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

Post by topherclay » Wed, Dec 18, 2024, 3:45 PM UTC

davedx wrote: post #113

Enginerrrd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by aeonik » Wed, Dec 18, 2024, 3:46 PM UTC

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #14

I 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 Sta…

Post by gtirloni » Wed, Dec 18, 2024, 3:48 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #100

It seems very odd that the article seems to be measuring the information content of specific tasks that the brain is doing or specific objects that it is perceiving. But the brain is a general-purpose computer, not a speed-card computer, or English text computer, or binary digit computer, or Rubik's cube computer. When you look at a Rubik's cube, you don't just pick out specific positions of colored squares relative…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 18, 2024, 3:50 PM UTC

GeoAtreides wrote: post #107

ziddoap wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

with all due respect, it was meant to be slightly abrasive. it's understandable (?) not finding something when the thread has hundreds of comments, not so much when the thread had like 15-20 comments.

Post by mhluongo » Wed, Dec 18, 2024, 3:54 PM UTC

heyjamesknight wrote: post #93

Enginerrrd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…