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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?

#261

Post by wruza »

tmiku wrote: post #206
wruza wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see how you could avoid logic and do literally anything useful that is not animalistic by nature. I can only imagine how it would be to be able to remember more than 7 things, use more than one thread and grasp complex ideas by simply looking at their schema for a second, all that on average. Instead we slowly follow triсkles of data, constantly being carried away by nuances and distractions, getting overwhelmed and tired in no time. Our natural "logic" sees god behind a lightning and witch behind an accident, please don't defend it.

deeply anti-human

What's wrong with that, just look at us going, globally. Any pro-human thoughts, really? Never understood this clinging to the horribly limited nature of humanity only because it has some relatively nice pockets (which usually correlate with deep thought and negatively with the lack thereof).

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

#262

Post by [deleted] »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #16
lccerina wrote: post #11

This is such a bad paper. Almost all calculations and equations look like some back of envelope calculation. A decent researcher would have provided some tests to their hypotheses.

The numbers cited and used in calculations are supported by citations. The purpose of this paper is not to test a hypothesis, or to gather new data, but to think about existing data and new directions of research. This is spelled out in the paper's abstract, which is kind of summary of the whole paper, useful to get a very quick idea about the paper's purpose -- expanded further in the paper's introduction and re-vis…

[deleted]

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

#264

Post by neuralRiot »

jknoepfler wrote: post #220
ssl-3 wrote: 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?

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…

Using a computer analogy to try to understand the brain functions is ok as long as we remember that the brain is not actually one of them. There have been different technological analogies throughout history including hydraulic systems, telegraphic and telephonic lines, all of them might seem comical today but they were the best explanation at the time, same will be in the future with ours, comparing something like the brain (or rather the whole living being) to a mathematical processing device is more than short sighted. We try to explain everything from the engineering point of view by isolating things but that’s not how life or the universe works.

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

#265

Post by scotty79 »

ghurtado wrote: post #245
scotty79 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reductionism is the only way humanity ever progressed on anything.

Right, just like when we used to believe that "unexplained thing happened" = "god". Can't really get more reductive than that.

How's that reductive? It's epitome of holism.

Reductionism is setting everything but one thing aside and trying to figure out that one thing. Bringing in the second thing in only after you fail and trying again.

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

#267

Post by jknoepfler »

burnte wrote: post #237
jknoepfler wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

260 words per SECOND? Are you sure about that? I can only assume you mean for skim/speed reading.

that's a funny typo, I apologize.

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

#268

Post by tim333 »

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.

It seems weird to me. They say 10/bits/sec "behavioral throughput."

Have they not seen a football match? The brain controls 600 or so muscles in a rapid manner. That alone must be a lot of bits per second, certainly far better than computer controlled robots.

Re

>Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s?

Tesla's FSD cars have a lot of processing power but still struggle not to drive into fire trucks. You probably need a lot.

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

#269

Post by scotty79 »

kijin wrote: post #196
scotty79 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody would say it outputs 10 bits per second. And when it comes to consciousness simplified answers at 10 bits per second is the best you can get. This article asks why.

It's an interesting question indeed, why the mind produces so little output compared to input. Still, I get the feeling that the apparent bit rate of the conscious output is not the right metric to be measuring. There are so many ways in which the bit rate you're measuring could have been bottle-necked by factors outside of the mind, such as the speed at which you can move your tongue to articulate language, or a cul…

> It's an interesting question indeed, why the mind produces so little output compared to input.

My theory is that consciousness is super complicated and brain has barely enough juice to crank out any of it.

Conscious field of vision is about 2% of total field of vision and we observe the world by constantly swiping it with this 2%. This way we reuse both neural circuitry of our brains and also training data that would otherwise necessarily be spread across larger size of neural network if our conscious field of vision was larger.

So it short, conscious output is so small because we are dumb and short lived.

I also wouldn't say that there's a lot of information in the side channels. Properly compressed it's probably less than engaged conscious output.

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