Earlier quoted context omitted.
> English is about one bit per letter.* * when whole sentences or paragraphs are considered.
What else would we consider?
The symbols aka words of the language itself?
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?
#32Where 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.
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 allotted. So the speed of thinking – with no constraints imposed – corresponds to 20 bits of information over a few seconds: a rate of 10 bits per second or less.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#33The 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 one of us, a combination of male and female hormones. The more "male" a person is is the result of that balance favoring the male hormones; and vice versa. What humanity is now struggling with is that there are plenty of folks with lots of both or little of either and all kinds of combinations.
Of course, my not being a biochemist means my categorization of hormones into "male" and "female" is, itself, likely to be a poorly booleanized representation of their natures.
We are much more akin to Boltzmann's statistical mechanics description of reality, than to digital logic's boolean description.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#34It seems this analysis is incorrectly assuming a serial communication mode for neuronal transmission, which isn’t what happens.
I have read the paper and your thesis, that the analysis is assuming a serial communication mode for neuronal transmission, is incorrect.
They say this directly in section 7.2,
> In contrast, central processing appears to be strictly serial…
and then they proceed to give misinterpretated evidence of serialization because they’re making assumptions about lower level biochemical behavior based on higher level tissue performance. In fact, that tissue-level behavior isn’t correctly described either.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#35arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234
Really fun paper. I especially enjoyed this section:
> Based on the research reviewed here regarding the rate of human cognition, we predict that Musk’s brain will communicate with the computer at about 10 bits/s. Instead of the bundle of Neuralink electrodes, Musk could just use a telephone, whose data rate has been designed to match human language, which in turn is matched to the speed of perception and cognition
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
What else would we consider?
The symbols aka words of the language itself?
I’m afraid I don’t understand your point.
If someone types English for a minute at 120WPM then they’ll have produced about 600 bits of information.
Are you saying we should consider the rate in a smaller window of time? Or we should consider the rate when the typist is producing a series of unrelated English words that don’t form a coherent sentence?
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#37The title is a reference to "The unbearable lightness of being" by Milan Kundera
for those unaware.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#38I think the authors are using information theory to inappropriately flatten the complexity of the problem. On one hand we have “bits” of pre-processed sensory measurement data, then on the other hand we have “bits” of post-processed symbolic data: in many cases directly so via human language, but that would also include “the Terran unit moved a short distance” as a compact summary of a bunch of pixels updating in Sta…
When compared directly to the 10^9 bits/s for sensory information, which uses the same type of information, it is slow.
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#39Where 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.
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…
If the questions were pre-determined, which they're usually not. Reminds me of Huffman coding and the reason that compression challenges measure submissions looking at artifacts required to run them in addition to compressed size. I tend to agree with OP that this doesn't pass the smell test
Re: The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
#40It's 10^9 bits/s. Your title is wrong.
> The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ∼10^9 bits/s. The title appears to be accurate?
Just for playing any sport the accuracy to instruct 100s of muscles to work in a certain way is certainly above that 10bits,
Pointing out positions in a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm cubic volume seems to possible significantly faster than 1/s.
The slower examples listed in the table all have some externalities like a motor/object manipulation feedback loop overhead (speed cubing) and or redundacy and are not optimized for pure information density, so I have no idea why they settled on that average, and not the optimum?
Object Recognition and Reading are already at ~50 bits.