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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?

#131

Post by codedokode »

> In particular, our peripheral nervous system is capable of absorbing information from the environment at much higher rates, on the order of gigabits/s. This defines a paradox: The vast gulf between the tiny information throughput of human behavior, and the huge information inputs on which the behavior is based. This enormous ratio – about 100,000,000 – remains largely unexplained

The GPU is capable of performing billions of operations per second, yet Cyberpunk barely runs at 60 fps. And there is no paradox at all.

By the way, the brain seems to perform better than a GPU at tasks like image recognition. Probably because it does even more operations per second than the GPU.

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

#132

Post by digging »

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…

Yes, it's a classic example of the power and skill of your "unconscious" mind - your consciousness is freed up to do novel work because the drive home is so routine that your unconscious mind can do almost all of the work. Should something change - a traffic jam, a detour, a pedestrian crossing the road - your conscious attention will be called back to the more urgent task which is making a decision about how to handle the driving situation.

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

#133

Post by wat10000 »

samatman wrote: post #115
wat10000 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t think a difference of this magnitude meaningfully changes what the paper is talking about. They already have other human behaviors in their table with bit rates up to 5 times higher. Even if you set it at 100bps it wouldn’t change much. They’re addressing a difference of eight orders of magnitude. Making it seven instead of eight isn’t all that important.

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

#134

Post by crazygringo »

esperent wrote: post #32
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.

From the paper: > Quick, think of a thing... Now I’ll guess that thing by asking you yes/no questions.” The game ‘Twenty Questions’ has been popular for centuries1as a thinking challenge. 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 220≈ 1 million possible items in the few seconds a…

What a truly bizarre method. There are so many things wrong with it I don't even know where to begin.

No wonder they came up with such an obviously nonsensical answer in the end.

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

#135

Post by pro14 »

esperent wrote: post #32
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.

From the paper: > Quick, think of a thing... Now I’ll guess that thing by asking you yes/no questions.” The game ‘Twenty Questions’ has been popular for centuries1as a thinking challenge. 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 220≈ 1 million possible items in the few seconds a…

> Quick, think of a thing... Now I’ll guess that thing by asking you yes/no questions.”

Every time I play this game, I can only think of one thing: https://t3.ftcdn.net/jpg/02/07/37/42/500_F_207374213_kNgoMel...

So I guess that means I can only think at 1 bit per second.

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

#137

Post by kidel001 »

These types of articles are so fundamentally flawed... it beggars belief. Why not ask the opposite question: if bandwidth works the way they describe, why can't H100 GPUs (3TB/s bandwidth) perform sensorimotor tasks 24 trillion times faster than a human? (Spoiler alert: they can not).

Could it be... there is a bit of a straw man argument here? About how much information it actually takes to input and output a complete sensorimotor task? I dare say! </s

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

#138

Post by bee_rider »

codedokode wrote: post #131

> In particular, our peripheral nervous system is capable of absorbing information from the environment at much higher rates, on the order of gigabits/s. This defines a paradox: The vast gulf between the tiny information throughput of human behavior, and the huge information inputs on which the behavior is based. This enormous ratio – about 100,000,000 – remains largely unexplained The GPU is capable of performing bi…

Is the brain better than a GPU at image recognition nowadays? Actually I’m not sure how that’s measured. Certainly a GPU could be tied to a database with a lot more things in it, like you can get some pretty impressive facial recognition demos where it’ll recognize a ton of random people.

But humans can see objects they’ve never seen before and sometimes guess what they might be used for, which is sort of like object recognition but better. (Or sometimes I see an object I’m technically familiar with, like an old tool of my grandpa’s, and remembering what he used it for feels more like imagining… maybe it is).

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

#139

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

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…

We think about many things at a time. But for those with malfunctioning brains that have the internal monologue going constantly, they mistaken that monologue for their thoughts and so it must be "one thing at a time". The language they experience their monologue in is by its very nature, sequential, you can't speak or even hear/understand two parallel streams of speech.

>Our brain does plenty of thinking in the background that leads to "a-ha!" moments even

That's not "in the background". That's the real you, your real mind. That's the foreground. But, if your brain malfunctions as many do, then the monologue shows up and crowds out everything. Sometimes it is apparently loud enough that it even prevents those "a-ha!" moments.

>but our language coerces our thought patterns into being linear and non-concurrent?

The language should just be discarded. What you want is an internal silence.

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

#140

Post by lanstin »

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…

When I have a deeply engrossing unitary (I.e. not one of five tasks but one task for months) project at work I had better start commuting by train and cut out the driving. I have lost two cars by not doing that. Fortunately no one was hurt. One car I had towed to the work parking lot, and just never thought about it until some time after the project when it turned out the office just had it towed off as unknown junk. The project went well.
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