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this is roughly one possible interpretation of the Fermi paradox. what if other intelligent thinking beings are out there but operate on a very different timescale? what if their speech-cycles are a millisecond, or a millennium, and we're either missing them or mistaking them for static equilibrium

Axe Ghost. On Steam!@axeghostgame.bsky.social

The only reason why people can think a brain is "thinking" is because of the illusion of an instantaneous response. If people performed the same neural state changes over a few centuries using paper & pen, at no point in time would anybody believe there is thinking going on.

Jonathan Stray

@jonathanstray.com

Possible, but unlikely. There are characteristic time scales that life needs to respond to. Below milliseconds you run into physical limits like the rate of diffusion and reaction. Above decades you're too slow to react to the environment. We can have fleas and trees, but not much beyond those.

Asa ⭔

@asa.engineer

I think that's true of anything resembling metabolic life as we know it, but may not hold for hypothetical electronic, or planet-scale, or other very different intelligences.

19/10/26, 6:55 pm0 reposts1 like

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