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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…

Print | posted @ Thursday, March 24, 2005 8:15 AM

Comments on this entry:

Gravatar # re: Thought For The Day
by John at 3/24/2005 8:56 AM
I actually wondered a while ago about what sort of 'bandwidth' humans have.
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<br>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.
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<br>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.
  
Gravatar # re: Thought For The Day
by John at 3/24/2005 8:57 AM
p.s. Did you know that your eyes multiplex data to your brain? That's cool!
  
Gravatar # re: Thought For The Day
by Scott at 3/24/2005 8:33 PM
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...
  
Gravatar # Your Life on Disk
by John at 3/25/2005 1:36 PM

<br>I'm reading a few books on Analysis Services.
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<br>From &quot;Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - Technical Reference&quot; by Claude Siedman:
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<br>-- begin quote --
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<br>British Telecom is exploring the idea of storing everything a person sees and hears on disk! &quot;Over an 80-year life we process 10 terabytes of data ...&quot;, 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.
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<br>-- end quote --
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<br>...so there you go. Apparently 10TB. Sans touch, smell, taste, that is... :)
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Gravatar # Re: Thought For The Day
by mitchell@4guysfromrolla.com (Scott Mitchell) at 3/25/2005 9:16 PM
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?
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<br>Perhaps we are all just living in a simulation, having our senses recorded, examined, backed up, and data mined.
<br>http://www.simulation-argument.com/
  
Gravatar # re: Thought For The Day
by Scott at 3/27/2005 6:51 PM
The FAQ at simulation-argument.com is the most reasoned Q&amp;A I've ever read on the 'we live in a computer simulation' argument. Thanks for the link!
  
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