I read a long time ago an essay by Asimov that described what elements could support life as a building block and why most elements cannot. I didn’t fully understand that at the time but it was interesting to see why carbon based makes sense and some other random element does not work.
Similarly, I wonder if under different planetary conditions, smart alien life (so not single cell life) can be very tiny or very large, or if there are biological constraints that would restrict that size range regardless of basic setup.
In: 324
It really depends on how many neurons the thing needs to operate it’s body, and how “sloppy” the activation thresholds for neurons in the system are.
A system with little “indeterminate” activity at the thresholds and boundary conditions can get away with having significantly fewer neurons since there’s less noise impinging on the Information of the system, and so fewer votes are necessary on precise things.
A system with more complicated motion requirements, a bigger body, terrestrial motion, more complicated balance system, etc. is also going to need more neurons before “linguistic translation, encoding, and embedding on a high-dimensional latent space” is possible in the system.
Humans have a LOT of neurons devoted to processing data about all sorts of shit that not every organism is going to need to care about.
Depending on the context, I suspect that 7-8 billion neurons could do the job of producing a fully capable human level of intelligence on a large variety of tasks, though this excludes most physical tasks.
Latest Answers