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Even when talking brains and memories, we still can't get away from pointers and references, huh? I've never heard this explanation for such a phenomenon. Quit

Even when talking brains and memories, we still can't get away from pointers and references, huh? I've never heard this explanation for such a phenomenon. Quite interesting. When I remember something, or when I purposefully recall a memory, it is very easy for me to change the details on purpose even as I am thinking the thing. It is also possible to create wholly false but entirely plausible recollections (for example, "remembering" having sex with a past girlfriend in a time or at a place which we never had sex, but because we spent so much time together, I have good baseline data to produce all the most pertinent details, and my mind doesn't care about glossing over the things which are fabricated.) It's scary to think about. I am capable of consciously replaying totally false memories, so how often are the things which I remember a product of an unconscious version of the same process? How fallible is my memory really?

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> Even when talking brains and memories, we still can't get away from pointers and references, huh? That's because they're good models of a fundamental concept of indirection :). People sometimes think it's hubris that programmers tend to talk a lot about fields they "know nothing about", but part of it really comes from the fact that programming is dealing with one of the most powerful abstract concept ever devised - that of computation. > It's scary to think about. I am capable of consciously replaying totally false memories, so how often are the things which I remember a product of an unconscious version of the same process? How fallible is my memory really? Yeah, it is scary, though one gets used to it. Experience shows that most of the time at least your recent memories are pretty robust. There's a lot of context ensuring the consistency and accuracy of the "procedural recollection" of a memory, but it's procedural generation nonetheless. EDIT: want another fun programming analogy? Think about how fast you can answer questions you've already heard and thought about vs. ones that are new to you. You may come to the conclusion that the brain is mostly a massive cache, and most thoughts being cache lookups. You know the concept of "speaking before you think"? For me that sometimes happens literally, and it really smells like a partial pattern-match to a question doing a cache lookup in the brain. And now add to this that it's been estimated that the brain itself is clocked around 200Hz (Hertz, without SI prefix) of sequential computation speed...

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> Even when talking brains and memories, we still can't get away from pointers and references, huh? That's because they're good models of a fundamental concept of indirection :). People sometimes think it's hubris that programmers tend to talk a lot about fields they "know nothing about", but part of it really comes from the fact that programming is dealing with one of the most powerful abstract concept ever devised - that of computation. > It's scary to think about. I am capable of consciously replaying totally false memories, so how often are the things which I remember a product of an unconscious version of the same process? How fallible is my memory really? Yeah, it is scary, though one gets used to it. Experience shows that most of the time at least your recent memories are pretty robust. There's a lot of context ensuring the consistency and accuracy of the "procedural recollection" of a memory, but it's procedural generation nonetheless. EDIT: want another fun programming analogy? Think about how fast you can answer questions you've already heard and thought about vs. ones that are new to you. You may come to the conclusion that the brain is mostly a massive cache, and most thoughts being cache lookups. You know the concept of "speaking before you think"? For me that sometimes happens literally, and it really smells like a partial pattern-match to a question doing a cache lookup in the brain. And now add to this that it's been estimated that the brain itself is clocked around 200Hz (Hertz, without SI prefix) of sequential computation speed...