Comment by Wowfunhappy
8 hours ago
I agree, it must not be literally infinite, I shouldn’t have said that. But it may be effectively infinite. My strong suspicion is that most of us are nowhere close to whatever the limit is.
Think about how we talk about exercise. Yes, there probably is a theoretical limit to how fast any human could run, and maybe Olympic athletes are close to that, but most of us aren’t. Also, if you want your arms to get stronger, it isn’t bad to also exercise your legs; your leg muscles don’t somehow pull strength away from your arm muscles.
> your leg muscles don’t somehow pull strength away from your arm muscles.
No, but the limiting factor is the amount of stored energy available in your body. You could exhaust your energy stores using only your legs and left barely able to use your arms (or anything else).
If we’ve offloaded our memory capacity to external means of rapid recall (ex. the internet) then what have we gained in response? Breadth of knowledge? Increased reasoning abilities? More energy for other kinds of mental work? Because there’s no cheating thermodynamics, even thinking uses energy. Or are we just simply radiating away that unused energy as heat and wasting that potential?