101–110 of 325 posts
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I don't have access. Nor do most of us here probably. Can you share for us then?
this thread has 20 comments at the time of writing my comment. About two of them contain a link to the full paper, please take a look.
The only time 'bits' will ever be an appropriate measure of human processing is when we are processing or producing diginal information artifacts, e.g. a typewritten document. Our bodies' systems are biochemical wetware that will never be aptly described using a boolean basis. That is one of the primary problems of society's obsessions with classical notions of gender. No one is male OR female. We are, every single o…
In biology, or really most sciences (math being an exception), the more closely you examine a delineated this or that categorization, the more you realize it's a scale, a range, or something fuzzy. Like even things we talk about regularly like touch and space is vague in the details. Is it still touching if the repulsive force of electron to electron is keeping nucleus apart? Where is empty space begin and an atom en…
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As someone without an inner monologue, and someone that's spent a LOT of time meditating, it's not the language. It's the attention mechanisms themselves. Buddhist scholars insist that while we can have multiple threads of attention in our awareness, like strings with pearls of experience/thoughts we can only actually hold one little pearl of information from that stream in our attention at a time, and that we flit b…
What you're describing here is software, not hardware—Cognitive Science is the relevant field, not Neuroscience. That said, your understanding is largely supported by our current understanding of consciousness, attention, and perception. The attention mechanism doesn't handle parallel processing well—but can operate "multi-threaded", where it juggles several foci at once (with some obvious cost to switching between t…
> Why can we only think about one thing at a time? Maybe this is just a perception thing. Sure, you can only really keep up one stream of thought, visualization or inner dialogue (whatever you want to call it) at a time, but perhaps that's because we learn all our lives that direct communication is a one-channel, linear thing--speaking and listening focused on one topic at a time. Our brain does plenty of thinking in…
I wonder if some people with dissociative identity disorder, or who at least identify as plural, experience overlapping simultaneous trains of thought
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this thread has 20 comments at the time of writing my comment. About two of them contain a link to the full paper, please take a look.
It would be a lot less abrasive to say "It's linked elsewhere, but here it is: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234 " or some variation, instead of saying "it's here somewhere, go find it".
> If the questions are properly designed, each will reveal 1 bit of information about the mystery thing. If the guesser wins routinely, this suggests that the thinker can access about 2^20 ≈ 1 million possible items in the few seconds allotted. So the speed of thinking – with no constraints imposed – corresponds to 20 bits of information over a few seconds: a rate of 10 bits per second or less. This is an extrinsic d…
This type of comment is my least favorite on HN. "Seems quite trivial," "non-sequitur to compare them," "foolish." I am not able to read the paper as I do not have access, but the published perspective has 131 citations which seem to consider everything from task-specific human abilities, to cortical processing speeds, to perception and limb movements and eye movements, and so on. I'm glad you thought about it too, b…
The parent comment is harshly criticizing (fairly, in my view) a paper, and not the authors. Smart people can write foolish things (ask me how I know). It’s good, actually, to call out foolishness, especially in a concrete way as the parent comment does. We do ourselves no favors by being unkind to each other. But we also do ourselves no favors by being unnecessarily kind to bad work. It’s important to keep perspective.
> If the questions are properly designed, each will reveal 1 bit of information about the mystery thing. If the guesser wins routinely, this suggests that the thinker can access about 2^20 ≈ 1 million possible items in the few seconds allotted. So the speed of thinking – with no constraints imposed – corresponds to 20 bits of information over a few seconds: a rate of 10 bits per second or less. This is an extrinsic d…
Another relevant point is the common anecdote about, eg, some master engineer who gets paid big bucks to come fix some problem that's been blocking up a factory for weeks. The engineer walks around, listens to a few of the machines, and then walks up to one of the machines and knocks it with his elbow Fonzi style and the factory starts running again. The factory boss is happy his factory is working, but annoyed that…
Or another way of saying it is, the answer was right there all along, the hard part was filtering all the non-answer out.
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Bits are a perfectly acceptable way to measure biological information processing. These are not the boolean logic digital bits like on a computer. They're the more abstract concept of a bit in information theory. Take the number of distinct possible configurations a system can be in (accounting for statistical uncertainty/biases if needed), take the base 2 logarithm of that number, and you have the bits of informatio…
But if your measurements are unreliable or downright flawed, then it's just garbage-in-garbage-out. Sounds like the statistics in the papers from the social "sciences". "There's lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Unknown I don't think you're going to be able to count the "number of distinct possible configurations" of an even moderately complex living system.
Unless entropy is a damned lie. Which I'm not saying it isn't, but claiming such a thing is a pretty strong claim. Possibly one of the strongest claims you can make in physics (which is why it's associated with cranks).
I'd expect some perpetual motion machines after overturning such a principle.
But I do agree you need to be careful defining the scope of microstates and macro states.