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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?

#81

Post by VyseofArcadia »

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…

A bit is the fundamental unit of information theory, and has nothing to do with digital logic in this context. No one is saying "ok use one bit to encode male or female". No one is saying "ok 101 means serotonin, and 110 is dopamine". What they are saying is that the information content produced by a human being can be compressed down to about 10 bits per second, but this is a statistical description.

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

#82

Post by thmsths »

bennettnate5 wrote: post #75

> 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…

I am not qualified to judge whether you're right or wrong but I love that concept!

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

#83

Post by PittleyDunkin »

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

This sort of reasoning seems to be a symptom of inadequate communication/jargon/diction describing mental faculties. Many times during serious thought there's no discrete "number of thoughts" occuring at all: there's just a hazy mental process that resolves to some result and often many results. This reminds me of the "80% of people have no inner monologue!!!" bullshit that went around recently.

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

#84

Post by jdbxhdd »

bennettnate5 wrote: post #75

> 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…

Also I do not agree with the premise that we can only think about one thing at a time.

We routinely communicate with multiple people at once and also communicate with the same persons in multiple threads of conversations.

Of cause this means that we switch between those tasks and do not really do them in parallel. At most we listen to one person, answer a second via speech, a third via text while thinking about what to respond to a fourth

We just switch our focus of attention quite fast

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

#85

Post by taffer »

malfist wrote: post #58
wat10000 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

> 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"

Yes the entropy of the next letter always depends on the context. One bit per letter is just an average for all kinds of contexts.

> Also the fact that there are more than two letters also indicate more than one bit

Our alphabet is simply not the most efficient way of encoding information. It takes about 5 bits to encode 26 letters, space, comma and period. Even simple algorithms like Huffman or LZ77 only require just 3 bits per letter. Current state-of-the-art algorithms compress the English Wikipedia using a mere 0.8 bits per character: https://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

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

#86

Post by Enginerrrd »

bennettnate5 wrote: post #75

> 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…

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 between them quite rapidly.

Personally, I sort of agree, but I notice that there seems to be a time-compression thing happening where the pearl delivered to attention can contain a compressed summary of continuous perception. This seems to work for 2 things at once in awareness. When you start monitoring 3+ streams, there are gaps. And even maintaining the 2 streams continuously is exhausting so the mind tends to relax a little and leave gaps on a normal basis, but it seems like it can monitor dual feeds when its particularly important.

My understanding is that neuroscience largely seems to agree with the above.

(Actually, I'll note that the USUAL mode of being doesn't even monitor one stream continuously. A lot of the weird effects (and deeply interesting ones!) they talk about in meditative arts seem to pop up when you progress to being able to hold truly continuous attention.)

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

#87

Post by MrMcCall »

Asraelite wrote: post #73
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 informatio…

But if your measurements are unreliable or downright flawed, then it's just garbage-in-garbage-out.

Sounds like the statistics in the papers from the social "sciences".

"There's lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Unknown

I don't think you're going to be able to count the "number of distinct possible configurations" of an even moderately complex living system.

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

#88

Post by MrMcCall »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #81
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…

A bit is the fundamental unit of information theory, and has nothing to do with digital logic in this context. No one is saying "ok use one bit to encode male or female". No one is saying "ok 101 means serotonin, and 110 is dopamine". What they are saying is that the information content produced by a human being can be compressed down to about 10 bits per second, but this is a statistical description.

You said both

  nothing to do with digital logic in this context
and

  compressed down to about 10 bits per second
Sounds like digital compression from where I sit, friend.

Are you using an information theory that is based upon something different from Shannon's?

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

#89

Post by lccerina »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #16
lccerina wrote: post #11

This is such a bad paper. Almost all calculations and equations look like some back of envelope calculation. A decent researcher would have provided some tests to their hypotheses.

The numbers cited and used in calculations are supported by citations. The purpose of this paper is not to test a hypothesis, or to gather new data, but to think about existing data and new directions of research. This is spelled out in the paper's abstract, which is kind of summary of the whole paper, useful to get a very quick idea about the paper's purpose -- expanded further in the paper's introduction and re-vis…

Thank you for explaining what an abstract is... The fact that those number come from a citation doesn't make them true. This is a badly written paper that a decent researcher wouldn't have written (and I know that the author has many papers, I am speaking about this one) and a decent reviewer would have rejected. A paragraph about Elon Musk? Guesstimates on information rates? As a blog post would have been okay-ish, as a scientific paper is quite bad.

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

#90

Post by fwip »

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…

Exactly. English text is thought to have about 10 bits per word of information content, yet you can read much more quickly than 1 word per second. That includes not just ingesting the word, but also comprehending the meaning the author is conveying and your own reflections on those words.
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