| This article was written in 1984, 29 years ago. Some of the information used in it is a bit out of date. 1) It refers to the triune brain model that has been debunked already. See this Scientific American blog entry: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/09/07/re... So most of the speculation regarding reptilian, limbic and neocortical intelligences isn't really valid. Though this doesn't affect the chordate vs. ganglionic argument. 2) The article states that "consciousness is an emergent of neuronal sentience" which isn't a necessary assumption. Recent research[1] has hinted at intelligent behavior as being a thermodynamic process occurring when a physical system acts such as to maximize its number of possible future states. Quick video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZB8TNaG-ik If true, a typical neuronal structure (i.e. brain) wouldn't necessarily be required for intelligent or conscious behavior, maybe not even a typical computational structure. One could imagine a cloud of gas undergoing chemistry such that it maximized its entropy production and could potentially possess superhuman intelligence or consciousness. 3) The article discusses the theoretical limits of intelligence as being a system possessing 10^50 bits of information per kilogram. But the maximum limit of a computational system should be given by the Bekenstein bound[2], which limits the information the system can process to a factor proportional to the surface area of the enclosed volume (for a 1 cubic cm sphere this comes to about 10^66 bits), the speed of light limiting the speed at which these bits can be processed, and the particular structure of how they are processed (e.g. the flow of logic gates). One could imagine a (quantum?) computer with the maximum encloseable surface area of the universe which transmitted information optically between different gates in the system. There may be other limits preventing that from being remotely feasible (e.g. heat dissipation, energy requirements, entropy production leading to the heat death of the universe, etc.). The main point is that comparing the Apple II at +5 SQ on a scale of 0 to 50 is kind of silly, when one could imagine an intelligence the size of galaxies, or even the known universe, operating according to a principal of maximum entropy production similar as referenced in the previous paragraph. Not to knock the article; my main point is that there have been a lot more theoretical advances in the almost-30-years since it was written. [1] http://math.mit.edu/~freer/papers/PhysRevLett_110-168702.pdf [2] http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Bekenstein_bound |