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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?

#311

Post by BehindBlueEyes »

t0mas88 wrote: post #272
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?

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 w…

Yes, and there's different buffers with different capacity for different types of perception according to these theories. Look up Baddeley & Hitch for details. I would guess there are similar buffers for other senses that didn't make it in the lectures in college.

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

#312

Post by burnte »

jknoepfler wrote: post #267
burnte wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No need to apologize! We're all human!

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

#313

Post by josefx »

fzeindl wrote: post #306
seanhunter wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THe 10 bits is just very obviously made-up nonsense. The brain doesn’t operate on anything like a binary system, sensory data is not digitally encoded - it is all continuous data. Even the abstract kind of answers its own question. It says sensory data is something like the order of 10^9 bits per second but the “information throughput” is 10 bits per second. It asks “why do we need billions of neurons to process 10 b…

> sensory data is not digitally encoded - it is all continuous data That might be correct but as far as I know the brain has circuits that fire periodically with a certain frequency (what brain waves are about). If such frequencies steer some kind of gate than you do have a kind of digital logic with 1 being where the brain waves cross the zero line.

> If such frequencies steer some kind of gate than you do have a kind of digital logic with 1 being where the brain waves cross the zero line.

What makes you think that this is the case? If someone touches you from behind do you immediately fall over dead from sensory overload? Do you react as if you where punched in the gut? Do you look over your shoulder to check who it is? Or do you fail to notice it until they break a bone? There is a significant amount of inputs where the reactions are not just zero or one but happen on a scale, your digital 1 or zero is more likely to be a 1.0 or 0.0 of a numeric type with unknown bit depth, lets go with 80bit since x87 is just the worst and completely blows the 10bit claim.

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

#314

Post by ziggyzecat »

082349872349872 wrote: post #226
ssl-3 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a think is not a conscious activity?

that, yes, sorry. I meant walking, chewing gum, dribbling a basketball, and avoiding traffic.

Mh, balance that ball on your finger while keeping it in spin or dribble it between your legs while spinning your body around and see how many conscious decisions you make while not stepping into canine feces.

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

#316

Post by hathawsh »

seanhunter wrote: post #303
hathawsh wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to put it: try to perform a skill you have never practiced. For example, if you've never played the piano or tried to read sheet music, see how long it takes you to play a few notes correctly. It's complex enough that you'll very likely find yourself limited to around 10 bits per second. You shouldn't count the bits handled by visual processing, basic motor control, and other things you have practiced all…

Your argument boils down to “exclude anything faster than 10 bits per second, so then you’re limited to things which are 10 bits per second or less”. It’s extremely unconvincing.

That is a remarkably good argument. Well done, I'm convinced that this paper has little substance after all.

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

#317

Post by whatever0124 »

082349872349872 wrote: post #214
bsder wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between latency and throughput.

True, maybe you can find a test which asks, instead of a single button click, to click one of 4 possibilities for a reaction? EDIT: see appendix A.3 Perception

Any FPS is this but with about a million possibilities (depends on the screen resolution). People can become crazy good at it.

Before you say it does not require decisions - you can have friendly fire on.

IO is the problem not processing power.

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

#318

Post by esperent »

taffer wrote: post #92
esperent wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> English is about one bit per letter Where did you get that number from? How would you represent a letter using 1 bit?

In practice, it is even less. Current state-of-the-art algorithms compress the English Wikipedia using just 0.8 bits per character: https://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

Why do you think Wikipedia is an accurate representation of the English language? Is it just because it's large?

As an encyclopedia, it has an intentionally limited and factual way of describing things, which lacks a lot of important parts of language like poetry, allegory, metaphor, slang, regional dialects, and so on.

The fact that it can be compressed down so much probably just means it has a ton of repetition.

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

#319

Post by heyjamesknight »

wruza wrote: post #165
heyjamesknight wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

we may only be aware of a single thread at any given time We may be not a single mind, but a bunch of minds. It just happens that the mind that “you” are reads this and has written the above comment, cause it’s of that kind (just like “all biological beings in this thread happen to be humans” type of a filter). Other minds can live completely different lives, just inside the same skull. And share emotions and thought…

I fully disagree that the mind can operate without "awareness." We understand neither the how nor why of consciousness. But its not just a parlor trick—consciousness helps us mediate our attention.

It's one of the core things missing from our current AI path. Even if the LLMs reach 100% parity on human computational power, we humans are still acting as the ghost-in-the-machine, mediating and directing said computation.

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

#320

Post by heyjamesknight »

datameta wrote: post #295
heyjamesknight wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As far as I know, our wetware builds the hardware as the software runs. Like some kind of self-agglomerating and pruning FPGA "... neurons that fire together wire together" (essentially)

Yes, the hardware is optimized over time. But the emergent experience of consciousness isn't described in that hardware. If you're a pure materialist, you believe said experience is still present physically—likely in some combination of brain matter and the ongoing electrical currents flowing through them. But there's no "place" where consciousness sits.

Its the same thing with a game running on a computer. You can point to different systems for specific aspects of it. But you can't show me where, either in software or hardware, the experience of the game lives.

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