This is such a bad paper. Almost all calculations and equations look like some back of envelope calculation.
A decent researcher would have provided some tests to their hypotheses.
The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
11–20 of 325 posts
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#12It seems this analysis is incorrectly assuming a serial communication mode for neuronal transmission, which isn’t what happens.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#13> thinker can access about
220 ≈ 1 million possible items in the few seconds allotted
Huh, no? No one is able to think about million items in a few seconds.
The 20q thinking process involves bringing an incomplete set of abstract categories and asking a question that divides these categories into two halves (binary search). You don't even start from scratch, using previous experience (cache) to reuse whatever worked best the last time.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#14I think the authors are using information theory to inappropriately flatten the complexity of the problem. On one hand we have “bits” of pre-processed sensory measurement data, then on the other hand we have “bits” of post-processed symbolic data: in many cases directly so via human language, but that would also include “the Terran unit moved a short distance” as a compact summary of a bunch of pixels updating in StarCraft. This even extends to the animal examples: the 10 bits/s figure applies to higher-level cognition. The crucial difference is that the sensory bits can be interpreted via the same “algorithm” in a context-independent way, whereas the higher-level cognition bits need their algorithms chosen very carefully (perhaps being modified at runtime).
So I am just not sure why 10 bits/s of symbolic data processing is especially slow in the first place. We don’t have a relevant technological comparison because none of our technology actually processes data in that fashion.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#15Why not? Processing an input of 10^9 bits, making sense of all of that, and contrast it against all your existing knowledge have an output speed 10 bits/s? It is not so bad. At least if we were really processing all that information in the same way.
It had to be enough to let us survive, in the context of the challenges we faced through most of our evolution. We took a lot of shortcuts and trims there, that is why we have a system 1 and system 2 in place, with a lot of builtin cognitive biases because of that.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#16This is such a bad paper. Almost all calculations and equations look like some back of envelope calculation. A decent researcher would have provided some tests to their hypotheses.
The numbers cited and used in calculations are supported by citations. The purpose of this paper is not to test a hypothesis, or to gather new data, but to think about existing data and new directions of research. This is spelled out in the paper's abstract, which is kind of summary of the whole paper, useful to get a very quick idea about the paper's purpose -- expanded further in the paper's introduction and re-visited again in the paper's conclusion.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#17Where do they get 10 bits/second?
Heck, I can type way faster than 10 bits per second, even after gzipping the output.
And when I consider the amount of sensory information that I consciously process (not that comes in, but that I conceptually analyze), it's got to be way higher.
10 bits/s doesn't pass the smell test.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#18It seems this analysis is incorrectly assuming a serial communication mode for neuronal transmission, which isn’t what happens.
I have read the paper and your thesis, that the analysis is assuming a serial communication mode for neuronal transmission, is incorrect.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#19Where do they get 10 bits/second? Heck, I can type way faster than 10 bits per second, even after gzipping the output. And when I consider the amount of sensory information that I consciously process (not that comes in, but that I conceptually analyze), it's got to be way higher. 10 bits/s doesn't pass the smell test.
The response to the question of "where do they get 10 bits/second" can be found in the paper, in great detail if I might add.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#20Where do they get 10 bits/second? Heck, I can type way faster than 10 bits per second, even after gzipping the output. And when I consider the amount of sensory information that I consciously process (not that comes in, but that I conceptually analyze), it's got to be way higher. 10 bits/s doesn't pass the smell test.
The response to the question of "where do they get 10 bits/second" can be found in the paper, in great detail if I might add.
I don't have access. Nor do most of us here probably. Can you share for us then?