On 12/26/2014 11:56 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
Am 26.12.2014 um 19:55 schrieb meekerdb:
But to say that DNA provides "long term memory" seems like an abuse
of terminology, making a metaphor into a factual description. DNA
provides "memory" only in that sometimes parts of it get to
reproduce. Genes are more persistent units, but their "memory" is
just get copied to not. There's nothing Lamarckian about it, much
less extra-corporeal survival of memories. Memories are necessarily
things that are remembered. I don't remember any previous life and I
doubt that you do either.
From the paper:
"In the twenty-first century the Hebbian network hypothesis came under attack and
attention returned to storage of specific items of mental information as DNA (Dietrich
and Been, 2001; Arshavsky, 2006a)."
Dietrich, A., Been, W., 2001. Memory and DNA. J. Theor. Biol. 208, 145-149.
Arshavsky, Y. I., 2006a. ‘The seven sins’ of the Hebbian synapse: can the hypothesis of
synaptic plasticity explain long-term memory? Prog. Neurobiol. 80, 99-113.
Evgenii
I can't get the first paper. The second is nonsense. Arshavsky claims that long-term
memory can't be based on network structure because it's not stable - but he doesn't
provide any empirical evidence that it's not stable enough. He ignores the fact that very
little information is actually retained in long-term memory (do you remember what you had
for lunch on this day last month?) and concentrates on the small amount that is. He
ignores the studies finding that recalling memories tends to change them. And he does
nothing to support his DNA theory except to say DNA is more stable. It would be trivial
to look at some brain cells and see whether they have identical DNA or not - which would
blow away his theory.
Brent
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