BH, there is room for criticism of some of your views, interesting though some points certainly are.
You say: “Perhaps I might rephrase the question to facilitate clarity of my answer:”
Perhaps indeed, but you surely realise that there are hazards associated with the answerer undertaking to alter the question. I am by no means convinced that AS had any coherent and definitive question in mind at all, let alone the question that you propose. I do not deny it of course, because I am in no better position to define the question than you are, but I must insist on my reservations on your presumptions in this matter.
Well then, you proposed instead that we paraphrase the question as: “Through cognitive processes, can we acquire information faster than can be conveyed at the maximum known mass carrier velocity, light speed?” Adding: “The answer is a provable - Yes.”
I dispute this.
You say: “To want to define what is meant by "speed of mind" is to miss the spirit of the original question.”
That is a very curious position to take. We obviously do not want to hamper rational discussion in good faith by niggling about angels on pins, but when the very basis of the discussion hinges on what the question (irrespective of the questioner) means, then to object to some reasonable approach to at least an informal, but reasonably functional, definition, seems to vitiate the very idea of the whole process.
You remark, very reasonably: ‘The mind is often related to reasoning and perception and as with all processes, requires time to execute. This is colloquially referred to as "speed", even though no distance is travelled by the mind. That is, the time it takes for one to come to an understanding, or whatever other result is expected given the circumstances, is "speed of mind".’
So far so good. As an unregenerate mechanist in matters concerning information processing however, I pause to emphasise that, as you seem to be well aware, every operation in the execution of the process, in whatever form the execution takes (which can of course be varied almost beyond recognition) requires physical events, none of which exceeds the speed of light in terms of information states propagating from one position to another. One implication is that no matter where your input data begin, they will not reach the output faster than light traversing the same path in a vacuum (which after all, is what we mean by “c”, the speed of light, right?)
This is of course simplistic in many ways, because for example, information-processing or “mental” processes need not follow just a single sequential path, but insofar as they do nonetheless involve events selectively entailing other events, the simplistic view remains “close enough for jazz”. This is true whether our processor operates in a medium of tumbling dominoes or interfering photons.
You add: “Relating this to light speed is simply a comparative measure with time elapsed at the fastest mass velocity, to complete the same operation.”
The “comparative measure” sounds fine, as does the “time elapsed. But do you not experience some discomfort comparing the light speed, which typically is expressed in terms of distance/time (you have a better idea?) with “completion of the same operation”. “My pointer is faster than your mental arithmetic, or your calculator”? Or what?
You say: “Many common expressions use the term "speed" and "how fast" something happens without any travel distance involved.”
Well yes, but let us not be too unkind about the cogency of many common expressions. Remember the White Knight: “...but it took hours and hours to get me out. I was as fast as — as lightning, you know.’ ‘But that’s a different kind of fastness,’ Alice objected. The Knight shook his head. ‘It was all kinds of fastness with me, I can assure you!’ ”
If we wish to compare speeds as scalars, then we must first make them commensurable. To do that we also must make them meaningful. AS said i.a. “...only thing faster than speed of light?” By your criteria, there are not many processes that are not faster than light.
But the criteria are unsound. For one thing, you said that by the time we see where Mars is, it is somewhere else; if you reflect, you will realise that by Einsteinian principles, in our frame of reference it is as precisely where we see it as we can measure. Any observer who disagrees is using a standard of time relative to his own frame of reference, and that is irrelevant to our observations.
Your examples compare one type of function with another, the conveying of information with the processing of information. A comparison of calculating the position of Mars with detection of its position simply makes no sense when one could rather compare the calculation by both mechanisms or the conveyance of the information. If I used an optic computer on those same calculations, it could beat anything the unaided human mind could do. If I put a man in orbit round Mars and gave him carte blanche about how to inform us where the planet was, then we could detect it by telescope faster than he could tell us about it.
Now, another point is that you have been speaking of speeds involving small amounts of data. Suppose we were to put a computer to work to calculate the appearance of the surface of the sun at some reasonable point in the future, with a granularity equal to what light could in principle convey at any given moment. What volume of data would that be? I don’t mean the equivalent of a 640X480 screen, please note, but the likes of what a decent telescope could record on fine-grained film say a metre across -- rather more than a terapixel. You will agree that we would have trouble calculating that at all, never mind handling the volume of data, but the light from the sun could go on supplying the information faster than we could change the film for as many millennia as we chose to go on looking.
An unfair example? Perhaps, perhaps not, but if we had defined our terms properly, we couldn’t have unfair examples, no?
You said: “I can catch a ball not because of the information supplied at light speed but because of the deduction at mind speed.”
Really? Have you ever tried to catch a ball in the dark illuminated only with strobed light at say 0.2 second intervals? A suitable computer could do so very handily.
You said: “Some minds though are slower than others. Snails for example.”
No doubt, but that hardly matters, does it? A computer assembled out of snail brains is theoretically possible, and hypothetically we could put it to work on problems concerning the Andromeda galaxy. In the 2000000 years it takes the evidence to get here, that slooow computer could do a fair amount of data crunching, compared to whatever we could see through a telescope! :-)
But as I hope I have made clear, that hardly matters.
The thing is:
1: If the human mind is faster than light in any useful sense (which I deny) then it is not the only thing faster.
2: If one compares any operation of the human mind with the same or equivalent function by a light-based mechanism, the light will be faster.
3: Apart from light, many other things are faster than the human mind at equivalent functions, such as mechanical adding machines, the pages of a book, and even plodding old electronic computers.
