Kawoomba comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 October 2012 10:12PM

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Comment author: Kawoomba 22 October 2012 12:40:10PM 4 points [-]

Lots of memories are constructed and modified post hoc, sometimes confabulating about events that you cannot have witnessed, or that cannot have formed memories from. (Two famous examples: Memory of seeing both twin towers collapse one after the next as it happened (when it fact the latter was shown only after a large gap), memory of being born / being in the womb.)

I'm not positing that you can have causeless memories, but there is a large swath of evidence indicating that the causal experience does not have to match your memory of it.

As a thought experiment, imagine implanted memories. They do have a cause, but certainly their content need not mirror the causal event.