Do people feel that the neuroscience about how people actually remember and
forget is relevant to this topic? If so, Daniel Schacter's books are quite
interesting, especially "The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind fogets and
Remembers." The book (despite the title) is not one of these
improve-your-memory self-help books but is instead about seven specific ways
human memories can (naturally) be altered (only one of them is simple
forgetting, where you don't know a fact, and also know that you don't know
it, so that you perceive a gap in your memory). Schacter describes how
these are affected by age and disease, and talks about studies designed to
measure specific kinds of memory failure.
I think that the nature of our brain's memory storage and the ways in which
it can fail is highly relevant to how we might want machines to remember for
us. For example, we may be more likely to make errors of misattribution or
even to confabulate (have a memory which is completely false) than to forget
and know we have forgotten. If our electronic memories only take over when
we try to remember something and cannot remember anything, then they don't
help us in the situations where we remember clearly, but wrongly...
On the other hand, certain aspects of human memory seem quite creative (like
the "madeleine" memory in which a taste brings back childhood memories of
our grandmother) and do not seem easy to reproduce in computers. Obviously,
if we had a the grandmother memories in a datbase, and that database had a
specific field pre-set to record any related tastes that go with the memory,
the database would know the madeleine association, but it would still be
incapable of making links on its own that would generate these sorts of
memories.
These memories of association are very common, I think (for example, if I
play a music tape I haven't heard in years, I am likely to remember exactly
where I was and what position my limbs were in the last time I heard it,
generating memories I may not have thought of for years) but are rarely the
subject of attempts to cache our memories in computer databases. Yet if
some day we want to make a Proust-writing robot, its memory will need to
work by association...
Millie
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