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The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

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Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#111

Post by nis0s »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #63
nis0s wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say this directly in section 7.2, > In contrast, central processing appears to be strictly serial… and then they proceed to give misinterpretated evidence of serialization because they’re making assumptions about lower level biochemical behavior based on higher level tissue performance. In fact, that tissue-level behavior isn’t correctly described either.

Be honest. The whole paragraph is: "In contrast, central processing appears to be strictly serial: When faced with two tasks in competition, individuals consistently encounter a “psychological refractory period” before being able to perform the second task broadbent_perception_1958, pashler_dual-task_1994. Even in tasks that do not require any motor output, such as thinking, we can pursue only one strand at a time."…

I wasn’t being “dishonest”, I couldn’t copy/paste the entire text on my phone.

I addressed the rest of that statement in my comment by noting that you can’t make the same assumptions about biochemical reactions and emergent behaviors of tissues.

Secondly, even from a neurophysiology perspective, their cited evidence is misinterpreted. Any basic dual N-back task proves their central thesis incorrect.

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#112

Post by GuB-42 »

MrMcCall wrote: post #33

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…

The use of "bits" here doesn't mean we are working in binary.

It is more like the way it is used in information theory. The number of bits is log2 of the number of states that can be represented, and it doesn't have to be an integer. For example, with 10 bits of information, we can distinguish between 1024 different states, it can be 1024 colors for instance, or 1024 genders if you wish, it doesn't matter, the important part is that there are 1024 boxes to put things in, no matter what they are. Of course, it doesn't mean that only 1024 colors exist in the universe, there are an infinity of them, but with 10 bits, you can only distinguish between 1024 of them. If you want more, you need more bits, if you can do with less, you need less.

By the article results, it means your "inner brain" can process one color with 1024 nuances per second, or 2 independent colors with 16 nuances each per second. If the colors are not independent, it can process more, because, if, say, you know that the two color are highly contrasting, you don't have to allocate "boxes" for noncontrasting colors, may free some boxes for more nuances, so, you may, for instance, process two contrasting colors with 100 nuances each with these 10 bits.

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#113

Post by davedx »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #86
bennettnate5 wrote: post #75

> 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…

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…

Sometimes I'll be deeply thinking about something while driving, and discover I'm at the last road to my house without remembering having driven the previous few blocks. It's quite disturbing. When I say deeply thinking I don't mean anything involving phones or external stimuli - really just thinking about a particular problem I'm working on. I also don't deliberately engage this deep mode of thought, I just sort of slide into it naturally.

Does anyone else have this happen? I don't think my driving is suffering, but it's hard to really honestly say?

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#114

Post by [deleted] »

MrMcCall wrote: post #33

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…

[deleted]

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#115

Post by samatman »

wat10000 wrote: post #23
crazygringo wrote: post #17

Where 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.

English is about one bit per letter. If you type at a very fast 120WPM then you’re right at 10bps. Computers just don’t represent English very efficiently, even with gzip.

Even very fast typists are unable to do stenography without a machine specialized to the task. Speech, in turn, can usually be understood at two or even three times the rate at which it is ordinarily produced. Meanwhile, I can read several times faster than I can understand speech, even at the highest speedup which I find coherent.

Ergo, 10 bits per second just doesn't hold up. It's an interesting coincidence that a reasonably fast typing speed hits that rate, but humans routinely operate on language at multiples of it.

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#116

Post by lgas »

greyface- wrote: post #26
michaelt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buddy, I followed the link and they want $35.95 to read the paper. This is... not a recipe for a successful discussion between people who have read the paper.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449845

Here's the link that link links to, to save people time: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#117

Post by MrMcCall »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #98
MrMcCall wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said both nothing to do with digital logic in this context and compressed down to about 10 bits per second Sounds like digital compression from where I sit, friend. Are you using an information theory that is based upon something different from Shannon's?

"Compression" here is nontechnical, and I was using it by analogy as an aid to intuition. I didn't want to throw out the E word (entropy) unnecessarily.

Are you using "bit" in a sense different to Wikipedia's definition, as linked from Claude Shannon's page?

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#118

Post by imzadi »

jdbxhdd wrote: post #84
bennettnate5 wrote: post #75

> 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…

Also I do not agree with the premise that we can only think about one thing at a time. We routinely communicate with multiple people at once and also communicate with the same persons in multiple threads of conversations. Of cause this means that we switch between those tasks and do not really do them in parallel. At most we listen to one person, answer a second via speech, a third via text while thinking about what…

This is the part that bothers me. I can definitely think of multiple things at a time. It really just depends on the complexity of the tasks. I can listen to and process and audiobook while driving to work every morning, for instance. I definitely can have multiple thoughts in parallel. I remember when I used to recite prayers, I would be reciting the memorized prayer while thinking about other things. Both things were happening at the same time. The memorized task takes less processing power, but it still requires some thought to execute.

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#119

Post by gchamonlive »

The authors of the article are smuggling in the assumption that 10bits/s is slow.

It's slow when compared to general computing system that we implemented in silicon substrate.

But this assumption doesn't translate linearly to the brain throughput and the perception of existence.

In my opinion the hypothesis is meaningless.

That is not to say the article is meaningless. Actually being able to measure brain information throughput is amazing. It's only that slowness isn't absolute.

Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

#120

Post by skibz »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #99

Bits are a unit of measurement we use in relation to computers. Humans are not computers. Do not use bits to measure anything in relation to humans. Stop thinking of humans as computers. It's dehumanizing, unhealthy, and a very narrow way to think of people. Using a computer model for humans is useless at best and misleading at worst.

This paper isn't proposing that humans can be understood using a "computer model".
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