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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?

#71

Post by Retric »

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…

Boolean logic extends just fine to handle complexity. Instead it’s the intuitive classification people come up with that are often a poor fit for reality.

Is someone’s DNA consistent throughout their body? Y/N Does someone have any chromosomal anomalies? Y/N etc

Similarly it’s very possible for a girl to suffer from abnormally low testosterone levels which doesn’t fit with how the public thinks of it as a gendered hormone. During puberty it normally spikes in both girls and boys. From a range of (2.5 - 10) in prepubescents, the typical range in puberty for boys is much higher (100 - 970) vs (15 - 38) but that doesn’t make it a male hormone just a pathway used differently.

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

#72

Post by psb217 »

mjburgess wrote: post #46

> 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 2^20 ≈ 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. This is an extrinsic d…

Another relevant point is the common anecdote about, eg, some master engineer who gets paid big bucks to come fix some problem that's been blocking up a factory for weeks. The engineer walks around, listens to a few of the machines, and then walks up to one of the machines and knocks it with his elbow Fonzi style and the factory starts running again. The factory boss is happy his factory is working, but annoyed that he paid so much for such an "easy" solution.

Ie, the amount of input and processing required to produce the "right" 10 bits might be far larger than 10 bits. Another obvious example is chess. The amount of bits conveyed by each move is small but, if you want to make the right move, you should probably put some deeper thought into it.

Humans are essentially organisms that collect and filter information, boil it down to a condensed soup of understanding, and emit a light sprinkle of carefully chosen bits intended to reshape the future towards their desires.

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

#73

Post by Asraelite »

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…

Bits are a perfectly acceptable way to measure biological information processing. These are not the boolean logic digital bits like on a computer. They're the more abstract concept of a bit in information theory.

Take the number of distinct possible configurations a system can be in (accounting for statistical uncertainty/biases if needed), take the base 2 logarithm of that number, and you have the bits of information in the system. This can be applied to basically anything, biological or otherwise.

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

#74

Post by gmadsen »

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…

it is a categorization, like all things in biology. One of the most robust and significant ones for all of life is sexual versus asexual reproduction. It is intentionally blurring understanding to say that it is not a binary. This is not a gaussian situation, and not fitting into this categorization is exceedingly rare due to defect/mutation which largely does not proliferate genetically.

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

#75

Post by bennettnate5 »

> Why can we only think about one thing at a time?

Maybe this is just a perception thing. Sure, you can only really keep up one stream of thought, visualization or inner dialogue (whatever you want to call it) at a time, but perhaps that's because we learn all our lives that direct communication is a one-channel, linear thing--speaking and listening focused on one topic at a time. Our brain does plenty of thinking in the background that leads to "a-ha!" moments even when the direct focus of our thoughts isn't on that topic. What if the mind could maintain multiple threads of thoughts at once, but our language coerces our thought patterns into being linear and non-concurrent?

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

#76

Post by beng-nl »

formerly_proven wrote: post #28
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.* * when whole sentences or paragraphs are considered.

I’d say that is implied by “English.”

Entropy is a measure of the source, not output.

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

#77

Post by pizlonator »

mjburgess wrote: post #46

> 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 2^20 ≈ 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. This is an extrinsic d…

I was about to say this but you beat me to it.

Seems like this 10 number comes out of the kind of research where the objective isn’t to find the truth, but to come up with an answer that is headline grabbing. It’s the scientific equivalent of clickbait.

Too bad people fall for it.

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

#78

Post by capitainenemo »

tetris11 wrote: post #35
luka598 wrote: post #10

arxiv: 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

It might be though that even though our processing rate is limited to 10 bits per second, shortening the communication loop between the helper AI and the human might allow the human to switch subjects more productively by getting faster feedback. The human would be in an executive approval role like the lead character in Accelerando with their agents, assuming they trusted their agents to be delegated to.

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

#79

Post by johnnyjeans »

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…

> Our bodies' systems are biochemical wetware that will never be aptly described using a boolean basis.

All physical systems are described on a base-2 basis using bits, or shannon entropy.

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