infrastructure... you get the point.

 

[Shalmanese]

I think it's a valid question. As it stands now, it takes somewhere in the order of 20 - 30 years to become specialised in one field of study via the torturous route we like to call the education system. This leaves roughly in the order of 30 - 40 years worth of productive work per human. As things get more advanced, the choice is either to study for longer or specialise more. Eventually, some things will become beyond what a human can profitably grasp in one lifetime because it's either too multi-disciplinary or takes too long to comprehend that the pay-off isn't worth it. At this point, unless we can come up with a solution, science will stop. Luckily, we seem to still have a long way to go yet.

 

[f95toli]

We are already well beyond the point where a single person can learn -or comprehend- a whole field.

Everyone have to specialize and it is only possible to be up to date in an extremely narrow field. Take physics for example; there are hundreds of monthly journals. it would be impossible to read them all.
At most you can look through the contents of about 10 or so every week and find the papers that concerns your own research. Most physisicts still spend between 4-8 hours every week reading just to keep up.

 

[unipidity]

Indeed. Of course the goal of modelling is that you dont have to understand everything perfectly... major advances in a number of fields are going to postpone the crunch day for a long time;

Advances in sharing information will allow less search time when learning
The gradual creep of increasing human lifespan will give longer working lives
The possibility of using certain as of yet unknown influences early in life to maximise the intellectual potential of people
The fact that if human intellect is normally distributed, you will always have geniuses capable of more than that which has gone before.

And because there is no reason that physics, sciences etc need get more complex- whilst GR is more complex that NLoG, a concise but relvolutionary model cannot be ruled out. Of course, this requires truly original thinking on the scale of Newton, to avoid the ever increasing maths creep, but there you go.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

On a related note, there will always be truths which cannot be known. The human mind comprehends that which it can understand. Not a trivial statement, because the human brain is finite. A dog can understand what a dog can, and a chimp what a chimp can and a person what a person can. The dog doesn't "get" everything, and likewise neither do we. It's like running the mile. Times get shorter, but not forever. Someone will run the ultimate mile one day, and no one will ever beat it. If you think not, when will training enable someone to run a one second mile? Yet eventually we must get there if unlimited potential exists. I do not believe it does.

 

[Geniere]

Augmented intelligence is something that will allow us to leap over the natural mental limitations. I think several methods will be in common use before the next century. Nano or biological processor implants with direct connection to the nervous system including a real time interface with the Internet of the future and improved mental capacity through genetic manipulation.

 

[Smilin]

It seems in animals the most intelligent are the least capable at birth and vice versa. Perhaps as a cosmic joke we will reach such a great point of intelligence that we will be too stupid at birth to breath properly.

It would be interesting if we could augment human memory. It would be pretty spiffy to have say a multiplication or square root table memorized out to some large digit. What about having a truly photographic memory of a sunset? If it could be done the next step would be to network and share among the augmentations.

 

[Orsorum]

Originally posted by: Smilin
It seems in animals the most intelligent are the least capable at birth and vice versa. Perhaps as a cosmic joke we will reach such a great point of intelligence that we will be too stupid at birth to breath properly.

It would be interesting if we could augment human memory. It would be pretty spiffy to have say a multiplication or square root table memorized out to some large digit. What about having a truly photographic memory of a sunset? If it could be done the next step would be to network and share among the augmentations.

I seem to remember reading something about that, how the human brain is actually in some ways a biological parasite in terms of its demands on our body; how human civilization may have advanced because of how helpless children are in their first ten years or so, etc etc. The natural course of thought was that someday we'd reach a point where our brains just completely drained our bodies of energy.

But I can't contribute anything deeper than that at the moment.

 

[dkozloski]

How about the case of the autistic savant that can perform mental feats far beyond anything in the "normal" realm. We still have no idea how they do what they do. Usually the scope of their gift is somewhat limited but must it always be so? The best is yet to come.

 

[Bremen]

Originally posted by: WinstonSmith
On a related note, there will always be truths which cannot be known. The human mind comprehends that which it can understand. Not a trivial statement, because the human brain is finite. A dog can understand what a dog can, and a chimp what a chimp can and a person what a person can. The dog doesn't "get" everything, and likewise neither do we. It's like running the mile. Times get shorter, but not forever. Someone will run the ultimate mile one day, and no one will ever beat it. If you think not, when will training enable someone to run a one second mile? Yet eventually we must get there if unlimited potential exists. I do not believe it does.

I would argue the ultimate mile will never be achieved. Instead times should approach some limit, with each successive record approaching that limit. Records will be beaten by seconds, then milliseconds, then nanoseconds etc. Of course at some point our ability to measure the ever shrinking margins will end, so I suppose one day the record books will record an 'ultimate' mile.

 

[Cogman]

I have to agree with Bremen. there will always be someone that can come along and beat the last person, but it will get to the point where the amout of time they are beating them by will be so extremly small that people might not care very much, (invisions a someone shaving all their hair off and running almost naked to get the extra microsecond to beat the last guy..)