3 ms·

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 typewr

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 one of us, a combination of male and female hormones. The more "male" a person is is the result of that balance favoring the male hormones; and vice versa. 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. Of course, my not being a biochemist means my categorization of hormones into "male" and "female" is, itself, likely to be a poorly booleanized representation of their natures. We are much more akin to Boltzmann's statistical mechanics description of reality, than to digital logic's boolean description.

beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
> 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 really mean much for how we should treaty people in public who desire to express their gender in different ways, which is, of course, respecting of their dignity and desires, in most cases. [0]: https://philosophersmag.com/unexceptional-sex/ https://philosophersmag.com/unexceptional-sex/
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  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.
malfist 2y ago
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 end? Is it after the electron shell? Outside of it's repulsive force? Some hybrid value?
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  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.
- psychoslave 2y ago
  Surely you will enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_mathematics 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.
- the__alchemist 2y ago
  To address your "empty space" question, you must first define, specifically, what you mean by this phrase.
psychoslave 2y ago
>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.
uoaei 2y ago
I think you've mixed up a few mostly unrelated things together to make a point. You're correct in that the larger point to be made is that analog and digital computing are paradigmatically distinct and analogies are hard to draw across that divide. However, "bits" is just a quantity of information in a certain base. We could discuss it in "nits" if you prefer. The point is that information per se remains real even if the specific representation is based on some assumption of digital computing. The rest of your comment is unfortunately out of scope of this article although it deserves some discussion on its own merit.
Retric 2y ago
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.
Asraelite 2y ago
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.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  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.
  - aeonik 2y ago
    It's more like statistical mechanics and the foundations of the second law of thermodynamics. Unless entropy is a damned lie. Which I'm not saying it isn't, but claiming such a thing is a pretty strong claim. Possibly one of the strongest claims you can make in physics (which is why it's associated with cranks). I'd expect some perpetual motion machines after overturning such a principle. But I do agree you need to be careful defining the scope of microstates and macro states.
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  > Take the number of distinct possible configurations a system Easy for an isolated system. Human body is 6000 billion cells, each of them has many possible configurations, most of them share and process informations. I respectfully doubt there’s much to do with bits outside of a tiny bit if flesh in a petri dish.
  - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    6 trillion * number of configurations of each cell * number of configurations of interactions between cells = (very very large) finite number. The thing about numbers is that they go on forever. There's not a cutoff for "ok, this number is too big for bits". Take whatever that mind-bogglingly huge number is, take the logarithm base 2, there you go, that's how many bits you need.
gmadsen 2y ago
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.
johnnyjeans 2y ago
> 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.
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
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.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  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?
  - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    "Compression" here is nontechnical, and I was using it by analogy as an aid to intuition. I didn't want to throw out the E word (entropy) unnecessarily.
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      Are you using "bit" in a sense different to Wikipedia's definition, as linked from Claude Shannon's page?
GuB-42 2y ago
The use of "bits" here doesn't mean we are working in binary. It is more like the way it is used in information theory. The number of bits is log2 of the number of states that can be represented, and it doesn't have to be an integer. For example, with 10 bits of information, we can distinguish between 1024 different states, it can be 1024 colors for instance, or 1024 genders if you wish, it doesn't matter, the important part is that there are 1024 boxes to put things in, no matter what they are. Of course, it doesn't mean that only 1024 colors exist in the universe, there are an infinity of them, but with 10 bits, you can only distinguish between 1024 of them. If you want more, you need more bits, if you can do with less, you need less. By the article results, it means your "inner brain" can process one color with 1024 nuances per second, or 2 independent colors with 16 nuances each per second. If the colors are not independent, it can process more, because, if, say, you know that the two color are highly contrasting, you don't have to allocate "boxes" for noncontrasting colors, may free some boxes for more nuances, so, you may, for instance, process two contrasting colors with 100 nuances each with these 10 bits.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
countarthur 2y ago
What you're saying is interesting but I think the causality is backwards here and I can provide some examples to show why. (By male hormone I'm assuming you mean testosterone, and by female hormone I assume you mean oestrogen.) i in fact If being "more male" came from having more testosterone (and vice versa), then logically when children go through puberty and develop into adults, they would become "more" male or "more" female. As adults become elderly and naturally produce less sex-associated hormones, they would become "less" male or female. (Fetuses do not all begin in the womb as female, that's a common misunderstanding. We start off physically undifferentiated, and develop along a genetically predetermined pathway as we grow. Some animals use temperature or other environmental triggers to pick, humans use genes.) Would that mean a male bodybuilder who injects testosterone is more male than a man that doesn't? His phenotype may become visibly more masculine, but that doesn't change his sex at all. Same for a female bodybuilder that injects testosterone - she may develop stereotypically male physical characteristics like large muscles and a deeper voice, but her sex is unaffected. The causality is the other way: being male - or - female results in a physiology (adult testicles/ovaries) that produces sex associated hormones in larger or lesser degrees depending on the person (and in some cases very low amounts or not at all). This makes sense if sex is a binary (with rare differences of sex development - detailed here https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/sex-development-charts https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/sex-development-cha... ) that results in different levels of sex hormones in the body and resulting phenotype. So yes, everyone is male or female. (I'm not referring to gender here - I'm talking only about sex) If there's a spectrum then some men could be biologically "more male" than others and vice versa for women. I've not seen any evidence of this myself, but I'm happy to be proven wrong!
Extropy_ 2y ago
What about male and female- and _N_ genetic syndrome- in terms of XX or XY chromosomes?

beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago

> 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 really mean much for how we should treaty people in public who desire to express their gender in different ways, which is, of course, respecting of their dignity and desires, in most cases. [0]: https://philosophersmag.com/unexceptional-sex/ https://philosophersmag.com/unexceptional-sex/

MrMcCall 2y ago
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.

malfist 2y ago

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 end? Is it after the electron shell? Outside of it's repulsive force? Some hybrid value?

MrMcCall 2y ago
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.
psychoslave 2y ago
Surely you will enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_mathematics 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.
the__alchemist 2y ago
To address your "empty space" question, you must first define, specifically, what you mean by this phrase.

psychoslave 2y ago

>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.

uoaei 2y ago

I think you've mixed up a few mostly unrelated things together to make a point. You're correct in that the larger point to be made is that analog and digital computing are paradigmatically distinct and analogies are hard to draw across that divide. However, "bits" is just a quantity of information in a certain base. We could discuss it in "nits" if you prefer. The point is that information per se remains real even if the specific representation is based on some assumption of digital computing. The rest of your comment is unfortunately out of scope of this article although it deserves some discussion on its own merit.

Retric 2y ago

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.

Asraelite 2y ago

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.

MrMcCall 2y ago
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.
- aeonik 2y ago
  It's more like statistical mechanics and the foundations of the second law of thermodynamics. Unless entropy is a damned lie. Which I'm not saying it isn't, but claiming such a thing is a pretty strong claim. Possibly one of the strongest claims you can make in physics (which is why it's associated with cranks). I'd expect some perpetual motion machines after overturning such a principle. But I do agree you need to be careful defining the scope of microstates and macro states.
aziaziazi 2y ago
> Take the number of distinct possible configurations a system Easy for an isolated system. Human body is 6000 billion cells, each of them has many possible configurations, most of them share and process informations. I respectfully doubt there’s much to do with bits outside of a tiny bit if flesh in a petri dish.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  6 trillion * number of configurations of each cell * number of configurations of interactions between cells = (very very large) finite number. The thing about numbers is that they go on forever. There's not a cutoff for "ok, this number is too big for bits". Take whatever that mind-bogglingly huge number is, take the logarithm base 2, there you go, that's how many bits you need.

gmadsen 2y ago

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.

johnnyjeans 2y ago

> 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.

VyseofArcadia 2y ago

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.

MrMcCall 2y ago
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?
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  "Compression" here is nontechnical, and I was using it by analogy as an aid to intuition. I didn't want to throw out the E word (entropy) unnecessarily.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    Are you using "bit" in a sense different to Wikipedia's definition, as linked from Claude Shannon's page?

GuB-42 2y ago

The use of "bits" here doesn't mean we are working in binary. It is more like the way it is used in information theory. The number of bits is log2 of the number of states that can be represented, and it doesn't have to be an integer. For example, with 10 bits of information, we can distinguish between 1024 different states, it can be 1024 colors for instance, or 1024 genders if you wish, it doesn't matter, the important part is that there are 1024 boxes to put things in, no matter what they are. Of course, it doesn't mean that only 1024 colors exist in the universe, there are an infinity of them, but with 10 bits, you can only distinguish between 1024 of them. If you want more, you need more bits, if you can do with less, you need less. By the article results, it means your "inner brain" can process one color with 1024 nuances per second, or 2 independent colors with 16 nuances each per second. If the colors are not independent, it can process more, because, if, say, you know that the two color are highly contrasting, you don't have to allocate "boxes" for noncontrasting colors, may free some boxes for more nuances, so, you may, for instance, process two contrasting colors with 100 nuances each with these 10 bits.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

countarthur 2y ago

What you're saying is interesting but I think the causality is backwards here and I can provide some examples to show why. (By male hormone I'm assuming you mean testosterone, and by female hormone I assume you mean oestrogen.) i in fact If being "more male" came from having more testosterone (and vice versa), then logically when children go through puberty and develop into adults, they would become "more" male or "more" female. As adults become elderly and naturally produce less sex-associated hormones, they would become "less" male or female. (Fetuses do not all begin in the womb as female, that's a common misunderstanding. We start off physically undifferentiated, and develop along a genetically predetermined pathway as we grow. Some animals use temperature or other environmental triggers to pick, humans use genes.) Would that mean a male bodybuilder who injects testosterone is more male than a man that doesn't? His phenotype may become visibly more masculine, but that doesn't change his sex at all. Same for a female bodybuilder that injects testosterone - she may develop stereotypically male physical characteristics like large muscles and a deeper voice, but her sex is unaffected. The causality is the other way: being male - or - female results in a physiology (adult testicles/ovaries) that produces sex associated hormones in larger or lesser degrees depending on the person (and in some cases very low amounts or not at all). This makes sense if sex is a binary (with rare differences of sex development - detailed here https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/sex-development-charts https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/sex-development-cha... ) that results in different levels of sex hormones in the body and resulting phenotype. So yes, everyone is male or female. (I'm not referring to gender here - I'm talking only about sex) If there's a spectrum then some men could be biologically "more male" than others and vice versa for women. I've not seen any evidence of this myself, but I'm happy to be proven wrong!

Extropy_ 2y ago

What about male and female- and _N_ genetic syndrome- in terms of XX or XY chromosomes?