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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?

#211
What would it really even mean for our brain to be fast or slow? Relative to what?

Inherent speed does not matter and is ill defined, it only matters relative to the environmental processes we have to react to. We’re already orders of magnitude faster than processes like geology and weather, so it is really only other animals where speed matters, and since we’re all using the same basic hardware, we’re on a relatively level playing field there (except for house flies it seems, lol). Time as we understand it may be as much as a cultural construct as anything else (see, for example Timeless physics). Some neurodivergent people, and people from very different cultures don’t experience anything like what most people in our culture refer to as time.

As for thinking about one thing at a time- I am absolutely certain this is false. Our subconscious operates massively parallel, and we only have one conscious thought at a time. But it had an interrupt system that lets it either act instantly itself in an emergency, and to bring things to consciousness when they are important. I’m sure everyone has had the experience of reacting quickly to an emergency with no conscious thought, or suddenly knowing the solution to a problem you hadn’t even been consciously thinking about.

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

#212
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.

There is a difference between latency and throughput.

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

#213
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'll have a good think about whether we can process things in parallel or only in series the next time I decide to walk and chew gum while bouncing a ball, not tripping over things, and staying out of traffic.

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

#214
post #212

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.

There is a difference between latency and throughput.

True, maybe you can find a test which asks, instead of a single button click, to click one of 4 possibilities for a reaction?

EDIT: see appendix A.3 Perception

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

#215
I skimmed over the paper so sorry if I didn't see it, but isn't the most obvious answer that (at least conscious) human decision making happens at a high level of abstraction? Information output or processing in terms of bits, say the numbers of words in a sentence, isn't equivalent to the meaning or effect that has in the world, which is what matters.

If a general orders an army to go to war that's a few bits of text on a piece of paper, but obviously that bears no relation to the consequence of what that puts into motion in the real world. It's not like we spend most of our days speedcubing or writing and reading the dictionary. We aren't low level data processors even though that might happen unconsciously somewhere in the sensory system, but the conscious mind is a reasoning system.

Even in artificial systems is that visible, from Deepmind on Alpha Zero (https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphazero-shedding-new...)

"For each move, AlphaZero searches only a small fraction of the positions considered by traditional chess engines. In Chess, for example, it searches only 60 thousand positions per second in chess, compared to roughly 60 million for Stockfish."

Not too draw to many parallels between the human brain and these systems, but they do obviously share the similarity that higher order conceptual decision making compared to just data processing will result in lower rates of decision making at at least the top level. That's for me what you'd expect to happen, not a paradox.

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

#216
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I'll have a good think about whether we can process things in parallel or only in series the next time I decide to walk and chew gum while bouncing a ball, not tripping over things, and staying out of traffic.

none of those activities need involve conscious decisions, however

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

#217
post #57

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…

As the answerer, if you have a wide vocabulary or if you're a technical person then it's not too difficult to routinely choose words the other person simply does not know so that no amount of yes/no questions will get them there. Obscure medical terms (phlebotomy), names of uncommonly-known stars (Fomalhaut), obscure data structures (cache-oblivious lookahead arrays), mathematical constants (Feigenbaum's constants)..…

And so there's a vast amount of social cognition taking place which is unaccounted for in the 10 bits/sec.

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

#218
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.

But on the other hand, a "fast" debator from a high school debate team can process 260 words per second while compressing that down to notes, while simultaneously queuing up meaningful responses, while evaluating which/what to go with for a particular audience/judge, while listening for mistakes from their opponent. If you distill bitrate down to serialized responses to a canned psychometric task, sure, but why do we think that's the total throughput? It isn't, trivially, if we inspect what people do every day.

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

#219
We process information at the rate we do because that's what works for adaptation to our environment. That's how all biological things develop. Some things are remnants of old adaptations, but generally speaking, we are the way we are because that's what enables our survival. If it seems "slow", it's because it doesn't need to be faster.

Better questions would be, why are we so weak? Why are we defenseless? Why are we hairless? Why do we move so slow? Most other mammals our size are much better equipped for survival. Obviously other beings "perform better" in many ways. Yet our fleshy, weak, slow, gangly, shivery bodies are suited for thinking, for adapting, for communicating and collaborating. However unoptimal or "slow" these authors think our brains are, they are obviously perfectly capable for what they need to do, seeing as we dominate the entire planet.

In any system design, every decision tends to be a tradeoff. You can gain CPU power, but it will cost you energy, heat, and probably stability or longevity. You often do not know what a "feature" will do until you add it. So it's wiser to only add the features you need to accomplish your immediate goals.

If at some point in the future, our survival is existentially threatened by our lack of "processing power", our brains will adapt. Until then, leave well enough alone.

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

#220
post #208

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?

This might be the worst possible way to measure the net throughput of conscious decision making I've ever seen. A wildly ecologically invalid, serialized discrimination task.

Now take someone navigating a social situation with three simultaneous participants, actively listening, coordinating body language, interjecting, responding to questions... and you have a human being operating at a "bitrate" of information that is so many orders of magnitude removed from this bullshit psychometry task as to prompt the question: "what the actual are they talking about".

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