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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?

#141

Post by lanstin »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #139
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 back…

I wouldn’t say it’s language so much as unnecessarily added language. Words and sentences can appear and be useful, but there is a lot of mental activity that is not essential but added on responses to things. I wouldn’t say a component that generates comments is a broken brain, it believing the comments or the beliefs embedded inside them can break your contentedness.

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

#142

Post by sigmoid10 »

gtirloni wrote: post #125
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…

My thoughts exactly. It makes no sense to me that what I'm thinking and perceiving in real-time is the equivalent of 10 bit/s of data.

Has anyone here even read more than the title? The article literally explains that you perceive at a rate of 10^9 bits per second. But after filtering and preprocessing in the outer brain you are only left with about 10 bits per second for conscious processing for things like motor functions. Yes, you can see a Rubic's cube and perceive all sorts of facts about it and the environment at the same time. But try solving it with your hands while someone shows you a bunch of objects and asks you visual comprehension questions at the same time. You might still perceive those other objects, but consciously classifying them verbally is gonna be really difficult. It's no surprise that the feature space that your deeper brain can actively work on is quite limited.

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

#143

Post by codedokode »

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…

There is also another comparison. Imagine if your goal is to calculate an integral over 100 dimensional space (or solve a quantum system) and answer whether it is larger or less than zero. This will take enourmous time but produces a single bit of information.

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

#144

Post by lanstin »

pro14 wrote: post #135
esperent wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If there there is only one answer it is zero bits.

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

#145

Post by infogulch »

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…

Such reductionist analyses are reliably blind to the complexity of being embodied in physical reality.

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

#146

Post by mystified5016 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #142
gtirloni wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly. It makes no sense to me that what I'm thinking and perceiving in real-time is the equivalent of 10 bit/s of data.

Has anyone here even read more than the title? The article literally explains that you perceive at a rate of 10^9 bits per second. But after filtering and preprocessing in the outer brain you are only left with about 10 bits per second for conscious processing for things like motor functions. Yes, you can see a Rubic's cube and perceive all sorts of facts about it and the environment at the same time. But try solving…

10 bits per second is effectively nothing. Not even a single cell could operate at 10 bits per second. Every organic system would collapse immediately.

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

#147

Post by countarthur »

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…

What you're saying is interesting but I think the causality is backwards here and I can provide some examples to show why.

(By male hormone I'm assuming you mean testosterone, and by female hormone I assume you mean oestrogen.) i in fact If being "more male" came from having more testosterone (and vice versa), then logically when children go through puberty and develop into adults, they would become "more" male or "more" female.

As adults become elderly and naturally produce less sex-associated hormones, they would become "less" male or female.

(Fetuses do not all begin in the womb as female, that's a common misunderstanding. We start off physically undifferentiated, and develop along a genetically predetermined pathway as we grow. Some animals use temperature or other environmental triggers to pick, humans use genes.)

Would that mean a male bodybuilder who injects testosterone is more male than a man that doesn't? His phenotype may become visibly more masculine, but that doesn't change his sex at all. Same for a female bodybuilder that injects testosterone - she may develop stereotypically male physical characteristics like large muscles and a deeper voice, but her sex is unaffected.

The causality is the other way: being male - or - female results in a physiology (adult testicles/ovaries) that produces sex associated hormones in larger or lesser degrees depending on the person (and in some cases very low amounts or not at all).

This makes sense if sex is a binary (with rare differences of sex development - detailed here https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/sex-development-cha... ) that results in different levels of sex hormones in the body and resulting phenotype. So yes, everyone is male or female.

(I'm not referring to gender here - I'm talking only about sex)

If there's a spectrum then some men could be biologically "more male" than others and vice versa for women. I've not seen any evidence of this myself, but I'm happy to be proven wrong!

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

#149

Post by codedokode »

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.

What if you are typing not an English text, but a series of random letters? This gets you to 5-6 bits per letter.
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