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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?

#201

Post by grumple »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #176
xattt wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen to a podcast at double speed. Assuming a normal talking speed of 150 words per minute, 300 words per minute of written word is not 10 bits per second.

Consider normal text compression and you're left with a few bits at best for most of those "fast talkers/listeners." And the human brain is very good at compression.

I can type at a rate faster than 10 bits/ second (about 2 characters / 16 bits! what a slow rate! I'm well above that, at least 24 bits/second!) and you aren't compressing that to less.

And that's while also moving my hands in extremely complex ways to perform the task, looking around my office, listening for threats / wife, observing the breeze from my fan, twiddling my toes on the balance board I don't use...

It's clickbait/ragebait. Well done to the title writer.

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

#203

Post by lukan »

scotty79 wrote: post #181
infogulch wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Reductionism is the only way humanity ever progressed on anything.

That's debatable. To me declaring that the world was made in a simple way like this and just listen to the priests was reductionism of the wrong kind.

I know the kind you mean though, reducing external factors(like air), so you can isolate gravity as a force unrelated to density by finding out in a vacuum a feather and a metal ball fall with the same speed.

(As for the paper I have not yet made up my mind.)

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

#204

Post by aebtebeten »

burnte wrote: post #185
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…

I did read the summary and see what you saw, but that still leads me to believe the headline of the article is clickbait and that the authors don't understand that action signalling doesn't require the same bandwidth as information processing, but even then it's way more than 10b/s. Look at a backhoe. It has a few levers and a couple pedals. EXTREMELY simple interface. Each lever and pedal is basically 1 bit for enga…

Here's a simple reaction test: https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime

It's 1 bit (discriminate red vs. green) but I doubt many here can manage 100 ms, which is what it would take to implement 10 of those decisions per second.

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

#206

Post by tmiku »

wruza wrote: post #159
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.

Do you really think that the fundamental human act of the current era is running logic programs? I don't dispute that digital logic and its uses deeply changed humanity, but this is like calling humans "weak af imitations of steam engines" during the late-1800s railroad boom.

Calling actions/thoughts that follow a concrete list of logical rules/algorithms "animal mode" is deeply anti-human.

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

#207

Post by ChrisClark »

dsr_ wrote: post #199
dantillberg wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> deciding that this is the most relevant activity to keep doing at the moment, instead of doing math or going out for a walk. How many bits of actual decision is going on here, as compared to the period of time that decision applies to? For example, if a person decided once per second whether or not to go for a walk, that could be 1 bit per second. But if that person is constantly transitioning back and forth betwee…

Your conscious planner may be making 1 decision/second, but your senses, proprioception, balancing system, etc. are handing you about a gigabit/second of data, most of which never rises to your conscious attention. When I'm reading, that's roughly 2000 bits/second, but I am engaging it with model-making systems that can completely enrapture me. I/O is not the same as computation; conscious computation is not the same…

Yeah, that's what the paper is talking about. A whole lot of input vs. a small amount of conscious focus.

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

#208

Post by ssl-3 »

aebtebeten wrote: post #204
burnte wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did read the summary and see what you saw, but that still leads me to believe the headline of the article is clickbait and that the authors don't understand that action signalling doesn't require the same bandwidth as information processing, but even then it's way more than 10b/s. Look at a backhoe. It has a few levers and a couple pedals. EXTREMELY simple interface. Each lever and pedal is basically 1 bit for enga…

Here's a simple reaction test: https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime It's 1 bit (discriminate red vs. green) but I doubt many here can manage 100 ms, which is what it would take to implement 10 of those decisions per second.

Can the combination of mind and body only process reactive tasks serially, or can it process them with some amount of parallelism?

And is 100ms (I struggled to get below 180ms, myself) only the time needed to process, or does that include IO latency?

If it includes IO latency, then is there a buffer?

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

#210

Post by 082349872349872 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #208
aebtebeten wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a simple reaction test: https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime It's 1 bit (discriminate red vs. green) but I doubt many here can manage 100 ms, which is what it would take to implement 10 of those decisions per second.

Can the combination of mind and body only process reactive tasks serially, or can it process them with some amount of parallelism? And is 100ms (I struggled to get below 180ms, myself) only the time needed to process, or does that include IO latency? If it includes IO latency, then is there a buffer?

> or can it process them with some amount of parallelism

I guess someone with two boxes handy could set them up next to each other and run two copies of this test to see if their reaction time holds up or if it lengthens?

EDIT: mine suffers greatly on dual wield: 225 -> 320 ms

see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42453704

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