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Cake day: February 18th, 2024

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  • 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.)


  • Information is information. Everything can be described in binary terms.

    Binary digit is how actual brain scientists understand bit, because that’s what it means.

    But “brains aren’t binary” is also flawed. At any given point, a neuron is either firing or not firing. That’s based on a buildup of potentials based on the input of other neurons, but it ultimately either fires or it doesn’t, and that “fire/don’t fire” dichotomy is critical to a bunch of processes. Information may be encoded other ways, eg fire rate, but if you dive down to the core levels, the threshold of whether a neuron hits the action potential is what defines the activity of the brain.







  • 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.






  • 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.)



  • 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.