How We Remember Last Weekend
nautil.us
nautil.us
It would be a much larger change than say the advent of the internet and smartphones. And just like that change, there will probably be a neat little honeymoon period where the future is bright and everything seems possible.
And then all the brainware developers with mortgage payments to worry about will get to work implementing in-brain purchases and mental advertisements and thought mandates, and the last true freedoms and privacy will have been eliminated.
(Edited to include that we're probably just the folks to bring about this change)
Article forgot to mention an Exobrain[0] which is related to externalism. I know for me my digital memories are stored perfectly.
1) What constitutes a "digital memory"? I can imagine images, videos, notes, etc. that you've taken, but I don't know if that's all that you mean. (Google saving your location history is "memory" but maybe not "yours".)
2) What does it mean to you that they're "stored perfectly"? Is that just that they're stored at all or are you suggesting some rigor to their storage security such that they can't be modified easily by someone other than you?
Fuck, if my weekends were ever—literally ever—that exciting I'd probably be able to remember them instead of being like "uh... I may have done something dull but at least a little out-of-the-ordinary last weekend? Maybe that was last month? I dunno."
Though, if you do want a weekend like that at least once (hors d'œvre at least, maybe dancing in general, and at least one person to make accidental eye contact with), you can try to attend some startup launch or celebration event or a non-profit fundraising gala. The former might end up boring and the latter may be expensive for a ticket, but it's a great experience to better appreciate what you have at home (a computer to spend a lot of worthwhile time on, and also maybe family to spend time with).
Before you dismiss this as another kooky consciousness theory, please let me add that this the only mechanistically precise one out there. All others are black-box models (yes, a bold claim!)
Sadly, it is completely ignored within neuroscience even if its "founder", Stephen Grossberg, is generally recognized as one of the pioneers of computational neuroscience and responsible for many now-commonplace ideas.
(plug) We've even written a book that, among other things, offers a gentle introduction to this work https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-...
And for anyone in AI/neuroscience I’d really, really recommend reading Grossberg’s Magnum Opus with an open mind: https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Resonant-Brain-Makes/d...
This article may be a good place to start, even if the terminology takes a little getting used to: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089360801...
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Coming back to the question of consciousness, I’d wager that we are going to have to ask the question of artificial consciousness very seriously as AI models continue to get better at a rapid pace (no, they are not conscious yet). You might find this worth reading: https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-...
It doesn't seem that unrealistic to me. The staggering number of elements making up the system we call a brain is likely to lead to some truly unintuitive solutions.