Are you sure this thread isn’t taking the question a bit too literally?
Suppose I have 2 telescopes pointed in different directions. I can go from thinking about a distant galaxy in telescope A to thinking about another distant galaxy in telescope B MUCH faster than light can travel between the two galaxies. In that sense, my consciousness can win a race with light. Even the fact that I can think about the surface of the Sun right now shows that, since light takes 8 minutes to get here from the Sun.
Of course, no matter or information moved from either of those places to the other, so relativity is not violated when I think about galaxies.
Another possible tack: several of the posts on the board mentioned tachyons (for which the evidence is lacking badly), which would move faster than light. By thinking about these FTL particles, aren’t we essentially ‘thinking faster than light’?
I think this ‘thought experiment’ sheds more light on the topic than any sarcastic remark. I think I understand what you’re saying.
And, in a similar vein, you could say that our apprehension of a galaxy as a whole, as a single entity, is also ‘faster than light’, i.e. although we see it as a whole, its dimensions of 100,000 X 20,000 light years indicate that its constituent parts are quite separate. At the risk of sounding facetious, I could say that if a galaxy possessed consciousness it would, therefore, be unable to have awareness of its total self. (Unless “awareness” is faster than light). Perhaps this is closer to the intent or spirit of the question in the OP .
The point I was trying to make was based on the ability to send a thought to a distant place and have light race the thought through space. I know that this has not been positively proven yet but hypothetically which would reach the destination first? For the rest of the folks who participated in this thread, thank you very much and I have learned a great deal of information.
If by “the speed of thought” you mean the processing of information inside the brain, in many (if not most) people I know it is definitely way below the speed of light, and probably below the speed of continental drift.
If by “the speed of thought” you mean the transmission of thoughts from one person to another, since this is totally invented, we can define it any way we like, like the powers of superman. For consistency I would vote that the transmission of thought travel at the speed of light but not any faster.
We would also have to define which substances block or slow this transmission.