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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?

#271

Post by aziaziazi »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #231
aziaziazi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take the number of distinct possible configurations a system Easy for an isolated system. Human body is 6000 billion cells, each of them has many possible configurations, most of them share and process informations. I respectfully doubt there’s much to do with bits outside of a tiny bit if flesh in a petri dish.

6 trillion * number of configurations of each cell * number of configurations of interactions between cells = (very very large) finite number. The thing about numbers is that they go on forever. There's not a cutoff for "ok, this number is too big for bits". Take whatever that mind-bogglingly huge number is, take the logarithm base 2, there you go, that's how many bits you need.

Yes no problem to imagine or process numbers, how big they might be.

I just don’t see how that makes a practical sense in the context of the article. Doing a full "scan" of a tiny biological material to study it, ok. Doing a full scan of "our body" as MrMcCall describe (and reject it)? I don’t think it’s possible in a near future. I totally agree with Asraelite in theory but don’t think that will be apply in reality.

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

#272

Post by t0mas88 »

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?

According to psychology research on human perception there is indeed something that you could call buffered IO in the human brain.

It's used in theories to explain why you can hear your name in a short sentence in a crowded room and then know what the sentence is. Including one or two words before your name. While if your name wasn't said, no attention is diverted to that sound and the "buffer" contents get dropped without retrieving the information.

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

#273

Post by ggm »

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…

> 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.

Look, I like the sentence. I like it so much I might steal it. But, that said I think analogising what the brain does to "general purpose computer" is a bit awry because we can invent algorithms, and given a process we can implement algorithms but I still tend to think there is something ineffable about thought/cognition which is NOT general purpose computation. It's a heuristic. I dunno what I think.

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

#274

Post by Ghostt8117 »

mjburgess wrote: post #252
Ghostt8117 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 physi…

I appreciate that you are elaborating further on your issues with the paper. I, again, am not choosing to defend the paper itself, rather the reason for science - asking questions and finding answers, even ones that may not be "worthwhile." Because we do not always know what is worthwhile and often we ignore some important facts when we think, intuitively, something makes sense and there is no reason to study it.

But, I will counter your comparison regarding LLMs and the transfer rate of wires. We, humans, have wired up the LLM ourselves. Evolution wired our body/brain and we do not know all of the filters and connections that exist in the transfer and processing of data. There is so much about the body we do not know. With LLMs, we've created every part so it doesn't really compare.

And to say that fields of science should not consider the knowledge gleaned from other fields is preposterous. I read about a new discovery in Math almost every few months in which a person from a different field brought in different techniques and looked at a problem from a new angle. Maybe this framing of the problem is silly in the end, or maybe it is just what someone needs to read somewhere to spark an idea. It doesn't hurt to think about it.

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

#275

Post by scotty79 »

lukan wrote: post #203
scotty79 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I'm not sure why reductionism brings simplicity to anyones mind. Yes, you consider one thing at a time, but there are billions of such single things to explain. And isolating one is a challenge in its own right.

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

#276

Post by PittleyDunkin »

ggm wrote: post #273
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…

> 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. Look, I like the sentence. I like it so much I might steal it. But, that said I think analogising what the brain does to "general purpose computer" is a bit awry because we can invent algorithms, and given a process we can implement algorithms but I still tend to thin…

The computer analogy is definitely off. For one thing, rationality is kind of bolted on to our linguistic ability. It's not deeply seated in our brain; it takes substantial energy to engage in logical reasoning and we're not that great at it; even very skilled mathematicians make trivial mistakes.

Deeper in our brain is reasoning about causality. But even that is more of an input to our reactions and emotions than it is as a consciously accessible function, and it too is often wrong.

As you said, it's a heuristic. We certainly can't solve the halting problem with brain magic.

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

#277

Post by akira2501 »

WXLCKNO wrote: post #164
infogulch wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Should they analyse everything all at once? Your comment seems reductionist to the realities of writing a paper on a specific subject.

Your brain does. It's not _one_ computer. It's dozens some interconnected and synchronized to others some with entirely independent control. It's why we have seizures, why optical illusions exist, and why you flinch when something moves at you in your peripheral vision.

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

#278

Post by Vecr »

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #276
ggm wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Look, I like the sentence. I like it so much I might steal it. But, that said I think analogising what the brain does to "general purpose computer" is a bit awry because we can invent algorithms, and given a process we can implement algorithms but I still tend to thin…

The computer analogy is definitely off. For one thing, rationality is kind of bolted on to our linguistic ability. It's not deeply seated in our brain; it takes substantial energy to engage in logical reasoning and we're not that great at it; even very skilled mathematicians make trivial mistakes. Deeper in our brain is reasoning about causality. But even that is more of an input to our reactions and emotions than it…

Implementing algorithms doesn't need a computer, and it doesn't need something that's not a computer.

That said, with enough willpower why couldn't you implement a universal Turing machine in your brain? I think you would need external memory (a tape) but that's not a problem.

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

#280

Post by Extropy_ »

MrMcCall wrote: post #33

The only time 'bits' will ever be an appropriate measure of human processing is when we are processing or producing diginal information artifacts, e.g. a typewritten document. Our bodies' systems are biochemical wetware that will never be aptly described using a boolean basis. That is one of the primary problems of society's obsessions with classical notions of gender. No one is male OR female. We are, every single o…

What about male and female- and _N_ genetic syndrome- in terms of XX or XY chromosomes?
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