bottleneck of data processing & consciousness

Neurons communicate "simple" data relatively fast. Group of neurons communicate with other groups a certain type of data - processed data - at a slower rate. Human beings communicate between each other extremely slowly (in terms of kb/s) and in an eminently serial manner (stories, language). But the raw data has been packed, structured, compressed: they communicate symbols whose meaning can be understood (or rather can be defined) as the links they suggest over elements of an internal model of the world (more or less happily shared shared by others - at least that's what most of us assume).

We communicate discovered patterns - and we are pattern-discovering beings.

Percepts and ideas form a continuum, a hierarchy of more or less compressed information. The more compressed, the more "meaningful" (perhaps by definition). The so called "sense-data" could be conceived as the lowest level of compression that we are capable of understanding as information at all - and therefore unsurprisingly difficult to describe with language. Idea-forming processes as hierarchy of packaging and compression techniques; and individuals (and the self) as a hierarchy of packaging processing units.

There seems to be an inverse relation between speed of data transfer and self conscious emergent "entities".

3/3/2011

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