Beauty and the data beast

A human lifetime lasts about 3 × 10^9 seconds. The human brain has roughly 10^10 neurons, each with 10^4 synapses on average. Assuming each synapse can store not more than 3 bits, there is still enough capacity to store the lifelong sensory input stream with a rate of roughly 10^5 bits/s, comparable to the demands of a movie with reasonable resolution.

So says Jurgen “Trilby” Schmidhuber, professor of technical robotics at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. How are we to make sense of all this information?

Trilby Schmidhuber’s answer is that our brains look for ways of a-squeezin and a-squashin it: data compression is what them computer bods call it.

Where Trilby sticks his neck out is in equating certain types of compression with particular human experiences. So the experience of compressing the data associated with the symmetries in a human face is what we call beauty. And an unusually large compression breakthrough is what we call a discovery. For example, different apples tend to fall off their trees in similar ways. The discovery of a law underlying the acceleration of all falling apples helps to greatly compress the recorded data, he says.

Ya gotta admire Trilby. Let’s face it, we ain’t gotta clue about the nature of human experience. So any ruminatin’ philosopher has carte blanche to expound any manner of hocus pocus. But at some level, human experience is essentially a phenomenon of information, so maybe it ain’t so crazy to attempt to describe it in this way.

Trouble is, physicists are still a-wondrin and a-speculatin over the nature of information too. So it’s a brave man who wades into the debate over human experience with an argument based on data compression.

Let’s wish him luck, he’s gonna need it.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0709.0674: Simple Algorithmic Principles of Discovery, Subjective Beauty, Selective Attention, Curiosity & Creativity

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