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

Post by siavosh » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 1:08 AM UTC

heyjamesknight wrote: post #93

Enginerrrd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone without an inner monologue, and someone that's spent a LOT of time meditating, it's not the language. It's the attention mechanisms themselves. Buddhist scholars insist that while we can have multiple threads of attention in our awareness, like strings with pearls of experience/thoughts we can only actually hold one little pearl of information from that stream in our attention at a time, and that we flit b…

What you're describing here is software, not hardware—Cognitive Science is the relevant field, not Neuroscience. That said, your understanding is largely supported by our current understanding of consciousness, attention, and perception. The attention mechanism doesn't handle parallel processing well—but can operate "multi-threaded", where it juggles several foci at once (with some obvious cost to switching between t…

Post by freehorse » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 1:16 AM UTC

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.

Post by ars » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 1:54 AM UTC

kijin wrote: post #183

digging wrote: post #179

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I'm out of my depth here, but a high-level response: First, I don't think the "unconscious" part is a single process, but myriad processes, and I'd bet they wax and wane. Second, the "conscious" part is the part that can reason about itself and think abstractly. I think it would be correct to say it's doing higher level computations. The important part is that this is more costly - it's not optimized because it has t…

So, one high-performance, high-power, general-purpose processor to handle the foreground task, and a bunch of low-power processors for background tasks. Looks like ARM got it right with its big.LITTLE architecture. :)

Post by VyseofArcadia » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 2:36 AM UTC

aziaziazi wrote: post #271

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #231

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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.

Post by 73kl4453dz » Thu, Dec 19, 2024, 2:48 AM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #256

082349872349872 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…