this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2024
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You are confusing input with throughput. They agree that the input is much greater. It's the throughput that is so slow. Here's the abstract:
Someone tell that to the random tab in my brain who keeps playing music
He's not.
Executive function has limited capacity, but executive function isn't your brain (and there's no reasonable definition that limits it to anything as absurd as 10 bits). Your visual center is processing all those bits that enter the eyes. All the time. You don't retain all of it, but retaining any of it necessarily requires processing a huge chunk of it.
Literally just understanding the concept of car when you see one is much more than 10 bits of information.
I think that we are all speaking without being able to read the paper (and in my case, I know I wouldn't understand it), so I think dismissing it outright without knowing how they are defining things or measuring them is not really the best course here.
I would suggest that Caltech studies don't tend to be poorly-done.
There is literally nothing the paper could say and no evidence they could provide to make the assertion in the title anything less than laughable.
There are hundreds of systems in your brain that are actively processing many, many orders of magnitude more than ten bits of information per second all the time. We can literally watch them do so.
It's possible the headline is a lie by someone who doesn't understand the research. It's not remotely within the realm of plausibility that it resembles reality in any way.
That is quite the claim from someone who has apparently not even read the abstract of the paper. I pasted it in the thread.
It doesn't matter what it says.
A word is more than 10 bits on its own.
You know, dismissing a paper without even taking a minute to read the abstract and basing everything on a headline to claim it's all nonsense is not a good look. I'm just saying.
The point is that it's literally impossible for the headline to be anything but a lie.
I don't need to dig further into a headline that claims cell towers cause cancer because of deadly cell signal radiation, and that's far less deluded than this headline is.
The core concept is entirely incompatible with even a basic understanding of information theory or how the brain works.
(But I did read the abstract, not knowing it's the abstract because it's such nonsensical babble. It makes it even worse.)
Again, refusing to even read the abstract when it has been provided for you because you've already decided the science is wrong without evaluating anything but a short headline is not a good look.
In fact, it is the sort of thing that people who claim cell towers cause cancer are famous for doing themselves.
The headline is completely incompatible with multiple large bodies of scientific evidence. It's the equivalent of claiming gravity doesn't exist. Dismissing obvious nonsense is a necessary part of filtering the huge amount of information available.
But I did read the abstract and it makes the headline look reasonable by comparison.
I don't suppose it would be worth asking if your professional field was neurology...
Argument to authority doesn't strengthen your argument.
A piece of paper is not a prerequisite to the extremely basic level of understanding it takes to laugh at this.
So essentially what you are saying is that you have no expertise in neurology and have not read the paper or evaluated any of the data or the methodology and yet, despite all of that, you know for certain that it is wrong.
Please explain your certainty. And if you appeal to "common sense," please note that common sense is why people thought the sun orbited the Earth for thousands of years.
No, I am saying that I do have a meaningful working knowledge of how the brain works, and information theory, beyond the literal surface level it would take to understand that the headline is bullshit.
You don't need to be a Nobel prize winning physicist to laugh at a paper claiming gravity is impossible. This headline is that level. Literally just processing a word per second completely invalidates it, because an average vocabulary of 20k means that every word, by itself, is ~14 bits of information.
You are already not using 'bit' the way it is defined in the paper. Again, not a good look.
The paper is not entitled to redefine a scientific term to be completely incorrect.
A bit is a bit.
From a cursory glance it seems at least quite close to the definition of a bit in relation to entropy, also known as a shannon.
If it's not re-defining the term then I'm using it like the paper is defining it.
Because just understanding words to respond to them, ignoring all the sub-processes that are also part of "thought" and directly impact both your internal narration and your actual behavior, takes more than 10 bits of information to manage. (And yeah I do understand that each word isn't actually equally likely as I used to provide a number in my rough version, but they also require your brain to handle far more additional context than just the information theory "information" of the word itself.)
And now it's "it's the paper's fault it's wrong because it defined a term the way I didn't want it defined."
Yes.
Science is built on a shared, standardized base of knowledge. Laying claim to a standard term to mean something entirely incompatible with the actual definition makes your paper objectively incorrect and without merit.
Cool. Let me know when you feel like reading the paper since Aatube already showed you they are using it properly. Or at least admitting you might not know as much about this as you think you do...
No I'm not, I read that part. Input is for instance hearing a sound wave, which the brain can process at amazing speed, separating a multitude of simultaneous sounds, and translate into meaningful information. Be it music, speech, or a noise that shouldn't be there. It's true that this part is easier to measure, as we can do something similar, although not nearly as well on computers. As we can determine not only content of sounds, but also extrapolate from it in real time. The sound may only be about 2x22k bit, but the processing required is way higher. And that's even more obviously way way way above 10 bit per second.
This is a very complex function that require loads of processing. And can distinguish with microsecond precision it reaches each ear to determine direction.
The same is the case with vision, which although not at all the resolution we think it is, requires massive processing too to interpret into something meaningful.
Now the weird thing is, why in the world do they think consciousness which is even MORE complex, should operate at lower speed? That idea is outright moronic!!!
Edit:
Changed nanosecond to microsecond.
As I suggested to someone else, without any of us actually reading the paper, and I know I do not have the requisite knowledge to understand it if I did, dismissing it with words like "moronic" is not warranted. And as I also suggested, I don't think such a word can generally be applied to Caltech studies. They have a pretty solid reputation as far as I know.
I'm not fucking reading a paper with such ridiculous claims, I gave it a chance, but it simply isn't worth it. And I understand their claims and argumentation perfectly. They simply don't have a clue about the things they make claims about.
I've been investigating and researching these issues for 40 years with an approach from scientific evidence, so please piss off with your claims of me not understanding it.
Without evaluating the data or methodology, I would say that the chance you gave it was not a fair one. Especially since you decided to label it "moronic." That's quite a claim.
It's 100% moronic, they use terminology that clearly isn't fit for the task.
"100% moronic" is an even bolder claim for someone who has not evaluated any of the claims in the paper.
One might even say that calling scientific claims "100%" false is a not especially scientific approach.
If the conclusion is moronic, there's a pretty good chance the thinking behind it is too.
They did get the thing about thinking about one thing at a time right though. But that doesn't change the error of the conclusion.
Again, I would say using the "100%" in science when evaluating something is not a very good term to use. I think you know that.
Yeah OK that's technically correct.
It's also been pointed out that they are using 'bit' in a way people here are not thinking they are using it: https://lemmy.world/comment/14152865
Oh boy.
Which is exactly what bit means.
Which is not bits, but the equivalent 1 digit at base 10.
This just shows the normal interpretation of bits.
If it's used as units of information you need to specify it as bits of information. Which is NOT A FREAKING QUANTIZED unit!
And is just showing the complete uselessness of this piece of crap paper.
I’m interested in what you mean. Could you ELI5 why bits of information can’t be used here?
I suppose it can, but just calling it bits is extremely misleading. It's like saying something takes 10 seconds, but only if you are traveling 90% at the speed of light.
It such extremely poor terminology, and maybe the article is at fault and not the study, but it is presented in a way that is moronic.
Using this thermodynamics definition is not generally relevant to how thought processes work.
And using a word to mean something different than it usually does BEFORE pointing it out is very poor terminology.
And in this case made them look like idiots.
It's really too bad, because if they had simply stated we can only handle about 10 concepts per second, that would have been an entirely different matter, I actually agree is probably right. But that's not bad IMO, that's actually quite impressive! The exact contrary of what the headline indicates.
I get your argument now. Do note that this entropy is about information theory and not thermodynamics, so I concur that the Techspot article is at fault here.
Thanks. ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
Meaning it's based on thermo dynamics.
And incidentally I disagree with both. Information theory assumes the universe is a closed system, which is a requirement for thermodynamics to work. which AFAIK is not a proven fact regarding the universe and unlikely IMO.
2nd law of thermodynamics (entropy) is not a law but a statistical likelihood, and the early universe does not comply, and the existence of life is also a contradiction to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
I have no idea how these ideas are so popular outside their scope?
Information theory is an accepted field. The entropy in information theory is analogous and named after entropy in thermodynamics, but it's not actually just thermodynamics. It looks like its own study. I know this because of all the debate around that correcthorsebatterystaple xkcd.
I'm not sure if you are making a joke, or also making a point. But boy that XKCD is spot on. 😋 👍
I think within it's field thermodynamics works, but it's so widely abused outside the field I've become sick of hearing about it from people who just parrot it.
I have not seen anything useful from information theory, mostly just nonsense about information not being able to get lost in black holes. And exaggerated interpretations about entropy.
So my interest in information theory is near zero, because I have discarded it as rubbish already decades ago.
For one, password security theory that actually works (instead of just "use a special character") is based on information theory and its concept of entropy.
OK I don't think information theory is actually needed for that. Just a bit of above average intelligence apparently.
Yes it's true some use the term entropy, instead of just the statistical amount of combinations, and obviously forcing a special character instead of just having it as an option, makes the number of possibilities lower, decreasing the uncertainty, which they then choose to call entropy. Which counter intuitively IMO is called increased entropy.
What is your realm of research? How have you represented abstract thought by digital storage instead of information content?
Mostly philosophical, but since I'm also a programmer, I've always had the quantized elements in mind too.
In the year 2000 I estimated human level or general/strong AI by about 2035. I remember because it was during a very interesting philosophy debate at Copenhagen University. Where to my surprise there also were a number of physics majors.
That's supposed to be an actually conscious AI. I suppose the chances of being correct were slim at the time, but now it does seem to be more likely than ever.