Ask A Genius 730: Divots
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/24
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why do you want to talk about divots?
Rick Rosner: Okay. So one way to look at memory is, it’s probably not the right way but it’s not entirely the wrong way either is you’ve got a mental landscape and when you send out a query like “Who’s that actor in Nightmare Alley?” That’s like rolling a steel ball, a pinball across a golf course-y landscape; rolling landscape with gentle hills and valleys. The ball eventually rolls into a hole and the hole is… Oh that’s Kate Blanchett; that’s your name. Sometimes you circle the hole and sometimes you don’t get to a hole. You’re like “Ah… it’s like a K or a C or like whose name…” For a long time there was something wrong with my landscape about Margo Robbie. For some reason I can’t get the ball to drop into the hole easily on her name.
When I had total trouble remembering her name for some reason my landscape doesn’t differentiate well between or it associates B’s and M’s, like if I can’t remember somebody’s name one of the things that often happens is I’m like it’s either a B or M and that’s Margot Robbie is an M. So anyway, you send out the search query and there’s some geography of recall that most of the time if your brain works decently the query, the ball ends up in a hole. It is the right hole that offers the right answer to your query. I just want to kind of say that when it comes to that landscape nothing lines up under IC. In IC the world represents several things. There’s the material world that we live in, the material universe that we’re made out of; space and time and matter. And then we pause it, that space and time and matter is actually information that it’s information in a mental model in some vast consciousness of some other world altogether.
Then there’s a third analogy where I think everything goes bad which is this is all like a computer. And I don’t think it’s at all like a fucking computer except that it processes information. In a computer, things have specific addresses and very tight values. You’ve got a bunch of circuits; you’ve got billions and trillions of circuits in chips that allow various switches to be flipped back and forth; transistors, micro transistors to be flipped back and forth between two values; zero and one. You can construct images and virtual worlds out of that but I don’t think that’s how the mental landscape, our minds are constituted. I don’t think there’s a specific planet in the universe that represents the awareness that is embodied by information in the universe. There’s no planet, there’s no star, there’s no solar system that represents the concept orange.
There’s no there’s no structure in our brain, there’s no one neuron in our brain or even a set of three neurons that handle all the traffic around orange. I think everything is much more distributed and probably our brain could work as quickly and efficiently as it does if it weren’t distributed. I think though I don’t know how confident I am, that our mental landscape is you can have temporary very fleeting awarenesses of immediate events that might live in your awareness largely due to changing potentiation among neural junctions or neural gaps but if those fleeting Impressions and thoughts are going to be recorded, my guess is they’re recorded via dendritic action that the connections, the fleeting potentiation leads to strengthening of dendritic links among neurons; that your brain basically is able to rewire itself.
But rewiring the memories and even the little specific aspects of those memories like the actress Marion Cotillard has a mole on her forehead but the detail of her mole, that’s not recorded in any one specific place in your brain where if you went in there and you cut one dendrite or something you lose your memory of that mole. Instead it’s an aggregate of a bunch of changes in dendritic linkups, the strength of them and the action and what ones are there, which neurons are linked, there are no specific addresses for details and memories the way there are data addresses within a computer.
And similarly what the universe itself knows is not super local but everything the universe knows about some alien equivalent of some alien actors’ mole on their alien forehead and a complete other universe that doesn’t live in a mountain formation on some rocky planet, it is instead some aggregational manifestation due to the action of a gazillion photons and neutrinos spreading information out across the entire universe. The knowledge of that mole isn’t spread out across the entire universe. It’s somewhat local largely confined to say a galaxy but there’s certainly no freaking moon orbiting some planet with the moon being specifically dedicated to that mole that it should spread out.
So when I say nothing lines up I’m saying that nothing’s as neatly defined and packaged as the data in a computer which is inconvenient but also better because the computer isn’t conscious. The kind of data manipulation that a computer does doesn’t allow for the wide bandwidth sharing of information that that characterizes consciousness.
[Recording End]
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