You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

ChristianKl comments on Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: James_Miller 09 October 2013 07:19PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (187)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: ChristianKl 11 October 2013 10:19:56AM 0 points [-]

Do you think that this is strong evidence? What does "most" of the information mean? How would you design an experiment to test infinite memory capacity?

One of the classic ways to demonstrate that a lot of knowledge can be retrieved is to retrieve from a person the number of steps in the stairway of the house in which he lived as a child.

I personally have IRC and ICQ and MSN messanger transcripts that go a long time back with contents that you could potentially retrieve.

The fact that you get in some savants total memory recall of some particular type after damaging their brain is also good evidence.

(I think wedrifid's "physics says otherwise" makes this discussion rather pointless.)

As far as physics is concered maybe a human being that's 1,000,000 years old runs into problems with storing his memories. That doesn't mean that an issue for human operating in todays world.

Keeping memories stored requires energy, how does it make evolutionary sense to store memories you never recall?

Because the main evolutionary reason that we store information in our brain isn't to recall memories. It's to pattern match what we experience into categories and make decisions based on those categories. For pattern matching it's useful to keep storing all information but unnecessary to retrieve individual instances of memories.