https://matpitka.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-popular-article-scientists.html

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Speed of though is 10 Hz: what does this mean?

The popular article "Scientists Quantified The Speed of Human Thought, And It's a Big Surprise" (see this) tells about the article "The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?" of Zheng and Meister (see this). The speed of human thought would be 1 step per .1 seconds. This time interval corresponds to 10 alpha rhythm.

The conclusion is rather naive and reflects the failure to realize that consciousness is a hierarchical structure. This failure is one of the deep problems of neuroscience and also of quantum theories of consciousness. Although the physical world has a hierarchical structure and although the structure of consciousness should reflect this, it seems impossible to realize that it indeed does so!

Only a very small part of this hierarchical structure is conscious to us. Conscious entities, selves, have subselves (associated with physical subsystems), which they experience as mental images. Also subselves have subselves as sub-subselves of us. The hierarchy continues downwards and upwards and the latter predicts collective levels of consciousness.

We do not experience these subsubselves as separate entities but only their statistical average. This makes possible statistical determinism of mental images so that they do not fluctuate randomly. This conforms with the fact that there is a large number of sensory receptors. For instance, this statistical averaging explains the summation of visual colors.

This applies also to cognition and quantum computation-like processes in which the outcomes are sub-sub-selves giving rise to cognitive mental image, self, conscious average. This averaging applies also in time direction since zero energy ontology predicts a slight failure of classical non-determinism. Averaging as a basic operation in quantum theory computations giving rise to predictions would have a counterpart at the level of conscious experience.

See the article Some objections against TGD inspired view of qualia and the chapter General Theory of Qualia.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.

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