Originally published at: Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity - Summer of Protocols
Research Salon: https://youtube.com/live/dDEgt1-72YM
Four hundred years before the term artificial intelligence emerged, debates about the development of “artificial memory” stirred. In contrast to natural memory, artificial memory involves using aids to help us remember. It represents a procedural, protocolized approach to recollection. Today, memory can’t escape metaphors from computing, but this isn’t totally new. Historically, the popular understanding…
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Just realized that Hao Wang whom Kei just mentioned in her talk is the same guy who invented Wang tiles, and posed the aperiodic tiling problem
Tessellation has always seemed to me the connecting idea between memory and time. Especially aperiodic tiling which somehow seems like a good model of the second law or irreversibility or something. Viewed as locations for memory, a tessellation is time-as-memory. Viewed as a way of filling space (as a metaphor for time… tiles are 2d but the graph defining them are more like 1.5d and a good model for event streams I think).
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yeah i recall that paper coming up last year
Wondering if the flood of news that we get daily erodes an important aspect of memory. We lose a ton of depth. Or, we substitute availability for permanence. Viral news feels critical because our associative memory gets tricked.
This shifting sensory overload → disorientation
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Tit-for-tat in species like birds, bats, etc. seems like solid evidence that living memory exists between agents
just got me thinking about the landauer limit and forgetting
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totally. a bit of a tangent, but this reminds me of an hg wells story called “the new accelerator” that i read recently.
it’s about a drug that accelerates attention and effectively freezes everyone else and it reminded me a lot of social media. ie. another drug that tunnels attention to narrower slices of now, every moment stretching with days worth of stimuli, crowding out memories, etc. also the final line: “We shall manufacture and sell the Accelerator, and, as for the consequences–we shall see.”
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As requested, this was the talk with similar themes.
Also this talk by Hofstadter on analogy as the core of cognition is probably relevant too (it’s the gist of his later ginormous tome Surfaces and Essences which imo you don’t have to read if you watch that).
Very interesting connection, I had the same. Thinking about forgetting as losing the capacity of recollection. Then equating, loss of capacity with heat dissipation, chaotic reduction of a piece of information enabling the recollection. Like a core with many ends that could serve as starting points for the recollection.
@keikreutler Can you elaborate on what you mean by “The act of remembering your path through the digital labyrinth is a way of changing perception.”?
Borges considered that ignorance (the ability to ignore something not relevant) is the fabric of reason/intelligence.
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