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Recently I was thinking about how my brain answers the question "What's your favorite movie?" and how I can easily answer that question, but it's harder to answ

Recently I was thinking about how my brain answers the question "What's your favorite movie?" and how I can easily answer that question, but it's harder to answer a question like "What's your favorite movie where a gun is fired?" It seems to me that whenever I watch a movie, if I really liked it, I check my perceived quality of the movie against the quality of my current favorite movie, and if the new movie beats the old favorite, I update the "favorite movie" pointer to point to the new movie. When someone asks "What's your favorite movie?" I just return the name of whatever the favorite_movie points to. The question of "Favorite movie where a gun is shot" is much harder, I think, because my memories aren't really indexed that way. I can't query by "gun is shot" so I can't get the subset of movies I've seen with gun shots and pick my favorite. To me, it seems like my brain, at least for movies, has something of a key value store, which I can scan, slowly and imperfectly, but not query with complex questions. Or, maybe, if the queries are too complex they timeout and I don't get back any results.

grawprog 6y ago
>The question of "Favorite movie where a gun is shot" is much harder, I think, because my memories aren't really indexed that way. I can't query by "gun is shot" so I can't get the subset of movies I've seen with gun shots and pick my favorite. And yet as much as yours or mine, or likely most people's memories aren't indexed that way, I bet if you asked enough people you'd find someone who organized their memories in some obscure strange way that would let them answer that question immediately.
benibela 6y ago
>Recently I was thinking about how my brain answers the question "What's your favorite movie?" and how I can easily answer that question, I can hardly answer that question I think I need to make a table of all movies I watched, with columns for different quality aspects, and then I could calculate a score for all movies. Then the favorite movie has the highest score. Then I think a few minutes about the table, before answering that I do not really have a favorite movie

grawprog 6y ago

>The question of "Favorite movie where a gun is shot" is much harder, I think, because my memories aren't really indexed that way. I can't query by "gun is shot" so I can't get the subset of movies I've seen with gun shots and pick my favorite. And yet as much as yours or mine, or likely most people's memories aren't indexed that way, I bet if you asked enough people you'd find someone who organized their memories in some obscure strange way that would let them answer that question immediately.

benibela 6y ago

>Recently I was thinking about how my brain answers the question "What's your favorite movie?" and how I can easily answer that question, I can hardly answer that question I think I need to make a table of all movies I watched, with columns for different quality aspects, and then I could calculate a score for all movies. Then the favorite movie has the highest score. Then I think a few minutes about the table, before answering that I do not really have a favorite movie