| > You seem to be saying ‘the current maximal can’t be more than the historical outliers, therefore people are predictable’, while my point is that you can’t actually know that, or fundamentally 100% predict an individual (or a group, really) because those historical outliers obviously occurred and were not obvious until after they had occurred. No, please reread what I said, I never narrowed it down to 'historical outliers' only. The human genome has been sequenced, brain structure has been analyzed (though we don't precisely know how each piece corresponds to mental phenomena), and so on. So even ignoring historical outliers, there is still a maximum possible deviation that an adult human brain can physically be capable of. And the the upper and lower bounds are known. It's not like someone can have a 5x larger brain or a brain with 12 lobes, or a brain with copper interconnections. So there are only outliers within a certain range. Plus, regardless of how developed or extremely different mental phenomena is, the possible range that others can see is much more finite, bound by signalling constraints and so on. You can only blink your eyes so fast, you can only move your limbs so fast, vocal chords have a speed limit, etc... For example, a human brain could not function if an iron rod was rammed through the brain stem instead, so if you know this happened to someone, you also can infer there's only one possible mental state they could be in, regardless of any other factors or combination of factors. There definitely are no outliers in this case. Another example would be the 24 fps frame rate in film. This was chosen precisely because extensive testing showed this was fast enough to fool the brain into seeing motion without exception. If someone claims otherwise you can repeat the same testing procedures to determine with certainty, but very likely there are no outliers either in this case. There probably are a couple hundred hard constraints like this that circumscribes all possible near-future human individual behaviour. Though of course group complexity and more distant scenarios such as cyborgs, etc., would still be unbounded. |
To pick an example - human brain size:
1 in 50 babies have brains that develop noticeably too large for the curve. Digging into it has identified a gene that regulates Brain sizes. There are of course many variations and mutations of that gene. [https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2014/04/single-gene-muta...]
And current human brain sizes already vary greatly, from (recorded) sizes of 61-l to 122+ cubic cm. [https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/634481-la...].
To pick another example you gave - brain stem injury.
[https://www.brainandspinalcord.org/brain-stem/]
Can someone survive on their own, right now with severe spinal cord trauma? No.
But we can keep their body alive, and they can do basic communication with technical means. They’re locked in, but they aren’t cut off anymore.
Even in the past, people could survive for some time with help with severe and traumatic brain stem damage. I personally know someone who suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke in her brain stem over a decade ago, was in a coma for months, and recovered. Today the only difference you can see is her fine motor control isn’t as good.
It wasn’t an iron rod, but I doubt it will be much longer before we can help the body recover from something like that too. A century ago, she would definitely have just been dead.
Another example: 24 fps is also not an absolute hard limit or minimum anything.
It’s a picked point where almost everyone can see simulated motion without having to work too hard (on the producer or consumer sides), it’s economical to produce things in (a major problem back in the day when it was all literal film), etc.
It is very noticeably not lifelike to almost everyone. Which is fine for its purpose. People can see motion at far lower frame rates (a flip book being a trivial example), and can see that the motion is artificial at far higher frame rates - picking out that a ‘bad’ frame was stuck into a higher rate feed for instance, or that it’s artificial and not real even in immersive environments (though that is much trickier to create a real test due to technical limitations now, everything we can do is pretty obviously fake to most humans).
Like the specified ranges of human hearing [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range], or the human ‘Normal’ body temperature [https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/01/human-body-te...] or a number of other things - they are generally agreed upon ‘good enough’ values. Useful approximations, not reality.
This is discoverable with sample sizes of hundreds, at most, and I expect you’ve personally experienced this too.
A friend who hears the sound that no one else can hear in a piece of electronics, for instance.
The further from the median we get, the rarer the deviations get of course. And near as we can tell, the probability of faster than light travel, or as you note a copper brainstem, or mind control is zero. At least unless we have evidence it isn’t. If there was some evolutionary advantage and some path via physics to do it (so, still zero odds on the mind control thing).
But the deviations in people in reality are far, far wider than you are stating or implying.
Even your note on the human genome reinforces this. We did not, and could not, and still can’t, sequence every humans genome in any deterministic way. Even the human genome sequencing we have done has just gone to show that it isn’t really very useful or what we thought it was.
Just to name a few factors - Epigenetics, methylation, and a host of other things have made it really clear that what we thought was ‘the story’ is really not. But it is part of it. And that is without even going into Chimeras, which we’ve found more and more of.
What you’re describing is the ‘all the hard problems in physics are solved’ fallacy.
Life is not that easy, for better or worse.
It can be useful to think it is though when we have something to do though.