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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?

#251

Post by wizzwizz4 »

gf000 wrote: post #232
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…

There is a whole "OS" in the background that is way more complex than all of our programmed systems. I may be hyped focusing on a complex program and really not think about anything else, but my body is still constantly senses, processes, and reacts to signals. E.g. I'm not ragdoll falling to the ground, which requires holding balance and tone, which is far from trivial. I also constantly listening to every possible…

I don't see your comparison as relevant. I'm a metre away from a nine-year-old Android 6 phone that can easily go a month on a single charge (while tracking its location!). Your Apple Watch is (a) constantly using its radio, (b) running a fairly high-end graphics chip, and (c) actively probing your body at intervals. Nothing to do with software.

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

#252

Post by mjburgess »

Ghostt8117 wrote: post #246
cscheid wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Disclosure: I’m a former academic with more than a handful of papers to my name) The parent comment is harshly criticizing (fairly, in my view) a paper , and not the authors. Smart people can write foolish things (ask me how I know). It’s good, actually, to call out foolishness, especially in a concrete way as the parent comment does. We do ourselves no favors by being unkind to each other. But we also do ourselves…

I realized that I do have institutional access and so I was able to read the paper, and I stand by my initial criticism of the above comment. "It seems to me all this paper does is define tasks in a highly abstract way that imposes a uniform cost to process '1 bit of task information'." The paper uses this number and acknowledges that it is not the only possible measure, and explains why they use this number and how…

The question reduces to "how does the intrinsic capacities of intelligence, had by humans, give rise to the capacity to answer complex questions?" -- I see nothing which the framing in informational terms adds.

It's nothing more than saying: we know that wires have electrons, and are made of metal, and can support a transfer rate of 1Gbp/s -- and we know that an LLM takes 1 min to answer "Yes" to a postgraduate physics question -- so how/why does the current in the wire at 10^9 bit/s second, support this 1bit/min mechanism?

It's extremely wrong-headed. So much so the paper even makes the absurd claim that Musk's neurallink need not have any high bandwith capabilities because a "telephone" (to quote) would be sufficient.

This is like saying an internet-connected server, hosting an LLM, need not have a high bandwidth RAM, because it only needs to transmit 1bit/s to answer the "yes" question.

In my view there isn't much worthwhile to say under this framing of the problem -- it's a pseudoscientific framing --- as is quite a lot of 'research' that employs 'information' in this way, a red flag for the production of pseudoscience by computer scientists.

Their implied premise is: "computer science is the be-all and end-all of analysis, and of what one needs to know, and so reality must be as we conceive it". Thus they employ an abuse of abstraction to "prove" this fact: reduce everything down to its most abstract level, so that one speaks in "bits" and then equivocate in semantically-weighty ways between these "bits", and pretend not to be doing so. This ends with pythagorean levels of mysticism.

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

#253

Post by ccozan »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #251
gf000 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a whole "OS" in the background that is way more complex than all of our programmed systems. I may be hyped focusing on a complex program and really not think about anything else, but my body is still constantly senses, processes, and reacts to signals. E.g. I'm not ragdoll falling to the ground, which requires holding balance and tone, which is far from trivial. I also constantly listening to every possible…

I don't see your comparison as relevant. I'm a metre away from a nine-year-old Android 6 phone that can easily go a month on a single charge (while tracking its location!). Your Apple Watch is (a) constantly using its radio, (b) running a fairly high-end graphics chip, and (c) actively probing your body at intervals. Nothing to do with software.

I think you lost the actual comparison. Is not about Android and iOS.

Is about having a ton of mini specific "computers" vs. the very generic conscience.

For example all the balancing, background hearing, hungry, thirsty , and so on are very specific zones in the brain. While our conscient mind is doing...well, whatever we like in a very generic way, basically keeping the joy of living on.

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

#254

Post by ComplexSystems »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #192
ComplexSystems wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the amount of actual entropic "information" that is processed when you identify a Rubik's cube as such may be nowhere near as much as you think it is, and most importantly, 10 bits may be nowhere near as little as you think it is. If we use your example, which is that of identifying an object, we may simply ask the entropy of what the distribution of possible objects-to-be-identified is at t=0, pri…

But you don't just perceive an object's category (like "cat"). We also perceive a high amount of detail about the object - colour, pattern, behaviour, we make comparisons to past behaviour, predictions of what's likely to happen next and so on. Sure, some parts of the brain don't receive all that detail, but that's necessary for abstraction. If you pumped all the sensory data everywhere, the brain would get overwhelm…

That 30 bits was not literally intended to represent only the object's noun category, but even if it did, none of the additional pieces of information you would like to add are going to change this picture much, because what one would think of as a "high amount of detail" is not actually all that high in terms of the logarithmic growth of the entropy.

Take color: suppose the average person has 16 baseline colors memorized, and then a few variations of each: each one can be bright or dark, saturated or pastel. That would be about 6 bits for color. If you have an eye for color or you're an artist you may have some additional degrees of freedom. Hell, a computer using RGB can only represent 24 bits worth of color, maximum. I am going to suggest this stuff gets cognized less than 10 bits worth for the average person; let's just say 10.

Now, of course, people can memorize more than one color. If colors are independently distributed uniformly at random, then processing N colors requires 10N bits. But of course they aren't, so the entropy is less. But again, let's just say they were. So how many color combinations can you process per second? I would say it's a bit of a challenge to memorize a set of 10 arbitrary drawn colors shown for a second. Most people couldn't continuously do that at a rate of 10 colors per second. That would be 100 bits/sec of info.

The point is that you really don't perceive all that much. You show the average person a Rubik's cube, there is no way they're going to remember the exact pattern of colors that they saw, unless the cube were solved or something. They will perceive it as "multicolored" and that's about it.

Adding behavior, texture, etc doesn't change this picture. None of this stuff is even close to 10^9 bits of entropy, which would be 2^1,000,000,000 different equally likely possibilities.

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

#256

Post by Jensson »

082349872349872 wrote: post #229
Jensson wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like typing? Typing we click buttons accurately in sequence, people can type way faster than 10 bits per second. Then consider something more complex like drawing, you draw way way way more than 10 bits a second.

not like typing, which is largely automatic; conscious decisions per second. EDIT: not the expanded bit rate, the optimally compressed bit rate, if that makes sense? EDIT2: typing at 90 wpm is 1,5 wps, or <10 bps according to Shannon (~1 bit per letter, 5 letters per word)

> EDIT2: typing at 90 wpm is 1,5 wps, or People can type way faster than 90 WPM, we talk about bitrate of the hardware here its the same even if you haven't practiced typing. And typing is still not what our consciousness is made to do, we have way higher bitrate than that when doing more native tasks such as running in the woods. You can't run in the woods without consciously thinking about each step and deciding where to put your foot next to not hurt your ankle and not collide with trees, that has a massive bitrate.

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

#257

Post by ccozan »

pixl97 wrote: post #109
psb217 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another relevant point is the common anecdote about, eg, some master engineer who gets paid big bucks to come fix some problem that's been blocking up a factory for weeks. The engineer walks around, listens to a few of the machines, and then walks up to one of the machines and knocks it with his elbow Fonzi style and the factory starts running again. The factory boss is happy his factory is working, but annoyed that…

Humans are nature's best designed filters. Or another way of saying it is, the answer was right there all along, the hard part was filtering all the non-answer out.

filtering and _acting_ on this condensed information.

For example: lighting strucks a tree, a fire starts. Man is scared but that night is very cold and near the tree is warmer. This happens a few times, und a branch falls and it is collected , incidentally is thrown on another pile of wood , starts burning -> idea of fire is formulated and since them man keeps warm.

Or: man finds shiny things in a river bed, collects them, one day the whole shack burns from lighting, and discovers that the shiny thigs are now in a different shape -> metal working is born.

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

#258

Post by axus »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #239
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Shannon estimates 11.82 bits per word, so 300 WPM is 59.1 bits per second)

The Hutter prize submissions can get compression factors >9 on english wiki text. And if you're listening to podcasts the entropy is probably even lower. The human brain is obviously a much better language model than anything we have today, so you can assume that the latent layer in your brain deals with much less than 60 bits per second.

Each second of listening we're perceiving the speaker's identity, what accent they are using, how fast they are talking, and what emotions they are showing. Those should count for the bit rate dealt with by the conscious brain.

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

#259

Post by benreesman »

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…

I’m not any good at Rubik’s Cube, and to me it looks like a bunch of colored squares.

But stuff I am good at? I don’t see it at all. A terminal? I never have any truly tangible conscious recollection of serious coding.

It might be the same for people good at Rubik’s Cube.

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

#260

Post by a_wild_dandan »

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..

An additional citation substantiating that 10 MB/s figure: the 3rd sentence of TFA.
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