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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?

#151

Post by sigmoid10 »

mystified5016 wrote: post #146
sigmoid10 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Remember, this is an intermediate encoding of a hidden feature space between perception and planning. What you see at the start and the end of the neural network might be very different. Consider this: Typing at 60 words/minute, 5 characters/word and 8 bits/character gives a gross bit rate of 40 bits/second. With today's compression algorithms, you can easily get 4:1 reduction in data. That leaves you at approximately 10bits/second that are consciously processed in your brain. Probably even less since your brain might be much better at encoding language than even our best models. Even if some of those numbers are off by a certain factor, the number in the paper is certainly in the right ballpark when you consider orders of magnitude.

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

#152

Post by spigottoday »

digging wrote: post #132
davedx wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hand…

It seams interesting to me that what we refer to as the conscious mind is unconscious a third of each day and the part we call unconscious is active 24 by 7.

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

#153

Post by wat10000 »

codedokode wrote: post #149
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.

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

I think this gets into what you consider to be “information.” Random noise is high entropy and thus high information in one sense, and zero information in another.

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

#154

Post by linearlayer »

lccerina wrote: post #122
GeoAtreides wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The fact that those number come from a citation doesn't make them true it does make them the citated paper problem, though. the guesstimates are explained as guestimates, and used as illustration for possible upper limits.

The problem is that the PR machine of caltech then spits out articles like https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-12-brain-paradox-quantif... or https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-information-enteri... or https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-human-brain-o... with words like "measure" and "quantifies", "fill that quantitative gap". There are no measurements here, I can guess the weight of an apple based…

You seem quite upset. Can you explain exactly which quantities don't make sense?

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

#155

Post by nabla9 »

l33tman wrote: post #104

The optical nerve has an information density of around 10 MBit/s (ref https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1564115/ ) Concentrating on only the symbolic thinking speed seems to be unnecessarily restrictive..

The only limit is the max size of Hacker News title allows. :)

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

#156

Post by metalman »

I tried to read the article, but celldotcom has a presumably very high bit rate robot that promptly questioned my humanity, so I did the dishes and ate lunch, but that didn't get through somehow as proof.(of humanity) And so my recourse is to then read the coments here, to try and get the gist of the argument,but even well fed, doing 11 of maybe 12 bits per second, there does not seem to be any point in quibling with reality. Maybe after a bit of shock-o-late icecream, (B and G chockolate therapy with esspresso beans added)

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

#157

Post by sam1r »

ziddoap wrote: post #101
GeoAtreides wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Thanks for this. I scrolled for ages hoping for something like this ^

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

#159

Post by wruza »

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…

Otoh, I just spent a minute to even comprehend your idea. We are living in the information era, the era of dodging an orange cat has ended. And we suck at this new thing, really. We’re like slow af emulators of logic programs and tend to fallback to animal mode when tired or clueless.

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

#160

Post by kens »

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…

> Has anyone here even read more than the title?

Since it costs $35.95 to read the article, probably not. Seriously, paywalling of scientific research is obviously wrong.

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