Thought For The Day

Taking the thoughts, ideas, and emotions we have in our brain,

and encoding them into an audible form, or a textual representation,

is a lossy compression at best…

posted on Thursday, March 24, 2005 1:15 AM by scott

Comments

Thursday, March 24, 2005 1:56 AM by John

# re: Thought For The Day

I actually wondered a while ago about what sort of 'bandwidth' humans have.

We can only differentiate 'instances' to some resolution (that is, somethings can happen so fast that we can't actually see it happen, so there is a limit on the 'sampling rate' of all of our senses). We only have 5 senses. So there must be an upper limit on the number of all possible human experiences, owing to the fact that we're mortal.

I've often wondered what that number was. I wonder how many 'bits' you'd need to encode an entire human life experience. Clearly, it's finite, and probably mostly a function of age.
Thursday, March 24, 2005 1:57 AM by John

# re: Thought For The Day

p.s. Did you know that your eyes multiplex data to your brain? That's cool!
Thursday, March 24, 2005 1:33 PM by Scott

# re: Thought For The Day

I'd agree it's a finite number of bits. It is an interesting question to ponder. Particularly since I'm not sure how to encode touch, smell, taste...
Friday, March 25, 2005 6:36 AM by John

# Your Life on Disk


I'm reading a few books on Analysis Services.

From "Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - Technical Reference" by Claude Siedman:

-- begin quote --

British Telecom is exploring the idea of storing everything a person sees and hears on disk! "Over an 80-year life we process 10 terabytes of data ...", to quote Ian Pearson, the offical Futurologist at British Telecom. As surreal as this may sound, it does show that disk storage capability isn't a concern for data miners.

-- end quote --

...so there you go. Apparently 10TB. Sans touch, smell, taste, that is... :)
Friday, March 25, 2005 2:16 PM by mitchell@4guysfromrolla.com (Scott Mitchell)

# Re: Thought For The Day

And if one could record the totality of senses throughout the life of one person, it could be relived by someone else. Or, what if it were fed into a computer? Would the computer then experiencing those stimulations be considered alive?

Perhaps we are all just living in a simulation, having our senses recorded, examined, backed up, and data mined.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Sunday, March 27, 2005 11:51 AM by Scott

# re: Thought For The Day

The FAQ at simulation-argument.com is the most reasoned Q&A I've ever read on the 'we live in a computer simulation' argument. Thanks for the link!
Thursday, March 31, 2005 2:11 PM by

# Sharing thoughts...

Thursday, March 31, 2005 2:12 PM by

# Sharing thoughts...

Sunday, July 02, 2006 12:06 PM by Matts Meanderings

# Sharing thoughts...