The Memory Machine

Why do we forget? New theory proposes 'forgetting' is actually a form of learning

Jan 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-theory.html

Access vs Loss:

The memories themselves are still there, but if the specific ensembles cannot be activated they can't be recalled. It's as if the memories are stored in a safe but you can't remember the code to unlock it.

It's not that you forgot, but that you forgot how to remember.

And on the collective memory -- we encode so much of each other's memories, when getting together with old friends and remembering a crazy night you all had, where each person remembers a different part, because you each have developed different "access routes" to different parts of that night. Only together can you activate each other's memories, and thereby get the much bigger, fuller picture of all that went down that night. 

via Trinity College Dublin: Tomás J. Ryan et al, Forgetting as a form of adaptive engram cell plasticity, Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41583-021-00548-3

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41583-021-00548-3

Image credit: Lost In Thoughts - Sebmaestro on Deviantart

Origins of Human Communication

Michael Tomasello, 2008

Pointing is the genesis of human communication,

But unless the people communicating share knowledge significant to that being pointed at, and unless they all know that they all know,

Then the pointing is useless and carries no meaning.

DISPLAY--such as wide hips, which attract mates
--both form and meaning are fixed
--you can’t hide wide hips and you can’t make them mean something other than ‘good for child-rearing’
SIGNAL--intentional and flexible

The roots of human communication are in the gestural, not the vocal, communication of non-human primates.

For primates, the flexibility and intentionality of vocal communication is more akin to display than signal, even though they [primates] have the same capabilities (vocal range) as humans.

Though their vocal-auditory channel matches humans, it is primate gestures that match the more functional aspect of human communication.

Human communication is fundamentally cooperative, and requires shared intentionality and [could have] evolved as part of a larger human adaptation for cooperation and cultural life in general.

--culture requires cooperation

--the culture is the soma, the phenotype – not the individual but the culture as a body to be modified/adapted

Cooperation, Communication, Culture

(anti-Chomskian) the fundamental aspects of human communication are seen as bio-adaptations for cooperation and social interaction in general, whereas the more purely linguistic, inclusive, grammatical dimensions of language are culturally constructed and passed along by the individual linguistic communities.

W.H.Durham’s Primary/genetic vs. Secondary/cultural Forces of Transmission

Coevolution

W.H.Durham, 1991

Origins of Human Communication

Michael Tomasello, 2008, MIT

Notes on Cognitive Fiction

via Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions, 2002

Agency Panic

-the panic of attributing consciousness to all kinds of systems, and about the difficulty of locating control at any one level of existence – the difficulty, in other words, in deciding what a person is. (p34, Tabbi referencing Timothy Melley’s agency panic of humanist backlash in contemporary U.S. culture)

We are at a loss to grasp how discursive social structures might impinge on individuals without depriving them of all capacity for autonomous action.

Knowledge, Fact and Contingency

Knowledge is the holding, or accumulation of facts, which in themselves exist, or are constructed anthropically, as an extension/precipitating of agreed-upon units. A fact is a product of prior facts, irreducible, infinite, like fractals. And they require a structure, held up by the beliefs of a society. And so facts are contingent upon the facts that make them up (in infinite recursion) and upon the subjects, the participants, the observers that agree upon their validity, and cement their sturdiness for further knowledge.

Programming vs Selection

Evolution is a process of selection rather than programming and thus the brain, and consciousness as well.

Reading Cognitive Fiction

-Can be thought of as interpreting/criticizing texts either analytically or psychologically

-Can stimulate a latent recognition

-Can force the question of how to represent thought and construct subjectivity

One cannot map consciousness onto cognition, or derive communication from hardware. One can only fluctuate between incompatible theories, and accommodate linear writing to multi linear thought, the conscious mind to the unreflective medial ecology. (p120)

The Imminent Mind

The imminent mind is not only in the body. It is imminent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem.

-Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p460

-cited in Wolfe, “In Search of Posthumanist Theory”, p50

-found in Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions, p34-35

Notes:

Brainless slime mould has an external memory

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19846365

Slime mold uses an externalized spatial “memory” to navigate in complex environments

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/10/04/1215037109

On Memory Non-Neuronal

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-memory-non-neuronal.html

Vista:

Microsoft’s Windows are opaque.

Aunt Colony

"I am beginning to see things from two different vantage points. From an ant's-eye point of view, a signal has no purpose. The typical ant in a signal is just meandering around the colony, in search of nothing in particular, until it finds that it feels like stopping. Its teammates usually agree and that moment the team unloads itself, by crumbling apart, leaving just its numbers but none of its coherency. No planning is required, no looking ahead, nor is any search required to determine the proper direction. But from the colony's point of view, the team has just responded to a message which was written in the language of the caste distribution. Now from this perspective, it looks very much like purposeful activity."

"Prelude...Ant Fugue", Douglas Hofstadter
in The Mind's I, Hofstadter and Dennett, eds., 1981

Beauty, Time, and Intent

In his book, The Life of the Cosmos, Lee Smolin asks:

What is the beauty of an ancient city vs. the ugliness of modern shopping center?

but I'll take a stab at the answer:

It is built up over time and by many different people.
Together, they cancel-out the individual conscious intent.

Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997, Oxford

The Intramental Userface

It is the pheromone that phrenzies the horses of Plato's carriage. It is the GPS Device that guides the driver.

"They pull on the strings of existence, but not by their own design. Only because they feel it on their fingers do they say they have done it.

It was really someone else."

-the intermental database