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This is quantum woo fueled neo cartesian dualist bullocks. Sorry not sorry. For starters, if events in space and any point in time are accessible as "memories", the laws of physics that enable that shouldn't constrain the only application to memory. The same physical mechanism would have to enable telepathy and even time travel. Secondly, it violates the whole "no hidden variables" results from recent Bell inequality QM experiments. Third of all, it requires long term stable room temperature entanglement basically everywhere (HAHAHA LOL NO). Fourth, it flies in the face of what we do know about how neurons compute things vis a vis signal spikes and activation potentials. Fifth, it fails to account for the numerous, reproducible experiments demonstrating the creation of erroneous memories made from whole cloth. Need I go on?

I can't believe this comment isn't buried. Its one thing to engage in a bit of rank speculation outside your specialty, but this is straight-up crackpot science.

This would be a much more valuable and informative comment if it wasn’t so wrapped in self-aware rude delivery. Saying so as someone who is prone to make that mistake.

The value and information of @IIAOPSW comment is just gold when you compare it to the primary one. The delivery brings additional value corresponding to the absurdity of the post.

Some times expressing left-field/weird artistic/speculative/magical thoughts acts like having a tattoo on your face, i.e., it makes condescending anti-social people more likely out theirselves, which can be both informative and entertaining.

Its one thing to make an honest mistake, its another thing to make half-baked conjectures about entire swaths of research fields where people have made careers and wrote full-baked PhD thesis's. Its frankly disrespectful to everyone's time when someone who hasn't even tried to be reasonably informed makes up some random explanation for everything and presents it as if their "insight" is worth anything whatsoever. My rudeness is on par and in response to rudeness. Failing to make bullshit feel unwelcome in the most uncertain terms is nothing more than an invitation for more bullshit.

My entire point was that you’ll make more bullshit unwelcome, if you know better, by kindly inviting more well meaning bullshitters to reconsider their bullshit than by clobbering them. It’s not quite win flies with honey but it’s a narrower application of the same principle.

I see no need to tolerate literally ignorant rambling at the expense of informed commentary.

If a site keeps doing that, competent people go elsewhere. Why is that post the top comment on an interesting paper from MIT?

I see no need to tolerate ignorant non sequiturs but I’ll be kind in the spirit of my point and ask that you re-read my prior comments and hopefully understand that’s not what I’m suggesting.

Being inflexibly and uniformly critical of all ignorance also drives people off. And the direct subject to a reply isn’t always the most important audience. Sometimes you’re persuading people who are passively reading along. If that sounds absurd in this scenario, consider the number of times a gentler rebuttal in a discussion has given you pause to reconsider some foolish idea you hadn’t expressed. If you can’t think of one, you’re either an outlier genius or maybe overconfident and overcompensating.

Either way, most people aren’t dissuaded of their ignorance by being chastised for it. Speaking as someone who’s lost important friends learning that the hard way.

You must be young.

Okay I’m genuinely curious. Younger than…?

It’s hard to believe that fluff is the top rated comment.

Wait, it wasn't a tongue in cheek joke? Are people taking it seriously??? I thought HackerNews was enjoying a rare sense of humor.

> As developer I think it would make most sense to only save references rather than trying store all events inside everyones brains. That would be huge waste of resources and just damn stupid.

> And probably the way we humans have built our computers also reflects how the universe really works, because after all we are bits of the universe doing whatever the universe is doing.

I think this is way too simplistic. Just like planes don't fly like birds, computers don't work like "the universe"

We don't know much about the brain at all and starting to think about it in terms of "computer" logic seems very wrong to me. Computers are our very crude and poor attempt at replicating brains/intelligence, by definition they're built on ultra simplified principles that our own brains came up with, using computer terms to define the brain/universe is closing a loop that doesn't exist

It only sounds like a waste because you(we)'re constrained by our own brains, the universe doesn't care about our ability to understand or make sense of it. Something might sound unoptimised to you(us) but might be the only way allowed by physics.

Naming and defining computer parts using human/brain related terms was an error imho, it confuses people and make them think we are able to replicate (or even understand) things that we have no clue about, they're very poor analogies.

> That would be huge waste of resources and just damn stupid.

Isn't the entire universe a huge waste of resource and just damn stupid ?

Helicopters kind of fly like birds don’t they?

They don't. They fly because they are so ugly that the ground repels them.

Rather like some particular family of insects. Both planes (depending on their engine part) and helicopters use aero propulsion but their mechanisms differ somewhat as much as for between helicopters and birds.

They're more like maple seeds.

Yeah I always like to think like this sometimes, but as far as we know a "reference" doesn't make sense in the brain - it doesn't have access to external stuff so in the brain context it would be like neurons connecting to a single neuron. Aside from something like a URL a computer can't reference anything outside of itself and I don't think we have a brain equivalent

Planes fly more like fish swim in the sea.

> “printed” in the fabric of space. Then as apparently Space is not empty at all but filled with Planck scale micro wormholes entangling all things into this one universal neural network, then our brains should be very well capable of tracing back our unique trails through space and retrieve information through those micro wormholes.

That's fun enough if that's intended as some form of recreational speculative fiction/sci-fi. I'm all about that.

But you said "model", without qualification, so its hard for me to tell from your comment the extent to which you want to put this forward as something that stands a chance of really being true.

In Buddhist philosophy the mind is a sixth sense organ, perceiving thoughts. The Lankavatara Sutra from Mahayana buddhism goes into some detail as to how karma is formed, past life memories and the like, in the “storehouse consciousness” which is basically encoded into the world around us by our actions. I thought your post was very beautiful and similar in spirit to a lot of ancient philosophy on consciousness.

That's potentially a good starting point for a sci-fi setting.

That's unlikely to have any resemblance to how brains work though. For one, we would be lacking the mechanism to do such a 'retrieval'. We can also influence memory formation.

Say you binge drink. You are temporarily unable to form memories. We can pinpoint the exact area affected. Unless alcohol is somehow able to influence the micro-wormholes, it shouldn't affect memories at all.

> As developer I think it would make most sense to only save references rather than trying store all events inside everyones brains.

Remember, nature does not care about that.

Seems like there's nothing in that model that would stop you from being able to remember events that didn't even happen to you.

Encryption with a signed keypair maybe.

The soul is my private key?! Haha.

So that's why the devil wants them!

Or events that didn't happen, or memories formed differently from how events actually occurred...

Created an account to say that this post has probably changed my life. What an extremely interesting thought.

Keep in mind that this comment is in no way even a tiny bit compatible with our current understanding of how the brain works. Treat it as a good sci-fi plot.

Yeah well that's what I did, but by sci-fi plot standards it had a huge amount of merit and originality.

This isn't a peer-reviewed journal, nor the Bible. And your comment contributes too, by pointing out it isn't consistent with Western medicine. You're helping the reader who happened to buy into that, not to try combining it with scientific mainstream things, not talk about it at the water cooler, and not talk about it for instance when being psychologically evaluated. Like even if the psych likes you if you say things like that it's out of his hands and he has to flunk you. That's the mistake Feynman made, he talks about flunking a psych exam for the military, but like full-on full F, like they used special words to describe how poor they judged his mind to be, and then he replied to them accepting the F and asking to be flunked harder on the basis it was clearly crazy to write them that letter.

And he was constantly thinking about the fabric of the universe, entertained many wild theories to arrive at sound ones, I'm sure of that.

But yeah, thanks for saying that, in case readers didn't take that comment with a grain of salt. Yours was the grain of salt.

I don't think science, and the application of the scientific method, can be fairly categorised as "western medicine". We all have shower thoughts but I keep mine to myself, at least until I can actually demonstrate something with it.

Do you at least write them down for yourself?

Yeah Feynman wrote them down sometimes, way before being able to demonstrate. Von Neumann too. Einstein. Wrote down theories before they were laws.

This is a very interesting idea. My criticism would be that our memories are such imperfect recollections of the real thing that its hard for me not to see them as a "copy" rather than a "pointer". Signal loss through the fabric of space?

Clearly the brain is the message processing center for the antenna, which is the pineal gland.

Do you have any scientific references to back this up? I agree that there could be something to your theory.

References make sense to me as well, but I also agree with the conclusion of this article, that memories are distributed. If you put the two together, then I think it works well. Those could be distributed references, that when fired together, activate a specific memory somewhere else in space-time.

This reminds me of the book Recursion by Blake Crouch. In the book, scientists figure out how to use memories to time travel. Interesting concept.

True or not. This would make much better sci-fi trope then current quantum entanglement plot lines

Reminds me somewhat of the Pale in Disco Elysium

Coherence (2013) was pretty good though. Haven't really seen a quantum entanglement movie after that one.

This reminds me of the the Stephen's Baxter book "the light of other days". A wormhole device was used to capture video from any spacetime coordinates. It was a nice book.

I'll have whatever this guy is having.

That's too much of Dan Simmons here.