It seems to indicate that for a thought to happen, a signal must traverse the entire length (width?) of your brain.
That isn't how it works at all. Many thoughts are localised in the brain. Further, some signals don't need to get to the brain at all. And some functions of life don't even need signals to ever leave the localised region at all.
If you are cut, your blood cells spill out, clot, and prevent further bleeding from happening, all without anything outside of the immediate vicinity of the cut to be notified (although it's good to let other parts of the body nearby, say another finger, from exacerbating the wound).
If the organism were larger than say a planet, then why would not the brain become distributed, with the parts needed to deal with one quadrant of the planet located at that part of it?
Basically, this article is lazy. It makes a couple of very dubious assumptions, then runs full-forward on those assumptions, never stopping to think if those assumptions even make sense.
Yes, if we are to try to imagine a life form that looks exactly like a human (or other life-form that we find on Earth), but is the size of the galaxy, we start to laugh, because that couldn't work. But that thought experiment is pretty silly.
Don't humans to a degree fulfill this role; the mass behavior of the species (recently) acting as form of brain with emerging self-awareness of the galaxy/universe; since we study it, and are also part of it?
Behavior can be influenced by others, but will isn't superceded by a crowd.
It often is by governments though. Also judging by polling on small sample sets, which often match whole population elections they do coherently aggregate; and then those governments make laws which incarcerate or penalize going against them.
Also isn't that the nature of science to provide coherent aggregation of knowledge that is agreed upon (though testable hypothesizes). Which is generally different from government policy, which usually doesn't use evidence based decision making in the scientific sense.
So yes, a universe sized lifeform could not have evolved randomly since the big bang, but you can only be confident about that if you assume that nothing exists outside the spacetime bubble we call the universe.
It's fun to kick around crazy ideas on Saturday afternoon. It could be anything. Sadly, there's no way i'll ever know. But the idle speculation is still amusing.
Does it really make sense to talk about it as being a single organism? How could it do anything in a coordinated way?
Or how about an organism that grows at say 10m in diameter per year, but signals across its body only propagate at 1cm per year? Again, how can it be considered to be functioning as a discrete organism? Surely if such a being evolved, its parts would perforce do so independently of each other? There could be no cross-organism coordination. It would have to disintegrate or devolve into local functional or operational units if it were to do anything effective at all.
Ae could be in it's stomach, where processes slow down the speed of light by a factor of trillions so that we are easier to digest.
None of these are testable hypothesese of course. But one day they may be testable.
This particular nasty swipe is not only not ok on HN, there's a specific rule against it. Please (re)-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The whole article is predicated upon a bunch of faulty assumptions, it's like it was written by a simple minded child.
The size of the observable universe: ~93 billion light-years
Time since the big bang: ~13.7 billion years.
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/104-the-universe/c...
That doesn't mean he must be right, but I feel pretty comfortable citing him.
Your comment doesn't really give accurate credit to the current state of knowledge.
Yes, quantum entanglement doesn't seem to allow for transmission of information in the conventional sense. However...
Take a universe full of particles, many of which are entangled with each other. If you consider the entanglement as primary you can think of the entangled particles as single entities that have "extensions" into space-time that can be widely separated. I don't think it's at all clear that "living" processes cannot be carried out on this "substratum" of interspersed non-local entities.
But I'm waaaay over my head here, so I'll stop waving my hands. :-)