How can one remember things?
I see a face. Of a person I talk with for a day. Next day I see her walking in the park. I recognize her from a distance. How can I know I have seen her yesterday. Because I remember her. We know nowadays that the physical brain doesn't store information like a computer does. A computer merely imposes structures of ones and zeros on a a physical structure and transforms the according to a program, stored in the form of one's and zeros on the same physical structure. The structure can be a quantum structure or a classical one but the principle stays the same, be it parallel or serial. Be it a quantum computer or a classical one. Both the program and the data are stored in the memory, although the have different functions. In the brain, there is no such structure. It's us who have the real memory. Our memory doesn't make use of comparison. If I see a face, I don't compare it to a stored memory and (consciously or unconsciously) to the memory of the face I have. How could it be like this? If I compare them, and see that they are the same then, well, how can I remember I have seen the face before? I merely see two faces that are the same. You can say, well, you have seen one of the two yesterday, but that begs the question. So what is a memory?
Comments (59)
Is there a good reason to claim this? Cognitive neuroscience would tell us that the ability to recognise - the ability to make a qualitative judgement of familiar~novel, or match~mismatch - is pretty central to everything the brain does.
So a sense of things being known or unknown is built into the process of perception as a critical contrast.
I don't think understanding how the brain or consciousness works is a matter for logic or seems-to-me philosophy. It's a matter of psychology, cognitive science.
I'm not looking for a scientific explanation. I already have one. I'm looking for a philosophical one. What makes a face famiar? What does it mean that you know a face? I must have been more specific. I explained though that it's not computer memory-like. So you can't say: I have seen you yesterday because you are stored in my memory. It's still a pity that poem subject is gone. Can't understand it still. Took the poetic universe over?
No one has anything but a preliminary understanding of how memory and consciousness work. Trying to do the philosophy without adequate understanding of the mechanics won't work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time
I'd say Proust is more than preliminary, but some may disagree.
That's what you say. Of course there is. Introspection for example is non-scientific. Even philosophical. Besides, why should science not be included in philosophy? They were a whole once. I can't help it that you have no understanding of it... No offense... :smile:
You are discussing the details of how memory must work without knowing what science already knows about how it does work.
I've had the same experience with faces. Again, the familiarity but the features not quite how I remember them (assuming physical changes haven't occurred in the time span).
Where did I say that? Again, you put the words into my thread.
You said this:
Quoting GraveItty
You mean not like a Turing Machine, or not like any kind of machine architecture, including neural networks that try to mimic the brain?
Quoting GraveItty
It is unclear what you seek. But neuroscience would aim for a more sophisticated account than a Cartesian strawman such as comparing a memory of a face with an experience of a face.
So philosophically speaking, we would want to leave behind a representationalist framing of the issue and move towards an enactive or semiotic one.
Quoting GraveItty
Thomas Fuchs incorporates the phenomenological philosophy of Merleau Ponty in his model of memory and the bodily unconscious:
“In body memory, the situations and actions experienced in the past are, as it were, all fused together without any of them standing out individually. Through the repetition and superimposition of experiences, a habit structure has been formed: well-practiced motion sequences, repeatedly perceived gestalten, forms of actions and interactions have become an implicit bodily knowledge and skill.” (Fuchs 2011)
“From the point of view of a phenomenology of the lived body, the unconscious is not an intrapsychic reality residing in the depths "below consciousness". Rather, it surrounds and permeates conscious life, just as in picture puzzles the figure hidden in the background surrounds the foreground, and just as the lived body conceals itself while functioning.”
“Unconscious fixations are like certain restrictions in a person's space of potentialities produced by an implicit but ever-present past which declines to take part in the continuing progress of life.”
So? Why shouldn't I say that? And why shouldn't science, from physics to neuro-biology, and math be included on this forum? Math is the ultimate abstract formal system, originating in old Greece. I believe Plato loved it. So did the natural phenomena. Philosophy was the whole package, so to speak. Is it because there are separate forums for this? If so, then it's no real philosophy here. As it included it all. Why exclude real science, when the awe for it is so many times mentioned. The philosophy of science is included, so why not science itself? A fear of crackpots who can't find a way on the "official" ones?
It's a fact that the memory doesn't function like storing data on a computer. It's nonsense to claim the memory contains a zillion bytes of information. So there is no comparison. And even if there was, how does a comparison constitute a memory. I can say that two faces are the same, but that's no memory.
Because you don't know if it's true, you just think it must be true. You haven't indicated you have any specific scientific knowledge about whether memory includes comparison. I infer that you don't.
If I don't know if it's true, then why shouldn't I say it? Kinda funny attitude. But scientifically sound, no doubt. Oh, the memory doesn't compare insofar memory is involved. You have to recognize what you compare with too.
I have no response to this.
A pity. You had some constructive critique, so beloved in philosophy (though philosophy is more than the invention of abstract formal systems).
That's something I mean exactly! I'll contemplate it.
No comparison to what? I agree, no comparison of any merit to a Turing Machine. But why not of some comparison to a neural network?
Quoting GraveItty
If your argument is about rejecting the term "memory", then I would tend to agree.
A first clarification would be that brains work not on stored memories but active anticipations. They are designed not to remember the past but predict the future. So the comparison is between what is expected to be the case, and what turns out to be the case.
When we recognise people, things and places, it is in the context of some forward looking expectation. If I see you in the street, I am mildly surprised to see someone I know. I was mostly expecting to see people I don't know. So your presence pops out as emotionally significant, attentionally salient. A fact promoted to focal consciousness.
That focus then brings with it a fresh "computation" of my expectations. I am now flush with all the likely and unlikely possibilities that may characterise my interaction with this "you". The forward prediction of "my" world is maintained.
So the story is not about knitting together the present and the past, but about updating my general orientation to my immediate future.
The second clarification is that humans have language and so can do more than just do simple recognitiion. We can linguistically construct states of recollection. We can learn the habit of seeing our selves as selves that exist in the past and so imagine ourselves reacting to situations at other moments of time. We can construct autobiographical narratives - such as remembering you when I last saw you as some sort of episodic memory.
Eyewitness research and other psychology tells us how unreliable and constructed such narratives are. But still, this gives a whole other level to any discussion of what memory is.
As we layer the social skill of recollection on top of the animal skill of recognition, we move further away from any simplistic and mechanical notion of the comparison of active states of experience with passive stores of data.
It's nice the body is involved here. If I see a face there is a neuronal process. Say I look steadily at the face. There are pathways strengenth. A path of least resistance forms (in fact a bunch of parallel ones). Then later on, I look at the same face. Is the falling in the same path the recognition. The memory?
To the impression one had before. There are no two different images of a face I see. Though the face leaves a trace in the brain. A pattern of least resistance. If I see the face of my wife, there is a kind of falling in this trace, so to speak. Is this trace the memory? If so there can be zillions of traces, due to the complexity of the network. One neuron can be involved in multiple memories. So there is a kind of comparison made, as I see now. The face is drawn to the trace, so to speak. But there is no litteral comparison.
So simulated annealing? Hebbian gradients?
Do you want pointers to scientific models of recognition? What you seem to want to say is just the usual way of understanding the associative structure of the brain's neural networks.
The memory as we experience it is always a reconstruction , a reinterpretation of what was. It is a cobbling together of what is new in our situational comportment with channels of interaction with the world already carved in our bodies out by habits of behaving.
Check out this article:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ke-Kaehler/publication/226320095_Body_Memory_and_the_Unconscious/links/00b7d52de303902b6d000000/Body-Memory-and-the-Unconscious.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=-vtNULO_M3o6Zx9sUSjbcyfbi8-GlW6jzJ3E2-02gHFGMo8_VOea9-ValkxIVdn_wDcJ_dMfb-h77FFQyChp9A.oM_YRUKFqpoHtZd0n054eONWcUutPPUXt3Rz42idLm4ikfcu7rki-CKH0oKaHG7c6wzsgpcQdmJ3QoZ3ELMfHQ.-_uh8OHaZ-pI3tb_JZETCTiZBBPrEmo6WSNCKLUy0Q6N6lxLHKUL4is8kxwZhPJ2bRlFWWdMCvqEet_r_p0Zvw&_sg%5B1%5D=bbOZK7ElMthHLlbxM9hLqmnFGwFcdMfO9vYrxL8ZsupDjXAS5IFFAwKi-YfPK5emYDCoGp-BKmkTFTx2FDx5t4e9GZDLk_eVVnY0LM1AeqQR.oM_YRUKFqpoHtZd0n054eONWcUutPPUXt3Rz42idLm4ikfcu7rki-CKH0oKaHG7c6wzsgpcQdmJ3QoZ3ELMfHQ.-_uh8OHaZ-pI3tb_JZETCTiZBBPrEmo6WSNCKLUy0Q6N6lxLHKUL4is8kxwZhPJ2bRlFWWdMCvqEet_r_p0Zvw&_iepl=
I want to understand memory. I understand it, of course. But I don't understand why it is said that it's an unknown phenomenon, scientifically. What happens when I remember a sight? How can one say the memory has a number of bits information, while in reality I can remember many more that number? More than a number of one's and zeros? What does it even mean to say my brain contains 2000 Gbytes of information? The brain is no digital computer. Most things leave traces in the brain. There are more possible traces in the brain than there are elementary particles in the universe.
I wanted to write exactly the same!
I think this is the answer!
Interesting articles! Seems they fit my bill. Thanks! :smile:
I'm not sure I understand the bodily memory. Do you think the very recognizing is a kind of relapsing into an earlier state?
Yep. And unlike the conventional notion of a computer – the representational understanding - meaning arises semiotically. What is significant is the brain's ability to eliminate that all that "information".
To recognise is to whittle a near infinity of possibilities down to some useful act of identification. In a split second, any number of less well fitting states of interpretation are discarded.
So computers place high value on storing information. Brains place high value on how much can instead be ignored.
Recognition is something forced on our attention by our inability to otherwise look past some aspect of our environment.
I tend to consider this as poetry! In a positive way, I mean! Great.
And here's a related discussion:
https://jeffbowers.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/blog/grandmother-cells/
That's a very nice view! It's indeed the face out there that's familiar!
I think T Clark plausibly inferred that from what you did say.
I slag you off a lot Apo but I like this bit. Not that I'm qualified to judge, merely being an armchair philosopher. :) If the human brain is really supposed to remember stuff, it's fucking shit at it. It can do it a bit, but if a computer had my memory it wouldn't even boot.
How else can it be? His conclusion was false though.
:lol:
How?
Quoting TheMadFool
Can't remember I wrote that.
Then your point is moot. Right?
A natural function of the human body. There is a point from which on explaining the natural functions of the body becomes impossible or meaningless, and eventually tautological.
Comparison does play a role, though: For example, if you notice that one day, a woman has a beauty mole on her face, and a few days later, she doesn't, that's a recognition of difference based on a comparison.
That's very true. Her face doesn't "click" completely in a kinda engraved path. The mole is not in the inscription yet. Next time you remember the mole. You recognize her but the mole is new. Though I'm not sure you compare here. You notice that the mole is new because the "falling into the trail" isn't complete. There is a mole now. You can of course remember how she was and you feel the new "clicking" is not complete, because (indeed!) your old image , her old engraved trail, becomes activated too, to state the matter in a somewhat impersonal way. So the new is indeed compared with the old! Thanks for a new insight! I'm not sure why I wanna know this. Consider it a result of my scientific upgrowing. It's always nice to know things. I used to dismantle wake-up alarms. But to dismantle my grandma would go to far! Just imagine...
Not sure where a tautology comes in.
Quoting GraveItty
We can see because we have eyes. Our eyes are sensitive to light of different wavelengths. That's how we can see.
Of course, we can go into a lot more detail about types of cells in the eye, visible wavelengths, etc. etc. but nothing is eventually gained by that in explaining how exactly it is that we see.
Now how useful is that?
If you exclude the brain, it's not useful. When you include it, it can explain how we see. Now what we see though. I mean, it can't explain the conscious experience of light. Line that of sound. Sound and vision are not explicable. Their forms and patterns are, by pointing at the neuron correlate. But their experience not. Perceived patterned forms of blue, moving in a 3d space cannot be explained. The experience of them, that is. How can a description of them in a scientific way explain it?
The (human) memory retrieves information, and also compares. The issue with your post is you right off claimed that it cannot store like a computer does -- which is true. The functionalities are different, but human memory stores, retrieves, and compares.
Oh yeah, welcome to human awareness.
I claim indeed right of that it doesn't store like a computer does. It doesn't. In a computer, information is stored in static patterns of spikes ones and zeros, to be operated on by an equally spikes pattern of ones and zeros. On every tick of the computer clock the patterns are forced to change. In the brain nothing the like is going on. Information is stored not in the static form of one's and zeros. The modern conception of information. Connection strengths between neurons can contain virtually all information about the physical world potentially. A pattern of one's and zeros can too, but in contrast, you need an enormous amount of these one's and zeros, including huge amounts of programs to encode for their evolution. The brain contains the information of a huge number of engraved paths. Engraved by strengthening connectiviness between neurons. A memory is a reconstruction of such a connected pattern. Many of the patterns we experienced are projected onto the neuronal network. So indeed memory is stored and a comparison is not made between two different patterns but between a familiar pattern and a more or less different pattern existing as part of the very same pattern. Which makes us note differences on familiarities. We recognize and spot the difference. But I might be wrong or inarticulate. Hence the thread. To find the truth.
If it's true, then why that's an issue?
I hit my head and forgot due to injury causing me to say 'yes' to a question, I originally intended to say 'no' to, but I remembered the words 'yes' and 'no'.
Mental(brain memory) and physical(dimensional memory) may exist if the original topic is correct.
I only now saw your comment. You didn't link me. It,'s intriguing indeed!
So:
"Mental(brain memory) and physical(dimensional memory) may exist if the original topic is correct."
Let's analyze. Why do you posit the existence of two memories? The dualistic approach.A physical one and a mental one. Can you explain the difference? Do you postit them for the same reason as I do?
There is experience-rs and experience.
I recognise the experience as an experience-r, and I am whelmed by visual data that reminds me of sensory data only attributed to me.
Where-in the memory vault is the experience of the experience-r? Or are there two vaults?
I suppose it's like RAM and Harddrive, one stores memory away from the computer shell, the other operates within it.
I have first hand experience of this type of dualistic memory loss, which I outlined in my previous reply. I was forced to say yes to a question I originally intended to say no.
Thanks for the comment. For your information: you can notify me or any other by selecting stuff you wanna quote and press on the black quote sign.That way I get to know you addressed me. I didn't know you reacted but accidentally stumbled on your reaction.
What is experience-rs? Quoting Varde
No, just one.Quoting Varde
No, it isn't. As I wrote, computers cannot be compared with the brain. Well, they can, but you will notice that they are different fundamentally.
Quoting Varde
Dualistic in what sense? Mental and physical? Both belong to the same underlying structure.
I don't agree with you, then.
I propose there are two simultaneous memory vaults: one dimensional-type, regarding universal nature of simulation, and another organic-type regarding cyclic mind.
Your argument falls apart when you say, "well, they can" refuting your point in the prior sentence. Brains are a lot like motherboards and common hardware you find in a computer.
A mental-organic memory exists that allows us to forget or remember in the short term, such as 'do I want to go to the shop? Yes', 5 minutes later, I forget, but then stumble upon the second, longer term, physical-dimensional memory which reminds me to fulfil that original want.
Ah! Experienes! And theyare consciousness. To my mind. They are spirits. The core of us, somehow? Experiencing human qualities. Does this mean you can be in an animal form?
Quoting Varde
Not sure what you mean by cyclic mind. What is the universal principle of simulation? That a reality is simulated to be able to live in the objective correlate of the simulated world? And universal in the sensecthat the reality simulated applies to all realities avaiailable to mankind? Is the organic memory the one as existing in our brain, when looking at it from a materialistic POV? In a sense your view coincides with mine. We both pose two memories I say they are connected in a way that can't separate them. There is a big difference though. You consider the spirit as the I. I consider what I see in the mirror as the I.
On the off chance that you were suggesting that the brain is inferior to computer memory. So, pre-emptively, I was 'warning' you not to. :chin:
Ah! I get it! I think the brain is infinitely superior to a brain, luckily. But thanks for the concern. :smile:
The very last wonder of the universe!