On 7 February 2014 06:59, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > 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<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. > > 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. > > Roughly speaking, you seem to be saying that having an eidetic memory leaves little space for anything else. So could that be used to estimate the total capacity of the brain?
I'm guessing memories aren't stored in HD surroundsound, despite earlier comments. The input stream is a lot of data, but surely memories are highly compressed, even photographic ones? (Maybe not using MPEG...) -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
