The phenomenon of eidetic (photographic) memory is well established as a reality. For an example of what it means, read the top answer to this quora.com question<http://www.quora.com/digest/track_click?hash=2e8ec7de05b636790212092c83f0936e&aoid=pLlVYjWVKa&aoty=2&ty_data=4012999&ty=1&digest_id=241884556&click_pos=1&st=1391558946766537&source=3&stories=1_L4sR6imoEQB%7C1_aytbQbnb2zW%7C1_jA8otFvN9FH%7C1_4XH6bzBFPwr%7C1_4TMBUpDzRpy%7C1_8f6Kgdm4jXW%7C1_XDaAF5TDFVy%7C1_zsSejxTjfe6&v=2&aty=4>. People with this gift/disability remember every moment of their lives in *perfect *detail. To me this raises real questions about the comp hypothesis and the 'yes doctor'. Consider the 'RAM' required for this type of recall. Memories are 3d and 'retina' resolution. If we consider that an hour of Blu-ray footage consumes about 30Gb, then some rough calculations show that Blu-ray quality footage of an entire life of 60 years would consume around 17,000 terabytes of storage. But these memories include tactile, olfactory and cognitive channels as well as visual and auditory information, and of course the resolution of the visual system is far better than Blu-ray. I'd take a rough guess and say that full recording of a person's mental experience in all external and internal channels would have to require hundreds or even thousands of times the bandwidth of Blu-ray. But even at what I'd think would be an extremely conservative estimate of a hundred times, we're up near two million terabytes (two exabytes). What's more, there appears to be no strain, no sign of running out of space at all, as if capacity was simply not an issue. This type of example makes me really question whether digital prosthetics are a real possibility at all - it looks to me strongly suggestive of a totally different way of recording information, or even of the possibility that recording and storage are the wrong metaphor entirely. 'Christian' in the above quora response says that he has little means of distinguishing a memory from a live experience, making for a very confusing mental life. This type of memory looks more like a kind of time travel than a recording. Perhaps this is still compatible with Bruno's version of comp - the universal subject inhabiting the pure space of Number - but it's more problematic for step one of the whole argument that leads to this vision, namely saying 'yes' to a digital brain.
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
