Please excuse my technological illiteracy. Isn’t that just a form of compression that might reduce the (uhh) space that the image takes up without actually reducing the information processing?
I don't have a great way to think about the distinction between computation and communication. It seems to me that the "bits/s" measure they're using doesn't even have the right units? That said, information seems fundamental and almost physical, whereas something like "FLOPS" feels tied to a general class of implementations.
Maybe you can imagine that some part of your mind really doesn't need a very high bitrate description of the world. For example, we read novels and play text-based adventure games, and that's sufficient to conjure a rich inner world. And at what rate do we read? Probably not more than a few bits/s, I would guess? Let's see... Google's AI says
> The entropy rate of English is between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character.
Let's just say 1 bit per character for round numbers.
It also says,
> A typical novel page usually contains around 3,000 characters
so, 3 kbits/page. Divide by 10 bits/s, and you get 300 seconds/page = 5 minutes/page.
This seems too long to me. I think we read faster than that.
And that's ignoring that "a picture is worth a thousand words".
So, if there is a single information bottleneck into the "conscious mind", my guess is that it has a higher bitrate than the quoted 10 bits/s.
FooBarBizBazz|1 year ago
Maybe you can imagine that some part of your mind really doesn't need a very high bitrate description of the world. For example, we read novels and play text-based adventure games, and that's sufficient to conjure a rich inner world. And at what rate do we read? Probably not more than a few bits/s, I would guess? Let's see... Google's AI says
> The entropy rate of English is between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character.
Let's just say 1 bit per character for round numbers.
It also says,
> A typical novel page usually contains around 3,000 characters
so, 3 kbits/page. Divide by 10 bits/s, and you get 300 seconds/page = 5 minutes/page.
This seems too long to me. I think we read faster than that.
And that's ignoring that "a picture is worth a thousand words".
So, if there is a single information bottleneck into the "conscious mind", my guess is that it has a higher bitrate than the quoted 10 bits/s.