Thanks to @[email protected] for the links!
Here’s a link to Caltech’s press release: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/thinking-slowly-the-paradoxical-slowness-of-human-behavior
Here’s a link to the actual paper (paywall): https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(24)00808-0
Here’s a link to a preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234
Please define ‘bit’ in neuroscientific terms.
Binary digit, or the minimum additional information needed to distinguish between two different equally likely states/messages/etc.
It’s same usage as information theory, because information theory applies to, and is directly used by, virtually every relevant field of science that touches information in any way.
Brains are not binary. I asked you to define it in neuroscientific terms.
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.
And yet you were already shown by someone else that the paper that you refuse to read is using its terms correctly.
I think what you really mean is brains are not numeric. It’s the “digit” part that is objectionable, not the “binary” part, which as an adjective for “digit” just means a way of encoding a portion of a number.
But in the end it’s a semantic argument that really doesn’t have a lot to do with the thesis.