Angilion your comment is interesting SWIM of mine was into shamanism and used to take hallucinogenic substances...
He reported to me that with some substances his thought of process slowed down to such an extent that he was simply seeing framed shot of single picture e.g. if he was in a room his brain will see say a TV remote control (processed through his eyes) and he see a snap shot of it in that state he didn't know what it was (the remote) or even who he was followed by another snapshot of another random object which his eyes picked up...
I have also had some fascinating and detailed discussions with someone who has taken hallucinogens. They told me about a variety of effects on processing the meaning of objects, including difficulty understanding what was being seen (although not the complete inability to do so that your acquaintance told you about) and the classic one of input data from one sense being processed through a second sense. They told me that they weren't at all bothered by any of this at the time, which is weird.
SWIM then reports after coming down off the substance his brain begins to speed up and as he puts it "everything comes back into sync or the frame rates pick up". after hearing this I speculated that the brains capacity probably works in a linear fashion with probably millions if not billions of strings of process say for sight and another for like the process and recognition of objects even emotions and the capacity to feel have string of process attached like many hyper threading cores... with the capacity of it slowing down...
This has been investigated to some extent by MRI scanning of brain activity. The commonly stated idea of different activities being strictly the province of specific parts of the brain is a very simplified view. For example, it's true that there is a section of the brain specifically involved in processing vision, but it's connected to the rest and there's a lot of interactivity. There's related activity in other parts of the brain. Interestingly, there have been some measurements of the amount of data carried by the optic nerves...and it appears to be nowhere near enough. It appears that a significant amount of what we think we see doesn't come from our eyes at all and is actually a creation of our minds filling in the gaps with an interpretation of what is probably there. This is supported by various illusions which rely on unexpected things that people won't see. We also don't see a whole image at a time - experiments show frequent and continuous flicking of vision from point to point, with eyesight turned off during the movements. We don't notice because our minds fill in, but most of the time we're not actually seeing anything. There are some fascinating experiments showing this by syncing changes in an image to eye movement. People very strongly tend to not notice the changes, even when they are big changes.
Some drugs can result in an unusual degree of focus on a single thing, so instead of your sense of vision flicking from thing to thing to thing so quickly that you're not aware of it, your sense of vision stays on one thing for a while before flicking to another one thing. Or perhaps the flick-flick-flick carries on as normal and you're still unaware of it, but the target remains the same for a considerable period of time rather than changing each time. Either way, that would result in the perception of a greatly slowed framerate, a perception which is not necessarily true.
I think it's not linear. We don't appear to process vision in terms of frames at all, more in terms of an ongoing gestalt of vision, memory and creation. Humans frequently "see" what isn't there and don't see what is there, because what we "see" is actually a creation of our own minds prompted by some visual data.
A classic experiment is shown here:
If you know people who haven't seen that video, you might find it interesting to show it to them without any context. When people don't know that it's an example of how humans don't see what's actually there, they usually don't see what's actually there. Knowing the context makes them more likely to see what's actually there, but it's still not a certainty. Try it yourself. Even though you know there's something else going on, you might still not see it (and it's not subtle, not subtle at all).
regarding hardware I think there will be a stage where we will reach limitation on what "hardware" is capable of doing... and would look into organic means which will move away from anything we could possible think of long gone will be the days of binary...
I don't think it will necessarily be organic in any sense of the word, but I think there could be radical changes in hardware. The problem wouldn't be hardware as such but programming it.
Say someone built a computer that was a simplified version of a brain. It has tens of billions of processors and tens of trillions of connections between them. The connections will change continuously depending on use and they radically affect the way the processors work. It's not binary.
So...how do you program that? Take a look at the processor usage for your own computer - even with only a handful of processor cores, in most situations they're not always used to capacity. Programming often simply isn't parallel enough. If it isn't parallel enough for 8 cores, or even 4 cores, how can we make it parallel enough for tens of billions of neurons? Even ignoring the massive effect of synapses, it's just not doable. It's not making a brain that's going to be the big problem. It's making a mind that's going to be the big problem. We can conceive of making a brain - it's a plausible extrapolation of existing hardware. We've no idea of how to make a mind.
I don't know I can only speculate but definitely interesting stuff...
Certainly is.
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