alt Hacker News> Do you have a source on the speed limit of biological computation. Potential gradients should behave just like electricity.
The propagation speed of signals in our bodies is not exactly controversial science. Just see Wikipedia for this [0].
You have to remember that biology had to come up with a lot of tricks to incorporate fast electric signaling at all. Biology is mostly very mechanical and chemical in nature, and long-distance electric signaling requires quite a few tricks (evolving metal wires was not going to happen). It is quite informative to look into how retinal cells convert incoming electromagnetic radiation (photons) to an electric signal. The visual cycle of retinals [1] is particularly interesting, imho.
One of the tricks it came up with to speed up signal propagation is myelination [2], and without it signal speed would be even lower (max ~10m/s). At such speeds, a two-metre signal path alone would take around 200ms. Imagine controlling your feet with 200ms ping.
> It's definitely more than a bunch of neurons messaging each other. Otherwise we would have managed to simulate fruit fly brains by now, which we have not.
The latter says nothing fundamental. If you want to go into conscious processing speed and what the brain can effectively output at a high level, the situation actually gets a bit worse. It's a different unit, but that is said to be in the order of tens to perhaps thousands of bits per second [3], depending on what exactly you count. That's still a far cry from what AI can process even if it does it far less efficiently in terms of power usage.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_cycle
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00068...