Arrival, time, intelligence

I discovered Ted Chiang's novel – The story of your life – soon after watching the movie in a plane on my way to Norway, where I was enrolled for my Ph.D. It was 2016, I had wrapped up all the experiments, that demonstrated that my model of neuron and nervous system was able to mimic 3 key things that any representative of any animal species do, and that no other model had been able to mimic even partly. I was quite happy with myself. But as a scientist working from the perspective that I should do my very best to falsify my hypotheses and my findings, I came up with a simple question: Does the reaction time of my organisms match the propagation of the information from sensory neurons to motor neurons?. I needed to dot the i-s and cross the t-s. I dug into it, and found out something very puzzling: the rection time was much shorter than the shortest propagation time inside the network. In other words, the – artificial – organisms were reacting long before the information reached the…