Xref: utzoo comp.ai:8361 sci.bio:4260 sci.psychology:4050 alt.cyberpunk:5611 Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!samsung!spool2.mu.edu!news.cs.indiana.edu!msi.umn.edu!cs.umn.edu!thornley From: thornley@cs.umn.edu (David H. Thornley) Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.bio,sci.psychology,alt.cyberpunk Subject: Re: The Bandwidth of the Brain Message-ID: <1991Jan9.150033.14718@cs.umn.edu> Date: 9 Jan 91 15:00:33 GMT References: <37034@cup.portal.com> <37353@cup.portal.com> <2753@infinet.UUCP> <37618@cup.portal.com> <2755@infinet.UUCP> Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis - CSCI Dept. Lines: 68 In article <2755@infinet.UUCP> sena@infinet.UUCP (Fred Sena) writes: >>[Claim that references to pre-transmitted info should not be counted.] > >It's probably not worth going on with this, but I'm having fun so here goes. >I am not using the traditional model for communication. I'm wearing my >philosopher hat, not my engineer hat. I'm probably way over my head (or just >crazy) as far as trying to work on these concepts and explain them. > I'm not an engineer, but I sometimes claim to be a philosopher, so here goes.... >[Looking at processes involved in communication, and wondering whether > defining "symbols" and "data" in human communication is nearly as easy > as doing it with computers.] > >>I wouldn't say these pre-understandings are communication, because they >>are not necessarily the same between the transmitter and the receiver. > >No, I wouldn't say that either. What I am saying is they are *involved* in >communication because the effects of stirring up the pre-understanding is the >smoking gun that suggests something was indeed transmitted, even though it >was not "data" in the traditional sense of something which you didn't know >and now you know. It's more like a trigger and I suspect that it might be >"invisible" if you don't know how to look for it. > 1. They are involved in communication. 2. They are not themselves bandwidth. The difficulty with treating multiple meanings as communication is that what is happening is not exactly communication. The example used earlier in this thread is the word "nuclear", which calls up meanings including bombs, reactors, families, and cellular reactions. Unfortunately, since it calls up *all* of these meanings, it cannot be credited with communicating any of them, since the actual meaning is unclear without other cues. If it were possible to send multiple meanings selectively, this would indeed be an effective bandwidth increase. An analogy in computer communications would be a garbled message that could be interpreted as "compile nuclear.c" or "archive nuclear.c" or "mail this to the nuclear group". Therefore, human communication only exceeds nominal bandwidth where the ambiguities can be resolved somehow, such as context. "What sort of power plant are they building there?" "Nuclear." Computers have done much this sort of thing, though. In an Infocom game, if you order "Kill gerbil", it will respond "[with the umbrella]" if that is your only weapon; if you have more than one weapon, it will say "With what", and will then accept the response "umbrella". To me, the more interesting difference is the nonverbal communication that goes on, which is not possible to illustrate here, where even a smiley counts as three characters transmitted. In face-to-face conversation, we use facial expressions and voice tones a lot. Recorded conversations can sound real strange without them. How much of this you care to call bandwidth is up to you; the actual written-down informational transfer is rather low, but sight and sound images can be fairly faithfully maintained for a long time, and that's a lot of bits. >I was waiting to get a response about my sloppy definition of bandwidth which >Tom Schneider pointed out. Definitely an "oops" on my part. > That's not the real problem here, we can afford some sloppiness. >I think that we've split enough hairs on this topic, any other suggestions... > I thought I'd split a hair nobody had seemed to split before, excuse me.... DHT