On 06 Feb 2014, at 02:32, Pierz wrote:
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. 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.
Yes, it makes the neuro-mechanist assumption doubtful (perhaps), but
that hypothesis is eliminated at step seven.
Now, I am not sure that there is no place in brain for such big
memories, somehow compressed, inclduing the glials, and who knows RNA
or something. Nor am I sure of your literal account of hypermnesia.
Hypermnesics have quite impressive memory faculties, but those which
memories are immediate, are so much handicapped that they are hard to
test, some have buffer problem, etc. As Christian says; it leads to a
very confusing mental life, making their accounts also confusing.
Bruno
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