So your focus was specifically on the compute performed by animal brains.
I expect total brain compute is dwarfed by the computation inside cells (transcription & translation). Which in turn is dwarfed by the computation done by non-organic matter to implement natural selection. I had totally overlooked this last part!
Non-brain matter is most of the compute for a naive physics simulation, however it’s plausible that it could be sped up a lot, e.g. the interiors of rocks are pretty static and similar to each other so maybe they can share a lot of computation. For brains it would be harder to speed up the simulation without changing the result a lot.
Great links, thank you!!
So your focus was specifically on the compute performed by animal brains.
I expect total brain compute is dwarfed by the computation inside cells (transcription & translation). Which in turn is dwarfed by the computation done by non-organic matter to implement natural selection. I had totally overlooked this last part!
Non-brain matter is most of the compute for a naive physics simulation, however it’s plausible that it could be sped up a lot, e.g. the interiors of rocks are pretty static and similar to each other so maybe they can share a lot of computation. For brains it would be harder to speed up the simulation without changing the result a lot.