Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 325 posts

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

#51

Post by MrMcCall »

malfist wrote: post #47
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…

In biology, or really most sciences (math being an exception), the more closely you examine a delineated this or that categorization, the more you realize it's a scale, a range, or something fuzzy. Like even things we talk about regularly like touch and space is vague in the details. Is it still touching if the repulsive force of electron to electron is keeping nucleus apart? Where is empty space begin and an atom en…

I hope you're not asking me those questions ;-)

Yeah, those are great questions, for sure.

I can always be awestruckdumb by the understanding that we are all mostly space inhabited by fields, our littlest bits vibrating at mindblowing speeds.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

esperent wrote: post #29
wat10000 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is about one bit per letter. If you type at a very fast 120WPM then you’re right at 10bps. Computers just don’t represent English very efficiently, even with gzip.

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

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by cess11 »

I see there are some people in the thread that doubt the low bandwidth between conscious thought and the rest of the central nervous system.

Do you also doubt that you're actually living half a second in the past, with the brain compensating for this lag between initial perception and conscious reception of the indirect effects of it?

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

#54

Post by ganzuul »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #21

I beg you, please read the paper before commenting. It's very interesting and it answers a lot of questions that might arise from just skimming the title.

I conclude that if you perform horrific experiments on animals then our intelligent universe reduces the rate at which you can continue to 10bps.

This is why enlightenment cures you of your curiosity.

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

#55

Post by MrMcCall »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #44
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…

> That is one of the primary problems of society's obsessions with classical notions of gender. What you go on to discuss is sex, and sexual dimorphism, which is a remarkably robust way of classification. The "classical" notions of gender (tbh, "classical" doesn't make much sense here) as sex based is fairly reasonable all things considered. Consider the arguments presented in this essay [0]. That, however, doesn't r…

Well said.

Yeah, what I mean by classical would boil down to just genitalia, which doesn't really hold up in how we must respect the person and how they feel and choose to express themselves. Yes, so long as their expressions are not harming others, then we must respect their human right to choose who they are.

I've got to give a huge hat tip to Suzi (Eddie) Izzard, who -- beyond their being just a brilliant comic and generally good human being -- taught me and my fam about how the spectrum of human configuration is way more complex than just male and female.

Cheers, friend.

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

#56

Post by psychoslave »

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 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.

Even that is a very smooth view of humanity as if was all going through more or less the same mindset.

Rest assured that most of humanity don’t conceive their life experience according to a scientific measure of information units.

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

#57

Post by chongli »

esperent wrote: post #32
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.

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…

As the answerer, if you have a wide vocabulary or if you're a technical person then it's not too difficult to routinely choose words the other person simply does not know so that no amount of yes/no questions will get them there.

Obscure medical terms (phlebotomy), names of uncommonly-known stars (Fomalhaut), obscure data structures (cache-oblivious lookahead arrays), mathematical constants (Feigenbaum's constants)... The list goes on and on!

The point I'm trying to make is that most people who play Twenty Questions aren't trying to maximize the number of bits per second in their answer. They're actually trying to play semi-cooperatively. The fun part of Twenty Questions is when the other person guesses your word with as few questions remaining as possible. Having them get all the way to 20 and then you tell them "no you were way off to guess toothache, it was actually temporomandibular joint dysfunction" makes you look rather unsporting!

Thus, since I think we can expect people who play Twenty Questions to actually try to choose a word they know the other person can guess within the space allowed, we can reasonably conclude that using the game as a way to establish some sort of rough constraint on the speed of thinking (in bits per second) is way off. In fact, I know from my own experience playing the game that I will think of and discard many words in a short time as I try to find one that will be in the sweet spot of challenge for the other person to guess.

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

#58

Post by malfist »

wat10000 wrote: post #48
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?

It’s an experimental result by Shannon: https://archive.org/details/bstj30-1-50/page/n5/mode/1up In short, you show someone an English text cut off at an arbitrary point and ask them to predict which letter comes next. Based on how successful they are, you can calculate the information content of the text. The result from this experiment was approximately one bit per letter. Representing it is not the concern of the…

Say that experiment is correct. Wouldn't that imply that the information context of a single letter varies based on the possible future permutations?

I.e., The string "I'v_" provides way more context than "con_" because you're much more likely to get I'm typing "I've" instead of "contraception"

That seems to disprove the idea that a letter is a bit.

Also the fact that there are more than two letters also indicate more than one bit, though I wouldn't want to even start to guess the encoding scheme of the brain

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

#59

Post by GeoAtreides »

MrMcCall wrote: post #25
GeoAtreides wrote: post #21

I beg you, please read the paper before commenting. It's very interesting and it answers a lot of questions that might arise from just skimming the title.

That might be the funniest comment I've ever seen on HN! A plea to reason, that is probably not outside the posting guidelines, but is certainly in a gray area :-)

I honestly don't understand why it would be funny or in a gray area to recommend people to actual read the paper?

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

#60

Post by psychoslave »

malfist wrote: post #47
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…

In biology, or really most sciences (math being an exception), the more closely you examine a delineated this or that categorization, the more you realize it's a scale, a range, or something fuzzy. Like even things we talk about regularly like touch and space is vague in the details. Is it still touching if the repulsive force of electron to electron is keeping nucleus apart? Where is empty space begin and an atom en…

Surely you will enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_mathematics

Also remember that putting a topic under mathematical form or mere layman prose is also a spectral arbitrary categorization.

Post reply on HN