> This bandwidth thing is one of the questions I find frustrating, on par with people wondering if a simulated piece of brain has feelings (the answer is NO). Why is left as an exercise for the reader.
Now this is a hot take.
Smolensky's pdp paper modeled presymbolic processing with the harmonium, the first restricted boltzman machine.
You have a piece of copper and circuitry between your house and your ISP. Back in the day, there was no digital processing. It's just copper, amplifiers, filters, and mechanical switches. Why did dial-up internet never exceed (within a factor of 2) 30 kbps? Because that's the bandwidth of the channel. It's not that modem designers missed a more complicated, neuronal, way to encode the information.
It's really amazing that information and bandwidth can be as fundamental as temperature and mass. There's nothing symbolic about it in that lens. Symbols only come in because we know how to do important computations in the digital domain.
Analog television, FM radio, telegraph lines, telephone lines, smoke signals, the human vocal tract, all of them have bandwidths.
From the wiki page on QAM: "Arbitrarily high spectral efficiencies can be achieved with QAM by setting a suitable constellation size, limited only by the noise level and linearity of the communications channel." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulatio...]
You're absolutely right that SNR plays a role. But I don't see why you need to map to symbols.
Dialup internet did exceed 30kbps -- and that's because the bandwidth of the channel (the copper wire) was not the limiter. That's why DSL works and can in theory reach 1 gbps (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subscriber_line)
I believe it is the channel plus the receiving mechanism plus the sending mechanism plus the encoding mechanism that determine the bandwidth. I am not asserting this, but that is my understanding.
56kbps modems and the like relied on digital telephone lines. I'm not sure where the 30kbps number comes from though - earlier pre-digital modems did go faster than that. Although you could argue those were 'pre-internet' as well...
But the other end of the local copper pair switched and became digital, which changes the channel in my eyes at least. There was then a series of bandwidth increases in the digital realm, giving significantly more efficient and effective use of the channel.
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...
The author correctly points out that past eras developed metaphors to explain how the mind might work based on the technological innovations they were familiar with, but I think there's a lot more nuance in the computational theory of the mind.
Namely that the notion of computation is much more abstract, and potentially more portable across disciplines, than some of the historical examples that the author of that Aeon piece brings up.
Anyway, obviously I don't have any real answers but for whatever reason the brain-as-a-computer theory rings pretty true for me and I've enjoyed reading essays and watching talks about the topic [2] [3].
[1] https://medium.com/the-spike/how-to-find-out-if-your-brain-i...
[2] https://medium.com/the-spike/yes-the-brain-is-a-computer-11f...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKQ0yaEJjok
^-- This is the first part in an ongoing series of lectures that Joscha Bach has been giving at the Chaos Communication Congress; if you watch it and find it interesting you should check out the proceeding installments.
https://medium.com/the-spike/your-cortex-contains-17-billion...
One of the final points the author makes is that the brain might be a neural network made up of as many as 89 million neural networks.
That's a staggering concept.
If true, I wonder how anyone stays sane with that level of entropy in the system!
> The better we could communicate on a mass scale, the more our species began to function like a single organism, with humanity’s collective knowledge tower as its brain and each individual human brain like a nerve or a muscle fiber in its body. With the era of mass communication upon us, the collective human organism—the Human Colossus—rose into existence.
I like thinking about us this way too, as being both individuals but at the same time also forming a sorts of organism together.
What originally got me thinking about us this way was something that Sun Tzu wrote in his book The Art of War.
I think this might be the part of that book that made me think of it like this:
> The skillful tactician may be likened to the shuai-jan. Now the shuai-jan is a snake that is found in the ChUng mountains. Strike at its head, and you will be attacked by its tail; strike at its tail, and you will be attacked by its head; strike at its middle, and you will be attacked by head and tail both.
> Asked if an army can be made to imitate the shuai-jan, I should answer, Yes. For the men of Wu and the men of Yueh are enemies; yet if they are crossing a river in the same boat and are caught by a storm, they will come to each other's assistance just as the left hand helps the right.
> I like thinking about us this way too, as being both individuals but at the same time also forming a sorts of organism together.
You may be interested in Paul Stamets' thoughts on this, essentially, that the invention of the Internet was an evolutionary inevitability.
Where he says... "From this simple exercise, we can begin to build the framework of a metaphor-free theory of intelligent human behaviour"
Um, why?
I don't get why the dollar bill example somehow means that we don't store memories in our neurons?
What am I missing?
Thanks in advance for helping me grok this!
The piece talks about transmitting 4k movies over nerve fibers. I take that to mean: if you removed the nerve from the body and use it purely as an OSI level 1 physical layer. There is no neural net. There is no processing.
We actually have no idea how a bunch of atoms interacting create qualia, or even whether they do. There's no math to tell us that a configuration of atoms makes qualia, or what qualia it makes. We have no way of distinguishing between a conscious being who experiences, and a philosophical zombie with the same behavior but no internal experience.
Therefore we can't know whether a simulation of atoms actually does capture what's necessary for qualia.
It does have a sort of abstract mapping to something that looks like me, but since I have no idea what produces qualia, I have no way to know whether something essential is lost in that mapping.
Nor is it clear what the endpoint of a communication is. This is another issue. Does information get counted twice if it's used by both unconsciously by the brainstem as well as rising into awareness and is used by the neocortex? The list of questions can go on.
This bandwidth thing is one of the questions I find frustrating, on par with people wondering if a simulated piece of brain has feelings (the answer is NO). Why is left as an exercise for the reader.