My point isn’t that blindly increasing neuron transmission speed would increase fitness. It probably would up to a point, but I don’t know enough about how sensitive the brain is to the speed of signals in a neuron to be sure. My point is that getting information from one part of the brain to another is clearly a fundamental task in cognitive processing and that the relatively slow speed of electrical signals is always going to be a limitation of neurons.
I think something like 250IQ is still a pretty sound concept, though I agree we would really benefit from better methods of measuring intelligence than the standard IQ test. For one, it would be helpful to measure subject-specific aptitudes.
“specific” My General intelligence is possibly above average but my maths co-processor is crap, my AiPU module for LLM is better than anyones, to the point I laugh at my own jokes in great pain, using the AiPU for maths is not great, I have a strong interior narrative, I am not a super-recogniser, not tone deaf, but have some weird fractal 2.23 mind’s eye (I can swap between wireframe rotations and rendered scenes plus some other stuff I cannot find words for)(def not aphantasic https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/margherita-arcangeli-institut-jean ), I have a good memory, auto-pilot is very strong and rarely get lost I think these two things are connected in me at least, about this memory thing my wife says I have a long memory and this is a bad thing. Putting all that into IQ is dumb.
My point isn’t that blindly increasing neuron transmission speed would increase fitness. It probably would up to a point, but I don’t know enough about how sensitive the brain is to the speed of signals in a neuron to be sure. My point is that getting information from one part of the brain to another is clearly a fundamental task in cognitive processing and that the relatively slow speed of electrical signals is always going to be a limitation of neurons.
I think something like 250IQ is still a pretty sound concept, though I agree we would really benefit from better methods of measuring intelligence than the standard IQ test. For one, it would be helpful to measure subject-specific aptitudes.
“specific” My General intelligence is possibly above average but my maths co-processor is crap, my AiPU module for LLM is better than anyones, to the point I laugh at my own jokes in great pain, using the AiPU for maths is not great, I have a strong interior narrative, I am not a super-recogniser, not tone deaf, but have some weird fractal 2.23 mind’s eye (I can swap between wireframe rotations and rendered scenes plus some other stuff I cannot find words for)(def not aphantasic https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/margherita-arcangeli-institut-jean ), I have a good memory, auto-pilot is very strong and rarely get lost I think these two things are connected in me at least, about this memory thing my wife says I have a long memory and this is a bad thing. Putting all that into IQ is dumb.