9 ms·
The computational complexity varieties of listening: Let n be the number of things the other is talking about (tricky to define a "thing" but, whatever?, use a
by pizza 10y ago
The computational complexity varieties of listening:
Let n be the number of things the other is talking about (tricky to define a "thing" but, whatever?, use a consistent thing metric)
- O(1) listening: ignoring/may as well not be there - reading your phone while the other talks to you
- O(n) listening: loading their information into your brain while they talk - e.g. repeating back to them, nodding to salient points
- O(n log n) listening: sorting the information they've talked about - talking about the most important bits (after hearing everything)
- O(n^2) listening: cross-comparing all the things they've said for informational pairings
- O(|V|_n + |E|_n + |V|_m + |E|_m) listening: suppose your thoughts are laid out in network form, |V|_x and |E|_x are the # vertices and edges for person x. You are m. Then this is breadth-first search on both your idea-networks.
etc. Thoughts?
edit: I wonder how P and NP come into this! For instance, if someone asks you a question that takes P work, you should be able to derive the answer from what you've talked about alone. But if someone asks you something like, "Were you at that party 25 years ago?" and you have since forgotten, but then your other friend produces a photograph of you in a pair of silly glasses and a clown afro, you can verify quickly that you were! The hardness of remembering something might be classifiable by computational class?
- solipsism 10y agoThe brain is massively parallel, your analysis seems to assume 0 parallelism.
- pizza 10y agoTrue; but one way I can get around this is that the strategies don't all require the same underlying brain architecture requirements. For instance number 1 doesn't even require a brain. Other than that, doesn't my analysis, concerning only the order of steps that must occur in aggregate per algorithm, sorta work out regardless of parallelism? Or do you mean that a multi-state computational brain could do a collection of moves simultaneously, say a vector of n linear actions as 1 brain vector-action?
- aidenn0 10y agoThere are fairly simple physical processes that can solve assumed exponential time problems in constant time for low values of N (most famously probably soap bubbles and the spanning tree problem).
- andrepd 10y agoI think it's not even remotely productive to make these wild assumptions about how the brain works. We know very little about the workings of the brain. It's very probable that this sort of analysis has almost no correlation to what's actually happening in the brain.
- pizza 10y agoI get where you're coming from, but you're demanding too much rigor prematurely for my nascent idea :P Which, come to think of it, probably is related to my having browsed half of some Scott Aaronson paper on the philosophy of computational complexity.. You know what they say - neurons that fire together, wire together! Just replace the "brains" in my post with "completely fictional abstract mechanistic brains whose behavior a human brain can emulate, hopefully not so far off from the qualia of The Real Thing." But I'm a big boy, and am all ears to PubMed-and-the-ilk articles that go into why I'm wrong! I guess the point is, if you can sort of recognize these patterns of information process at a Very High Level Internal Logic and Monologue (tm? lol) in your experiences with consciousness - i.e. how would you explain how you thought internally from a premise to an answer - would it look much differently than this? I doubt that the most pragmatic answer would include descriptions of the microsecond-level G-protein transactions, the millisecond tree diagram of where each synapse released how many vesicle molecules, how these were interpreted and then made sense of via an internal vocalization process, etc? At the end of the day, how evidence based or proof based does arm-chair navel-gazing really need to be? :P All tongue in cheek, of course. But maybe this discussion gives some people "intuition pumps" (ew, I just cited Dennett..) with which they'll make their own falsifiable claims that may even hopefully be worth sharing themselves.
- Okkef 10y agoParallelism doesn't matter for big-O complexity
- ncallaway 10y agoInstead of time-analysis consider it to be space analysis and the analogy holds up pretty well.
- m12k 10y agoSo it's an analysis of the cost of listening in attention/energy, not of time before the processing is done.
- soberhoff 10y agoYou could also just point out that the brain is finite, if you were nitpicking.
- pjc50 10y agoTaking analogies literally deducts at least one point from your listening score.
- sn9 10y agoThe brain may be parallel, but attention [0] isn't for all intents and purposes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention
- Klockan 10y agoThe conversation will take O(n) time no matter what, so parallelism doesn't matter.
- Artoemius 10y ago> O(n^2) listening: cross-comparing all the things they've said for informational pairings If you manage to think of a good hash function for everything they say, you can use a hash table and cross-check every new thing they say in O(1), which makes the total complexity O(n).
- TeMPOraL 10y agoWhich kind of describes a lot of discussions on the Internet - people pattern-matching what they see/hear to cached thoughts in their brains, and replying to those cached thoughts instead of to what was actually said.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- teawrecks 10y agoYeah, in computing, a cache is a hardware or software component that stores data so future requests for that data can be served faster.
- ricksplat 10y agowhen referring to human mind these terms describe a similar phenomenon: Salience: facts are more prominent from either highlighting or frequency. Priming: Recently noted topics may be recalled with less effort. Recency: Memories from more recent times are more readily accessible.
- RangerScience 10y agoI saw this in person, once. Guy with one of the those super-christian inflammatory signs in the middle of UC Berkeley. Both students and "protester" felt like they were presenting canned arguments "at" each other rather than "to" each other. Now that I think about it, I could totally see a cabal of professors hiring someone to be antagonistic as a teaching moment.
- 10y ago
- sovietmudkipz 10y agoObservation: O(1) listening is easy enough that a rubber duck can accomplish the task.
- pizza 10y agoYup ;)
- chronolitus 10y agoAnd it's not even the worst level of listening ability.
- amelius 10y agoI find it a bit odd you categorize methods of listening by computational complexity, rather than by the method itself. Also, the brain is not a sequential machine. And different algorithms can be used to achieve the same effect. For example: - O(n^2) listening: cross-comparing all the things they've said for informational pairings Who says this can't be done in O(n log n)?
- pizza 10y agoI guess I used complexity as a proxy for involvement. And of course the brain isn't a sequential machine - reaction times, voxel fMRI analysis, and lesion or connector studies show that consciousness is a network phenomenon. That said holding in one's mind the illusion (value as determined by observer..) of a list of instructions isn't so far off from how I imagine many would choose to describe the mind-feel of their particular process when it comes to listening? And if the illusion breaks down because the brain has lower lower bounds than whatever non-materialist a priori wishful thinking one might expect from mental algorithms, then, that's nice I guess or something? I think I just wrote it to induce my intuition in others, but you're right in saying that there's no proof that a brain operates with the same atomic instructions or architecture as I've pulled out of thin air above..
- pizza 10y agooops too late to edit but 'connector' should be connectome
- andrepd 10y agoThis is almost comical :p The brain is not a turing machine. You can't make these kind of analysis because the brain isn't just a huge von neumann computer.
- MawNicker 10y agoThe brain is most certainly a turing machine.
- bbcbasic 10y agoThe brain can emulate a Turing machine but not necessarily vice versa
- MawNicker 10y agoA turing machine can simulate the whole universe and everything in it.
- FreeFull 10y agoI don't see a good reason why a turing machine can't simulate a brain, or even a whole universe
- bbcbasic 10y agoMaybe. You'd need to understand the universe before you can answer in the affirmative.
- Klockan 10y agoA Turing machine can't properly simulate randomness...
- FreeFull 10y agoPseudorandomness is fine, and given you do have an infinite amount of tape, the pseudorandom generator doesn't ever have to repeat either.
- ulucs 10y agoCan't you reduce the O(n log n) to O(log n) by picking the most important points instead of sorting everything?