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It seems very odd that the article seems to be measuring the information content of specific tasks that the brain is doing or specific objects that it is percei

It seems very odd that the article seems to be measuring the information content of specific tasks that the brain is doing or specific objects that it is perceiving. But the brain is a general-purpose computer, not a speed-card computer, or English text computer, or binary digit computer, or Rubik's cube computer. When you look at a Rubik's cube, you don't just pick out specific positions of colored squares relative to each other. You also pick up the fact that it's a Rubik's cube and not a bird or a series of binary digits or English text. If an orange cat lunged at your Rubik's cube while you were studying it, you wouldn't process it as "face 3 has 4 red squares on the first row, then an orange diagonal with sharp claws", you'd process it as "fast moving sharp clawed orange cat attacking cube". Which implies that every time you loom at the cube you also notice that it's still a cube and not any of the millions of other objects you can recognize, adding many more bits of information. Similarly, when you're typing English text, you're not just encoding information from your brain into English text, you're also deciding that this is the most relevant activity to keep doing at the moment, instead of doing math or going out for a walk. Not to mention the precise mechanical control of your muscles to achieve the requisite movements, which we're having significant trouble programming into a robot.

gtirloni 2y ago
My thoughts exactly. It makes no sense to me that what I'm thinking and perceiving in real-time is the equivalent of 10 bit/s of data.
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  Has anyone here even read more than the title? The article literally explains that you perceive at a rate of 10^9 bits per second. But after filtering and preprocessing in the outer brain you are only left with about 10 bits per second for conscious processing for things like motor functions. Yes, you can see a Rubic's cube and perceive all sorts of facts about it and the environment at the same time. But try solving it with your hands while someone shows you a bunch of objects and asks you visual comprehension questions at the same time. You might still perceive those other objects, but consciously classifying them verbally is gonna be really difficult. It's no surprise that the feature space that your deeper brain can actively work on is quite limited.
  - mystified5016 2y ago
    10 bits per second is effectively nothing. Not even a single cell could operate at 10 bits per second. Every organic system would collapse immediately.
    - sigmoid10 2y ago
      Remember, this is an intermediate encoding of a hidden feature space between perception and planning. What you see at the start and the end of the neural network might be very different. Consider this: Typing at 60 words/minute, 5 characters/word and 8 bits/character gives a gross bit rate of 40 bits/second. With today's compression algorithms, you can easily get 4:1 reduction in data. That leaves you at approximately 10bits/second that are consciously processed in your brain. Probably even less since your brain might be much better at encoding language than even our best models. Even if some of those numbers are off by a certain factor, the number in the paper is certainly in the right ballpark when you consider orders of magnitude.
      - cycomanic 2y ago
        So the argument is that compression is not processing? That's a very weird definition of processing. Also when we do this we can always argue that we get down to 10bit/s, just change the compression ratio.
  - kens 2y ago
    > Has anyone here even read more than the title? Since it costs $35.95 to read the article, probably not. Seriously, paywalling of scientific research is obviously wrong.
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      >Seriously, paywalling of scientific research is obviously wrong. Agreed! Here you go: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234 https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234
  - wbl 2y ago
- kijin 2y ago
  Send a query to your favorite database. The database preprocesses hundreds of gigabytes of data, map-reduces it, and finally returns a single 32-bit integer, taking exactly 3.2 seconds to do so. Nobody would say that the database can only process 10 bits per second. The query just happened to ask for a very simplified answer.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    Everybody would say it outputs 10 bits per second. And when it comes to consciousness simplified answers at 10 bits per second is the best you can get. This article asks why.
    - kijin 2y ago
      It's an interesting question indeed, why the mind produces so little output compared to input. Still, I get the feeling that the apparent bit rate of the conscious output is not the right metric to be measuring. There are so many ways in which the bit rate you're measuring could have been bottle-necked by factors outside of the mind, such as the speed at which you can move your tongue to articulate language, or a cultural expectation that prefers compact answers over chain-of-thought babbles. The mind also leaks a lot of information, both consciously and unconsciously, through side channels such as facial expression, gestures, and even variations in the rate of output itself.
      - scotty79 2y ago
        > It's an interesting question indeed, why the mind produces so little output compared to input. My theory is that consciousness is super complicated and brain has barely enough juice to crank out any of it. Conscious field of vision is about 2% of total field of vision and we observe the world by constantly swiping it with this 2%. This way we reuse both neural circuitry of our brains and also training data that would otherwise necessarily be spread across larger size of neural network if our conscious field of vision was larger. So it short, conscious output is so small because we are dumb and short lived. I also wouldn't say that there's a lot of information in the side channels. Properly compressed it's probably less than engaged conscious output.
infogulch 2y ago
Such reductionist analyses are reliably blind to the complexity of being embodied in physical reality.
- WXLCKNO 2y ago
  Should they analyse everything all at once? Your comment seems reductionist to the realities of writing a paper on a specific subject.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    Your brain does. It's not _one_ computer. It's dozens some interconnected and synchronized to others some with entirely independent control. It's why we have seizures, why optical illusions exist, and why you flinch when something moves at you in your peripheral vision.
  - freehorse 2y ago
    They should just not claim the 10 bits/sec non-sense.
- scotty79 2y ago
  Reductionism is the only way humanity ever progressed on anything.
  - lukan 2y ago
    That's debatable. To me declaring that the world was made in a simple way like this and just listen to the priests was reductionism of the wrong kind. I know the kind you mean though, reducing external factors(like air), so you can isolate gravity as a force unrelated to density by finding out in a vacuum a feather and a metal ball fall with the same speed. (As for the paper I have not yet made up my mind.)
    - scotty79 2y ago
      I'm not sure why reductionism brings simplicity to anyones mind. Yes, you consider one thing at a time, but there are billions of such single things to explain. And isolating one is a challenge in its own right.
wruza 2y ago
Otoh, I just spent a minute to even comprehend your idea. We are living in the information era, the era of dodging an orange cat has ended. And we suck at this new thing, really. We’re like slow af emulators of logic programs and tend to fallback to animal mode when tired or clueless.
- tmiku 2y ago
  Do you really think that the fundamental human act of the current era is running logic programs? I don't dispute that digital logic and its uses deeply changed humanity, but this is like calling humans "weak af imitations of steam engines" during the late-1800s railroad boom. Calling actions/thoughts that follow a concrete list of logical rules/algorithms "animal mode" is deeply anti-human.
  - wruza 2y ago
    I don't see how you could avoid logic and do literally anything useful that is not animalistic by nature. I can only imagine how <human-incomprehensible positive adjective> it would be to be able to remember more than 7 things, use more than one thread and grasp complex ideas by simply looking at their schema for a second, all that on average. Instead we slowly follow triсkles of data, constantly being carried away by nuances and distractions, getting overwhelmed and tired in no time. Our natural "logic" sees god behind a lightning and witch behind an accident, please don't defend it. deeply anti-human What's wrong with that, just look at us going, globally. Any pro-human thoughts, really? Never understood this clinging to the horribly limited nature of humanity only because it has some relatively nice pockets (which usually correlate with deep thought and negatively with the lack thereof).
colordrops 2y ago
The PhD student writing this could be excused for being young an inexperienced but their advisor, tagged second on the paper, should have cut this off at the pass.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ComplexSystems 2y ago
On the other hand, the amount of actual entropic "information" that is processed when you identify a Rubik's cube as such may be nowhere near as much as you think it is, and most importantly, 10 bits may be nowhere near as little as you think it is. If we use your example, which is that of identifying an object, we may simply ask the entropy of what the distribution of possible objects-to-be-identified is at t=0, prior to any analysis. Saying we can resolve 10 bits of this entropy per second is equivalent to saying that we can identify one object from a uniform distribution of 1024 per second. Let's suppose this is a low estimate by several orders of magnitude, and that it's really one from a billion objects instead that you can identify per second. Then this would still only be about 30 bits/sec. None of this changes the main thesis of the paper, which is that this is much lower than the 10⁹ bits/sec our sensory systems transmit.
- FartyMcFarter 2y ago
  But you don't just perceive an object's category (like "cat"). We also perceive a high amount of detail about the object - colour, pattern, behaviour, we make comparisons to past behaviour, predictions of what's likely to happen next and so on. Sure, some parts of the brain don't receive all that detail, but that's necessary for abstraction. If you pumped all the sensory data everywhere, the brain would get overwhelmed for no reason.
  - ComplexSystems 2y ago
    That 30 bits was not literally intended to represent only the object's noun category, but even if it did, none of the additional pieces of information you would like to add are going to change this picture much, because what one would think of as a "high amount of detail" is not actually all that high in terms of the logarithmic growth of the entropy. Take color: suppose the average person has 16 baseline colors memorized, and then a few variations of each: each one can be bright or dark, saturated or pastel. That would be about 6 bits for color. If you have an eye for color or you're an artist you may have some additional degrees of freedom. Hell, a computer using RGB can only represent 24 bits worth of color, maximum. I am going to suggest this stuff gets cognized less than 10 bits worth for the average person; let's just say 10. Now, of course, people can memorize more than one color. If colors are independently distributed uniformly at random, then processing N colors requires 10N bits. But of course they aren't, so the entropy is less. But again, let's just say they were. So how many color combinations can you process per second? I would say it's a bit of a challenge to memorize a set of 10 arbitrary drawn colors shown for a second. Most people couldn't continuously do that at a rate of 10 colors per second. That would be 100 bits/sec of info. The point is that you really don't perceive all that much. You show the average person a Rubik's cube, there is no way they're going to remember the exact pattern of colors that they saw, unless the cube were solved or something. They will perceive it as "multicolored" and that's about it. Adding behavior, texture, etc doesn't change this picture. None of this stuff is even close to 10^9 bits of entropy, which would be 2^1,000,000,000 different equally likely possibilities.
dantillberg 2y ago
> deciding that this is the most relevant activity to keep doing at the moment, instead of doing math or going out for a walk. How many bits of actual decision is going on here, as compared to the period of time that decision applies to? For example, if a person decided once per second whether or not to go for a walk, that could be 1 bit per second. But if that person is constantly transitioning back and forth between walking and not-walking, we could consider their behavior pathological. Instead, for most people, the information density of these decisions is quite low, i.e. the per-second decision bits are very compressible. Personally, I only decide whether to go for a walk (or not) _at most_ once every few minutes. Even if we add in bits for "where" and "precisely when" and "how long", I think we're still at just a small fraction of 1 bit per second.
- lukan 2y ago
  "Personally, I only decide whether to go for a walk (or not) _at most_ once every few minutes. " Consciously. Subconsciously much more is going on.
- causi 2y ago
  The vast majority of the brain's processing power, including conceptual processing, is not conscious. Conscious thought is the framebuffer of the mind, subconscious is the RAM.
- dsr_ 2y ago
  Your conscious planner may be making 1 decision/second, but your senses, proprioception, balancing system, etc. are handing you about a gigabit/second of data, most of which never rises to your conscious attention. When I'm reading, that's roughly 2000 bits/second, but I am engaging it with model-making systems that can completely enrapture me. I/O is not the same as computation; conscious computation is not the same as all computation.
  - ChrisClark 2y ago
    Yeah, that's what the paper is talking about. A whole lot of input vs. a small amount of conscious focus.
ozim 2y ago
Don’t forget typing in English is also outcome of processing all the context. Also not so conscious context like „I am writing a reply on HN not on Reddit - making obvious silly pun about cats is not going to make upvotes - making quasi intellectual comment about subconscious processing should earn me some”.
benreesman 2y ago
I’m not any good at Rubik’s Cube, and to me it looks like a bunch of colored squares. But stuff I am good at? I don’t see it at all. A terminal? I never have any truly tangible conscious recollection of serious coding. It might be the same for people good at Rubik’s Cube.
ggm 2y ago
> But the brain is a general-purpose computer, not a speed-card computer, or English text computer, or binary digit computer, or Rubik's cube computer. Look, I like the sentence. I like it so much I might steal it. But, that said I think analogising what the brain does to "general purpose computer" is a bit awry because we can invent algorithms, and given a process we can implement algorithms but I still tend to think there is something ineffable about thought/cognition which is NOT general purpose computation. It's a heuristic. I dunno what I think.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  The computer analogy is definitely off. For one thing, rationality is kind of bolted on to our linguistic ability. It's not deeply seated in our brain; it takes substantial energy to engage in logical reasoning and we're not that great at it; even very skilled mathematicians make trivial mistakes. Deeper in our brain is reasoning about causality. But even that is more of an input to our reactions and emotions than it is as a consciously accessible function, and it too is often wrong. As you said, it's a heuristic. We certainly can't solve the halting problem with brain magic.
  - Vecr 2y ago
    Implementing algorithms doesn't need a computer, and it doesn't need something that's not a computer. That said, with enough willpower why couldn't you implement a universal Turing machine in your brain? I think you would need external memory (a tape) but that's not a problem.
fzeindl 2y ago
Could the 10bits be some sort of instruction-set-address-width? Meaning that while you are solving the rubik‘s cube, your brain has the capacity of switching into one of 2^10=1024 possible next states, which might fire nerve impulses for the body and also come with a new set of 1024 next states? When focusing on the cube about 20 or 30 of the next states could be related to the cube, while the rest is concerned with bodily sensations, other thoughts etc. What if learning something well meant that less states need to be reserved for the task/cube at hand because the decision tree going forward has become more efficiently packed, so more states are open for something else.
- seanhunter 2y ago
  THe 10 bits is just very obviously made-up nonsense. The brain doesn’t operate on anything like a binary system, sensory data is not digitally encoded - it is all continuous data. Even the abstract kind of answers its own question. It says sensory data is something like the order of 10^9 bits per second but the “information throughput” is 10 bits per second. It asks “why do we need billions of neurons to process 10 bits per second?” Well we clearly don’t because that’s clearly not what we do. We process 10^9 bits per second, and we do a bunch of things which aren’t just processing sensory data as well. And on top of that we do things which aren’t measured in the 10 bits per second also.
  - fzeindl 2y ago
    > sensory data is not digitally encoded - it is all continuous data That might be correct but as far as I know the brain has circuits that fire periodically with a certain frequency (what brain waves are about). If such frequencies steer some kind of gate than you do have a kind of digital logic with 1 being where the brain waves cross the zero line.
    - josefx 2y ago
      > If such frequencies steer some kind of gate than you do have a kind of digital logic with 1 being where the brain waves cross the zero line. What makes you think that this is the case? If someone touches you from behind do you immediately fall over dead from sensory overload? Do you react as if you where punched in the gut? Do you look over your shoulder to check who it is? Or do you fail to notice it until they break a bone? There is a significant amount of inputs where the reactions are not just zero or one but happen on a scale, your digital 1 or zero is more likely to be a 1.0 or 0.0 of a numeric type with unknown bit depth, lets go with 80bit since x87 is just the worst and completely blows the 10bit claim.
atoav 2y ago
Well and not only that, your brain is at the same time processing incoming sounds which it spatializes based on the minor phase/level differences and based onnreflections within the ears themselves. Your brain processes all feelings for all body parts, including a big chunk of skin, temperature perception, sense of gravity to balance yourself, etc. If you received 10 bits once a second describing all of that, good luck, you probably won't survive the next 15 minutes.

gtirloni 2y ago

My thoughts exactly. It makes no sense to me that what I'm thinking and perceiving in real-time is the equivalent of 10 bit/s of data.

sigmoid10 2y ago
Has anyone here even read more than the title? The article literally explains that you perceive at a rate of 10^9 bits per second. But after filtering and preprocessing in the outer brain you are only left with about 10 bits per second for conscious processing for things like motor functions. Yes, you can see a Rubic's cube and perceive all sorts of facts about it and the environment at the same time. But try solving it with your hands while someone shows you a bunch of objects and asks you visual comprehension questions at the same time. You might still perceive those other objects, but consciously classifying them verbally is gonna be really difficult. It's no surprise that the feature space that your deeper brain can actively work on is quite limited.
- mystified5016 2y ago
  10 bits per second is effectively nothing. Not even a single cell could operate at 10 bits per second. Every organic system would collapse immediately.
  - sigmoid10 2y ago
    Remember, this is an intermediate encoding of a hidden feature space between perception and planning. What you see at the start and the end of the neural network might be very different. Consider this: Typing at 60 words/minute, 5 characters/word and 8 bits/character gives a gross bit rate of 40 bits/second. With today's compression algorithms, you can easily get 4:1 reduction in data. That leaves you at approximately 10bits/second that are consciously processed in your brain. Probably even less since your brain might be much better at encoding language than even our best models. Even if some of those numbers are off by a certain factor, the number in the paper is certainly in the right ballpark when you consider orders of magnitude.
    - cycomanic 2y ago
      So the argument is that compression is not processing? That's a very weird definition of processing. Also when we do this we can always argue that we get down to 10bit/s, just change the compression ratio.
- kens 2y ago
  > Has anyone here even read more than the title? Since it costs $35.95 to read the article, probably not. Seriously, paywalling of scientific research is obviously wrong.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    >Seriously, paywalling of scientific research is obviously wrong. Agreed! Here you go: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234 https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234
- wbl 2y ago
kijin 2y ago
Send a query to your favorite database. The database preprocesses hundreds of gigabytes of data, map-reduces it, and finally returns a single 32-bit integer, taking exactly 3.2 seconds to do so. Nobody would say that the database can only process 10 bits per second. The query just happened to ask for a very simplified answer.
- scotty79 2y ago
  Everybody would say it outputs 10 bits per second. And when it comes to consciousness simplified answers at 10 bits per second is the best you can get. This article asks why.
  - kijin 2y ago
    It's an interesting question indeed, why the mind produces so little output compared to input. Still, I get the feeling that the apparent bit rate of the conscious output is not the right metric to be measuring. There are so many ways in which the bit rate you're measuring could have been bottle-necked by factors outside of the mind, such as the speed at which you can move your tongue to articulate language, or a cultural expectation that prefers compact answers over chain-of-thought babbles. The mind also leaks a lot of information, both consciously and unconsciously, through side channels such as facial expression, gestures, and even variations in the rate of output itself.
    - scotty79 2y ago
      > It's an interesting question indeed, why the mind produces so little output compared to input. My theory is that consciousness is super complicated and brain has barely enough juice to crank out any of it. Conscious field of vision is about 2% of total field of vision and we observe the world by constantly swiping it with this 2%. This way we reuse both neural circuitry of our brains and also training data that would otherwise necessarily be spread across larger size of neural network if our conscious field of vision was larger. So it short, conscious output is so small because we are dumb and short lived. I also wouldn't say that there's a lot of information in the side channels. Properly compressed it's probably less than engaged conscious output.

infogulch 2y ago

Such reductionist analyses are reliably blind to the complexity of being embodied in physical reality.

WXLCKNO 2y ago
Should they analyse everything all at once? Your comment seems reductionist to the realities of writing a paper on a specific subject.
- akira2501 2y ago
  Your brain does. It's not _one_ computer. It's dozens some interconnected and synchronized to others some with entirely independent control. It's why we have seizures, why optical illusions exist, and why you flinch when something moves at you in your peripheral vision.
- freehorse 2y ago
  They should just not claim the 10 bits/sec non-sense.
scotty79 2y ago
Reductionism is the only way humanity ever progressed on anything.
- lukan 2y ago
  That's debatable. To me declaring that the world was made in a simple way like this and just listen to the priests was reductionism of the wrong kind. I know the kind you mean though, reducing external factors(like air), so you can isolate gravity as a force unrelated to density by finding out in a vacuum a feather and a metal ball fall with the same speed. (As for the paper I have not yet made up my mind.)
  - scotty79 2y ago
    I'm not sure why reductionism brings simplicity to anyones mind. Yes, you consider one thing at a time, but there are billions of such single things to explain. And isolating one is a challenge in its own right.

wruza 2y ago

Otoh, I just spent a minute to even comprehend your idea. We are living in the information era, the era of dodging an orange cat has ended. And we suck at this new thing, really. We’re like slow af emulators of logic programs and tend to fallback to animal mode when tired or clueless.

tmiku 2y ago
Do you really think that the fundamental human act of the current era is running logic programs? I don't dispute that digital logic and its uses deeply changed humanity, but this is like calling humans "weak af imitations of steam engines" during the late-1800s railroad boom. Calling actions/thoughts that follow a concrete list of logical rules/algorithms "animal mode" is deeply anti-human.
- wruza 2y ago
  I don't see how you could avoid logic and do literally anything useful that is not animalistic by nature. I can only imagine how <human-incomprehensible positive adjective> it would be to be able to remember more than 7 things, use more than one thread and grasp complex ideas by simply looking at their schema for a second, all that on average. Instead we slowly follow triсkles of data, constantly being carried away by nuances and distractions, getting overwhelmed and tired in no time. Our natural "logic" sees god behind a lightning and witch behind an accident, please don't defend it. deeply anti-human What's wrong with that, just look at us going, globally. Any pro-human thoughts, really? Never understood this clinging to the horribly limited nature of humanity only because it has some relatively nice pockets (which usually correlate with deep thought and negatively with the lack thereof).

colordrops 2y ago

The PhD student writing this could be excused for being young an inexperienced but their advisor, tagged second on the paper, should have cut this off at the pass.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ComplexSystems 2y ago

On the other hand, the amount of actual entropic "information" that is processed when you identify a Rubik's cube as such may be nowhere near as much as you think it is, and most importantly, 10 bits may be nowhere near as little as you think it is. If we use your example, which is that of identifying an object, we may simply ask the entropy of what the distribution of possible objects-to-be-identified is at t=0, prior to any analysis. Saying we can resolve 10 bits of this entropy per second is equivalent to saying that we can identify one object from a uniform distribution of 1024 per second. Let's suppose this is a low estimate by several orders of magnitude, and that it's really one from a billion objects instead that you can identify per second. Then this would still only be about 30 bits/sec. None of this changes the main thesis of the paper, which is that this is much lower than the 10⁹ bits/sec our sensory systems transmit.

FartyMcFarter 2y ago
But you don't just perceive an object's category (like "cat"). We also perceive a high amount of detail about the object - colour, pattern, behaviour, we make comparisons to past behaviour, predictions of what's likely to happen next and so on. Sure, some parts of the brain don't receive all that detail, but that's necessary for abstraction. If you pumped all the sensory data everywhere, the brain would get overwhelmed for no reason.
- ComplexSystems 2y ago
  That 30 bits was not literally intended to represent only the object's noun category, but even if it did, none of the additional pieces of information you would like to add are going to change this picture much, because what one would think of as a "high amount of detail" is not actually all that high in terms of the logarithmic growth of the entropy. Take color: suppose the average person has 16 baseline colors memorized, and then a few variations of each: each one can be bright or dark, saturated or pastel. That would be about 6 bits for color. If you have an eye for color or you're an artist you may have some additional degrees of freedom. Hell, a computer using RGB can only represent 24 bits worth of color, maximum. I am going to suggest this stuff gets cognized less than 10 bits worth for the average person; let's just say 10. Now, of course, people can memorize more than one color. If colors are independently distributed uniformly at random, then processing N colors requires 10N bits. But of course they aren't, so the entropy is less. But again, let's just say they were. So how many color combinations can you process per second? I would say it's a bit of a challenge to memorize a set of 10 arbitrary drawn colors shown for a second. Most people couldn't continuously do that at a rate of 10 colors per second. That would be 100 bits/sec of info. The point is that you really don't perceive all that much. You show the average person a Rubik's cube, there is no way they're going to remember the exact pattern of colors that they saw, unless the cube were solved or something. They will perceive it as "multicolored" and that's about it. Adding behavior, texture, etc doesn't change this picture. None of this stuff is even close to 10^9 bits of entropy, which would be 2^1,000,000,000 different equally likely possibilities.

dantillberg 2y ago

> deciding that this is the most relevant activity to keep doing at the moment, instead of doing math or going out for a walk. How many bits of actual decision is going on here, as compared to the period of time that decision applies to? For example, if a person decided once per second whether or not to go for a walk, that could be 1 bit per second. But if that person is constantly transitioning back and forth between walking and not-walking, we could consider their behavior pathological. Instead, for most people, the information density of these decisions is quite low, i.e. the per-second decision bits are very compressible. Personally, I only decide whether to go for a walk (or not) _at most_ once every few minutes. Even if we add in bits for "where" and "precisely when" and "how long", I think we're still at just a small fraction of 1 bit per second.

lukan 2y ago
"Personally, I only decide whether to go for a walk (or not) _at most_ once every few minutes. " Consciously. Subconsciously much more is going on.
causi 2y ago
The vast majority of the brain's processing power, including conceptual processing, is not conscious. Conscious thought is the framebuffer of the mind, subconscious is the RAM.
dsr_ 2y ago
Your conscious planner may be making 1 decision/second, but your senses, proprioception, balancing system, etc. are handing you about a gigabit/second of data, most of which never rises to your conscious attention. When I'm reading, that's roughly 2000 bits/second, but I am engaging it with model-making systems that can completely enrapture me. I/O is not the same as computation; conscious computation is not the same as all computation.
- ChrisClark 2y ago
  Yeah, that's what the paper is talking about. A whole lot of input vs. a small amount of conscious focus.

ozim 2y ago

Don’t forget typing in English is also outcome of processing all the context. Also not so conscious context like „I am writing a reply on HN not on Reddit - making obvious silly pun about cats is not going to make upvotes - making quasi intellectual comment about subconscious processing should earn me some”.

benreesman 2y ago

I’m not any good at Rubik’s Cube, and to me it looks like a bunch of colored squares. But stuff I am good at? I don’t see it at all. A terminal? I never have any truly tangible conscious recollection of serious coding. It might be the same for people good at Rubik’s Cube.

ggm 2y ago

> But the brain is a general-purpose computer, not a speed-card computer, or English text computer, or binary digit computer, or Rubik's cube computer. Look, I like the sentence. I like it so much I might steal it. But, that said I think analogising what the brain does to "general purpose computer" is a bit awry because we can invent algorithms, and given a process we can implement algorithms but I still tend to think there is something ineffable about thought/cognition which is NOT general purpose computation. It's a heuristic. I dunno what I think.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago
The computer analogy is definitely off. For one thing, rationality is kind of bolted on to our linguistic ability. It's not deeply seated in our brain; it takes substantial energy to engage in logical reasoning and we're not that great at it; even very skilled mathematicians make trivial mistakes. Deeper in our brain is reasoning about causality. But even that is more of an input to our reactions and emotions than it is as a consciously accessible function, and it too is often wrong. As you said, it's a heuristic. We certainly can't solve the halting problem with brain magic.
- Vecr 2y ago
  Implementing algorithms doesn't need a computer, and it doesn't need something that's not a computer. That said, with enough willpower why couldn't you implement a universal Turing machine in your brain? I think you would need external memory (a tape) but that's not a problem.

fzeindl 2y ago

Could the 10bits be some sort of instruction-set-address-width? Meaning that while you are solving the rubik‘s cube, your brain has the capacity of switching into one of 2^10=1024 possible next states, which might fire nerve impulses for the body and also come with a new set of 1024 next states? When focusing on the cube about 20 or 30 of the next states could be related to the cube, while the rest is concerned with bodily sensations, other thoughts etc. What if learning something well meant that less states need to be reserved for the task/cube at hand because the decision tree going forward has become more efficiently packed, so more states are open for something else.

seanhunter 2y ago
THe 10 bits is just very obviously made-up nonsense. The brain doesn’t operate on anything like a binary system, sensory data is not digitally encoded - it is all continuous data. Even the abstract kind of answers its own question. It says sensory data is something like the order of 10^9 bits per second but the “information throughput” is 10 bits per second. It asks “why do we need billions of neurons to process 10 bits per second?” Well we clearly don’t because that’s clearly not what we do. We process 10^9 bits per second, and we do a bunch of things which aren’t just processing sensory data as well. And on top of that we do things which aren’t measured in the 10 bits per second also.
- fzeindl 2y ago
  > sensory data is not digitally encoded - it is all continuous data That might be correct but as far as I know the brain has circuits that fire periodically with a certain frequency (what brain waves are about). If such frequencies steer some kind of gate than you do have a kind of digital logic with 1 being where the brain waves cross the zero line.
  - josefx 2y ago
    > If such frequencies steer some kind of gate than you do have a kind of digital logic with 1 being where the brain waves cross the zero line. What makes you think that this is the case? If someone touches you from behind do you immediately fall over dead from sensory overload? Do you react as if you where punched in the gut? Do you look over your shoulder to check who it is? Or do you fail to notice it until they break a bone? There is a significant amount of inputs where the reactions are not just zero or one but happen on a scale, your digital 1 or zero is more likely to be a 1.0 or 0.0 of a numeric type with unknown bit depth, lets go with 80bit since x87 is just the worst and completely blows the 10bit claim.

atoav 2y ago

Well and not only that, your brain is at the same time processing incoming sounds which it spatializes based on the minor phase/level differences and based onnreflections within the ears themselves. Your brain processes all feelings for all body parts, including a big chunk of skin, temperature perception, sense of gravity to balance yourself, etc. If you received 10 bits once a second describing all of that, good luck, you probably won't survive the next 15 minutes.