There may not be any second law of themodynamics for algorithms, but there’s surely something pretty similar. If I leave my computer running indefinitely, it quickly becomes “psychologically exhausted”, runs slowly, starts causing programs to crash, and so on. If I leave it on anyway, at some point it’s going to commit suicide with a blue screen.
So I still don’t see why it would be simpler for evolution to build a brain that never gets exhausted, or why my story isn’t a reasonable one.
If I leave my computer running indefinitely, it quickly becomes “psychologically exhausted”, runs slowly, starts causing programs to crash, and so on.
really? Oh you mean if you kept using it, not if you just left it there? I would suspect that the equivalent (and this is a stretched analogy, but let’s go with it) would be that a human brain would “fill up” with memories. But over what timescale? The amount of genuinely “new” experiences that a human has probably already varies by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Do people with particularly exciting lives full of new careers/hobbies/travel/goals/relationships go insane after 20 years? No… I mean maybe they would after 1000 years. But that’s my point: the timescale for psychological “exhaustion” will be hugely varied. We kind of already know that it is.
There may not be any second law of themodynamics for algorithms, but there’s surely something pretty similar. If I leave my computer running indefinitely, it quickly becomes “psychologically exhausted”, runs slowly, starts causing programs to crash, and so on. If I leave it on anyway, at some point it’s going to commit suicide with a blue screen.
So I still don’t see why it would be simpler for evolution to build a brain that never gets exhausted, or why my story isn’t a reasonable one.
really? Oh you mean if you kept using it, not if you just left it there? I would suspect that the equivalent (and this is a stretched analogy, but let’s go with it) would be that a human brain would “fill up” with memories. But over what timescale? The amount of genuinely “new” experiences that a human has probably already varies by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Do people with particularly exciting lives full of new careers/hobbies/travel/goals/relationships go insane after 20 years? No… I mean maybe they would after 1000 years. But that’s my point: the timescale for psychological “exhaustion” will be hugely varied. We kind of already know that it is.