The bottlenecks in our brains create awareness, meaning and coherence

Does it make sense to simulate the brain in a computer to produce a human-like intelligence that’s way more capable than a biological hum? I’ve make the argument that machine minds are different kinds of minds, and we should focus on intelligent function of machine minds based on their unique advantages rather than emulating how people think. 

During the discussions of uploading a human mind, I repeatedly asked myself why we were interested in doing this in the first place. The obvious sci-fi intent is digital immortality. Perhaps an expansion of the nature of being human by replacing biological embodiment with a digital embodiment that had the potential for greater bandwidth and augmentation of sensation and physical ability. We know the abilities of the human brain are severely limited in bandwidth and speed. 

The processing speed and storage limits

So let’s start with the brain’s limitations. You may have seen a recent paper showing that the brain processes speech at the remarkably low rate of 39 bits per second. The paper by Coupe et al. analyzed 17 spoken languages and found that while speech rates and information density per syllable vary between languages, the overall information transmission rate is remarkably consistent at 39 bits per second. 

As part of editing my book manuscript and starting my Substack posts, I turned my attention to being a better communicator at this intersection of neuroscience, philosophy and self-help. It’s really complex and many of the ideas are radical because they peer behind the illusion that the brain presents us through awareness.

As part of that effort, I’m been reading some of the recently published books on brain and consciousness like Anil Seth’s Being You and Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality. By the way, I can recommend the former with reservations, but avoid Hoffman at all costs. In their efforts, these philosophers of mind are hopelessly trapped in what I’ve started calling “Mentalism”, the explanation of brain function not through neurophysiology but through metaphor and theory all of which is untestable and without consequences in the real world.

I was so happy to hear a real neuroscientist discuss our understanding of the brain on Sean Carroll’s podcast: Jeff Lichtman on the Wiring Diagram of the Brain – Sean Carroll. Jeff Lichtman is a contemporary of mine, an MD, PhD who stuck with basic research on brain connections through a very productive career.

Like Jeff, I’m astounded both at how far we’ve come in understanding the brain compared to where we started, but in awe of how far we are from a real understanding of how the brain functions as a complex system of networked neurons.

it’s an enormous amount of effort. And I don’t want to make fun of this, because this is the field I’ve been in for my entire professional career, and I’m old. And we have learned an enormous amount. The question is, if you’re climbing Mount Everest and you’ve gone three feet, have you made a lot of progress? You have made an infinite amount of progress relative when you started and you had gone zero. But we are still very far from having a deep understanding of how the brain works. And I will probably say at some point, I’m not sure that is what we should be aiming for anyway.

It’s also interesting to hear Sean Carrol, a physicist as smart questions about the brain from what for us is a very naive perspective. He’s had some of those Philosophers on his podcast over the years and they’ve given him some wrong ideas about what’s represented in the brain and our understanding of encoding. But Jeff put it perfectly:

I think of a nerve cell as a living creature. It’s a single celled organism, like a paramecium or an amoeba, but it’s living in a very weird pond, which is your head. It doesn’t know that it’s inside your head. It doesn’t care about whether you’re eating a sandwich or listening to a podcast. It’s just there. And it has to do certain things to stay alive. And so all the things it does are for its own survival because it’s a single celled organism with a will to survive. And those things end up generating learned based wiring diagrams. That from their perspective, they don’t know that that’s what they’re doing. They just know that if they don’t do that, they’re going to be punished and die.

This is a point I’ve been working on presenting more clearly. We have an introspective sense that I call awareness that provides some access to brain function. But outside of what we’re presented through this limited mechanism, we have no access to the functioning of the brain at all. And when we use our tools to look inside, we don’t understand at a fundamental level what these neurons are doing and how they’re organized. They’ve been assembled into networks through developmental programs to process sensory input through channels of sight, sound, position, etc and produce purposeful behavior.

And Jeff makes a great point about the difference between describing the structure of the brain and understanding it in the sense of predicting behavior.

I think even simulating a worm in a computer is a challenge, though, with only 300 cells, so I’m not too worried. I think, as I said, the best we may be able to do is describe in complete detail what’s there, but it’s a big difference from saying, I now can predict its behavior, I understand it. No human being, honestly, no human being could hold this amount of information. The analogy I give is like, do you understand New York City? And you’d say, that’s a stupid question. What do you mean? There’s so many things happening at the same time, and there’s so much complexity, and I would say if you can’t understand New York City, forget about the brain. It’s way more complicated than New York City.

I agree that if we can’t understand a 300 neuron worm brain, understanding the complex biological system of the human brain with its billions of neurons is beyond reduction down to understanding. So we describe. Make general statements about regions of brain, their connections, their participation in aspects of awareness and behavior, but the goal is better and better description.

This is what David Chalmers famously termed “The easy question”, which is describing the mechanisms of brain function that underly cognition and behavior. I think Jeff underestimates our progress. I think we’ve come more than just a few steps, but I agree there is much more to learn. I’m confident that the understanding gained will provide insight into human problems like depression, schizophrenia and, ultimately, allowing each of us to attain our potential. Because even though the mechanisms are an ad hoc, tangled mess, their purpose is emergent functions like optimism about the environment or fear. And we have already found a number of levers to shift the system toward a more desirable state. I think we just need to be a bit more sophisticated and realistic in how to accomplish change in a complex system we can describe but never truly understand.

A week ago I posted for the first time on Substack and result has been quite nice. More reads of a post coming out of nowhere than I get here on my 25 year old blog based on analytics, but of course RSS reads these days are silent, so total audience size of a blog is an unknown. The community at Substack is really nice, reminiscent of the early days of blogging but enriched with many serious creators. It seems like the audience is looking for engaging content.

Writing on a schedule is a challenge that I’ll have to work on, probably by prepping more than a week in advance. At this point my goal is to see if I can get better at explaining my take on the topics where neuroscience and life meet. So I’m trying to take a single one of the concepts each week and try to make it understandable. So last week it was the illusion of self. This week it I’ve written about externalization of mental events as feedback.

In the meantime, I’m talking to some publishing industry pros about what to do with the manuscript. At this point, all options are still open, but I think a plan is taking shape. This writing, like my photography is my art. It’s for me and it’s my pleasure to share it.

When I saw that Venkatesh Rao, was “retiring” his blog of 17 years, Ribbonfarm and moving to Substack, it solidified my plan to try building audience there as well.

Here’s my first post there: Forget Cognitive Dissonance.

I’ve been writing in this space, hosted one way or another for just about 25 years now. The early days were exciting and we built up each other in a blogging community for a few years. Then with the rise of social media and commercialization of websites with ad driven clicks, blogging died a quiet death for all but a few high profile public intellectuals. I get traffic here from what I think is a small group of regulars plus some pages that Google serves up in the first page or two on note taking tools and camera equipment.

At least for right now, Substack feels a lot like a 2024 version of that early blogging environment with easy interaction with writers and low barrier to entry. Of course the monetization is a big problem with the balance between free and paid content varying wildly between creators.

For now, I wouldn’t think of charging for content as I’m after some more engagement than one gets at a site like this. I’m putting myself on a once a week schedule there with. more frequent notes here.

My other motivation, besides engagement, is to work on writing for a general audience to develop the ideas I’ve put into my manuscript. That’s put aside for the moment, but I know that the next edit should be an effort to be clear and systematic in exposition of ideas. I’m also curious about what subjects a general readership is interested in besides tools for thinking so that I can focus my next big writing project on something that might be more broadly read.

Dave Rodgers always notices when I start feeling the need to write in this space and I thank him for that. I’m glad to know that there are a few consistent readers.

A little while ago, I wrote about my review of what actually gets read here. It’s not the book reviews or philosophy, it’s the discussion of tools. And that makes sense, because it’s by far the most useful information for the largest audience.

And the last section of my manuscript is about positive steps and techniques for making better decisions. So it makes sense to focus there while trying a bit harder to lay out the unique perspective I’ve gained by looking into the brain mechanisms behind our choices. Because it turns out that it’s not so easy to make better decisions when almost all of them take place entirely outside of awareness by processes we have no access to or influence over.

After many false starts over the years, I started from scratch and finished a first draft detailing what I’ve learned over the years almost 3 years ago. I let it sit for a long time, but after picking it up again about 18 months ago, I’ve made it through a full reorganization and revision and have something that more resembles a book.

Along the way there were a few long detours into researching probability (focusing on Jaynes’ big book and) Polya’s two part treatise on plausible reasoning) and the neuroscience of perception and valence. So it’s about 75,000 words. A sizable book, but one that’s not really commercially viable in today’s competitive publishing world.

Why would it be tough to get published? Two reasons really. One is that I’m not known in academia, philosophy or as a public intellectual. This little corner of the web is visited occasionally and I’ve never built an audience eager to spend a ton of money on a book. Given the investment a publisher makes in preparing for print and distribution, it’s not a reasonable business proposition. Second, the subject of decision making is a very crowded area in the publishing space. For the most part, Economists have flooded the zone with their discussions of “irrationality” and “bias”. So books on choice and rationality abound, even if they don’t really help us much since most of our decisions are made outside of awareness and can’t be adjusted to avoid our built in biases.

It’s good to have this big project behind me and begin to think about next steps. As I’ve written recently, I’m look at options and but I think there’ll be more effort here as part of the path forward.

Thinking about how to best use this blog.

When you look at my most read posts here you’ll find it’s all tool posts. The Hobonichi, the Plotter, Cameras, etc. It’s true of my blog reading habits as well. Reviews of software, stationary, cameras, etc. I have to presume this is universal since the tools cut across all of the other areas of interest which are much smaller- topics like decision theory, systems and neuroscience. Yet we know that these small niches are where dedicated audiences are built through consistent posting. I read blogs on AI safety, quantum mechanics and statistics. All of interest, but nothing directly useful to me.

I’ve long subscribed to the idea that the primary benefit of the act of creating art goes to the artist. So much work is thrown out before ever seeing the light of day and most art never finds much of an audience. While creating is an act of communication, whether through image, music or words, it’s the artist that speaks and the audience reacts. The process of creation is itself valuable to the artist. Also valuable to the audience if anyone is there to appreciate it.

In most of the arts, we create a body of work and seek an audience. I make images and share them in a variety of ways including here on the site. There was Flickr, now there’s Instagram but at this point, we’re without solid social media support for my kind of photography. Since I’m producing it anyway, I remain motivated to carry the camera and make casual images, although no longer so focused on the craft.

Now having nearly completed a 75,000 word manuscript about how the brain decides almost entirely outside of our awareness, I’m now learning that non-fiction publishing is definitely not art. In fact, I’ve finally come to realize that having completed a manuscript is a distinct disadvantage in the commercial publishing world. I think I was a bit taken in by the self-publishing industry which operates a bit like social media- getting creatives to make product for free then monetizing their effort with services and platforms.

Non-fiction publishing is very crowded and there are lots of books on the brain, lots of books on irrational decision making and while none are really similar to mine in form or content, the manuscript I’ve produced has clarified my thinking and provided lots of opportunity for research, but doesn’t have the kind of simple point that the industry is looking for. It seems most likely I’ll finish the edit, self publish electronically through a few channels and move on to the next project.

I’ve enjoyed having the room to fully develop ideas as I’ve found the short form of blogging to be limited as a way to tell big stories. I do want to publish here more once the manuscript is edited and out, possibly elaborating on the ideas in the book which can serve as a basis for the ideas that’ I’ve been exploring.

This gave me pause:

Why To Not Write A Book · Gwern.net:

So, a book is a lot of work for a writer, even if it is mostly already-written writing, which crowds out new writing or exploration, and which tends to freeze them in place. But it gets worse.
A book commits you to a single task, one which will devour your time for years to come, cutting you off from readers and from opportunity; in the time that you are laboring over the book, which usually you can’t talk much about with readers or enjoy the feedback, you may be driving yourself into depression .

It reminded me of why I spent over a year on a first draft of the ODB manuscript and now the better part of a year editing, rearranging, doing deeper readings and thinking, thinking, thinking. You see, I’m writing for me, not to pursue a new career as a published author. For a long time, I’m been frustrated with the blog format to outline complicated ideas in depth. I’d write a post, but I had trouble writing it to be self contained enough to stand alone as an essay. Or having to repeat background over and over across essays to provide the background to understand the underlying framework.

Clearly, the answer to these problems is the extended format we call a book. Where development of ideas can proceed step by step with enough room to dig a bit deeper. That was the impetus to collect the ideas into a single work.

What I didn’t expect, but should have known, was the enormous value to me as author in working through the process of explicitly laying out the ideas clearly enough that an interested reader with limited background could grasp the big picture. Explaining the ideas to a reader means that you have to understand them yourself. Can’t get away with half baked ideas and unjustified assumptions. Plus, as one thing leads to another, one discovers all sorts of implications and truths that the writing process uncovers.

Now I will admit, as Gwen points out well, is that there is a huge opportunity cost in communicating on a regular, more limited basis. So often I’ve thought about writing here, but the priority just isn’t high enough to put aside the current activity to spend even a few minutes on a brief post.

Let this post stand as the justification to myself of the choice of working on the manuscript for hours when I could be writing here.