4 ms·

Maybe those infant memories exist, but they aren't accessible to our adult minds because our understanding of sensory data at the time was so different from our

Maybe those infant memories exist, but they aren't accessible to our adult minds because our understanding of sensory data at the time was so different from our more developed minds? The data is still there, but it's in a forgotten file format.

m463 3y ago
I had a friend who had a sibling that had a mental illness. When she was ill, she could recall other memories while she was ill. and vice versa. She could not recall what she did when she was ill while on medication. Sort of more than plain memories too, like how she was thinking, deciding, frame of mind, what she felt, etc.
milleramp 3y ago
and the hardware has been updated.
Accujack 3y ago
We are, all of us, born EBCDIC. The world teaches us ASCII, and we can make no sense of all we knew.
qingdao99 3y ago
This was my guess. I believe I have experienced this as an adult too: I played on a special Minecraft server (an anarchy server) for a year or so, and despite spending so much time on it, I can hardly remember my first few days on there. I have no memory at all of being at the spawn location. I believe it's because of what you described - as I continued to play on the server, my understanding of how it worked changed completely so my initial memories no longer made sense under my new framework.
madaxe_again 3y ago
I think it’s similar to that, but the analogy doesn’t quite hold. It’s a bit more like they’re there, on the hard drive, but they aren’t in the FAT. Our memories operate on association, be that by topic or by causal chain. Infant memories are laid down without those associations. I have some early conscious memories - I remember my second birthday, our neighbour walking on stilts in his garden, finding a snake in a gutter at the end of our garden - things which left an impression. I know these are memories as my parents have zero recall of any of these events, yet talking to my au pair of the time a few years ago, she, who was present, does remember the stilts, and the snake. Interestingly, since having an infant daughter of my own, I feel those primordial memories that I don’t consciously recall far more presently - I’ll cuddle her just so, or will tuck her into bed, or will make stupid noises while feeding her, and will have a moment of “she is the baby. I am the baby. She is the baby” with either just a feeling of familiarity or in some cases a brief glimpse of visual information. It’s an interesting topic - along with how “past life” memories form, as apparently about as soon as I could talk I was keen to lecture anyone who would listen on mongol siege warfare in the levant.
veunes 3y ago
Wish I was able to covert some files to "a forgotten file format"
rincebrain 3y ago
I am likewise of the opinion, having observed various things (in particular how people in severely altered states of consciousness like dissociative drugs can sometimes remember things from previous experiences that they cannot recall when not on those drugs), that a lot of memory "loss" is just that our process of memory recall is basically setting the same variables and then running the machine again, and if the code has churned since then, obviously the result will vary (and then be written as varied, since memory recall also stores the new result) - and if it's churned too much, it fails sanity checks entirely.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
That kinda jives with "compression is understanding". If recalling a memory depends, as a sibling comment says, on "re-running the machine", then you can't recall it if you can't intuit how you thought at the time. As if you compressed a chess game by using a chess engine and saying, "The move ranked #2, the move ranked #1, the move ranked #1" and some very tight arithmetic encoding. If you come back and decompress it with a different engine, it'll put out similar results for a little bit, then diverge into nonsense. (All speculation, for fun of course) Sometimes I feel at odds with my memories. There are certain images I always return to, and I'm not sure why. I'm not even sure what emotions they evoke. Nostalgia, I guess. There is one overseas trip where I barely remember anything, except that I hated it. I feel like I fucked up my childhood and need a do-over, but they say everyone feels that.

m463 3y ago

I had a friend who had a sibling that had a mental illness. When she was ill, she could recall other memories while she was ill. and vice versa. She could not recall what she did when she was ill while on medication. Sort of more than plain memories too, like how she was thinking, deciding, frame of mind, what she felt, etc.

milleramp 3y ago

and the hardware has been updated.

Accujack 3y ago

We are, all of us, born EBCDIC. The world teaches us ASCII, and we can make no sense of all we knew.

qingdao99 3y ago

This was my guess. I believe I have experienced this as an adult too: I played on a special Minecraft server (an anarchy server) for a year or so, and despite spending so much time on it, I can hardly remember my first few days on there. I have no memory at all of being at the spawn location. I believe it's because of what you described - as I continued to play on the server, my understanding of how it worked changed completely so my initial memories no longer made sense under my new framework.

madaxe_again 3y ago

I think it’s similar to that, but the analogy doesn’t quite hold. It’s a bit more like they’re there, on the hard drive, but they aren’t in the FAT. Our memories operate on association, be that by topic or by causal chain. Infant memories are laid down without those associations. I have some early conscious memories - I remember my second birthday, our neighbour walking on stilts in his garden, finding a snake in a gutter at the end of our garden - things which left an impression. I know these are memories as my parents have zero recall of any of these events, yet talking to my au pair of the time a few years ago, she, who was present, does remember the stilts, and the snake. Interestingly, since having an infant daughter of my own, I feel those primordial memories that I don’t consciously recall far more presently - I’ll cuddle her just so, or will tuck her into bed, or will make stupid noises while feeding her, and will have a moment of “she is the baby. I am the baby. She is the baby” with either just a feeling of familiarity or in some cases a brief glimpse of visual information. It’s an interesting topic - along with how “past life” memories form, as apparently about as soon as I could talk I was keen to lecture anyone who would listen on mongol siege warfare in the levant.

veunes 3y ago

Wish I was able to covert some files to "a forgotten file format"

rincebrain 3y ago

I am likewise of the opinion, having observed various things (in particular how people in severely altered states of consciousness like dissociative drugs can sometimes remember things from previous experiences that they cannot recall when not on those drugs), that a lot of memory "loss" is just that our process of memory recall is basically setting the same variables and then running the machine again, and if the code has churned since then, obviously the result will vary (and then be written as varied, since memory recall also stores the new result) - and if it's churned too much, it fails sanity checks entirely.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago

That kinda jives with "compression is understanding". If recalling a memory depends, as a sibling comment says, on "re-running the machine", then you can't recall it if you can't intuit how you thought at the time. As if you compressed a chess game by using a chess engine and saying, "The move ranked #2, the move ranked #1, the move ranked #1" and some very tight arithmetic encoding. If you come back and decompress it with a different engine, it'll put out similar results for a little bit, then diverge into nonsense. (All speculation, for fun of course) Sometimes I feel at odds with my memories. There are certain images I always return to, and I'm not sure why. I'm not even sure what emotions they evoke. Nostalgia, I guess. There is one overseas trip where I barely remember anything, except that I hated it. I feel like I fucked up my childhood and need a do-over, but they say everyone feels that.