Memory, was Re: Platonism in modern etc

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Apr 2 06:45:57 PDT 2000


Dace wrote:


> >Ted's belief in this perhaps indicates
> >the source of his odd beliefs about "minds."
>
> No. My conception of mentality stems from my belief in the existence of
> memory, not ideal forms. Modern science rejects the idea of memory.
> Instead of recalling things from the past, we simply store the information
> regarding past events. Thus memory is replaced by information retrieval.

My subject here is confined to this clause: "we simply store the information regarding past events."

1) Huh? That's what we mean by memory, retrieving "information regarding past events." The whole passage is a confused and confusing tautology.

2) But (1) is trivial because the argument is based on an even deeper error, the belief that the brain "stores" information. (I am *not* allowing for the possibility that the disagreement here is *merely* verbal, revolving around the unfortunate metaphor of "store." I assume, rather, that Ted means the metaphor seriously.) The brain does *not* store anything. Contrast computer memory, where information is stored on a disk, etc -- it will remain there dead and (except for an external accident) unchaning until a reader vivifies it. But "memory" must be continuously recreated in the human brain -- which is one of the reason no memory is wholly "accurate" because it changes continuously as it is recreated in the neural circuits. This explanation is sometimes called "neural darwinism." (It has *nothing* to do with the pseudo-science called evolutionary biology. It is a metaphor analogizing activity in the brain to selection in evolution. Millions of impulses inflow on each neuron, and only some get selected for and passed on to other neurons. It is through this selection process that memory is maintained.)

There is, as far as I know, no good popularization of the neuroscience involved here. The closest I know of (and I could not follow all of it because lacking the background knowledge, is Israel Rosenfield, *The Invention of Memory: A new view of the brain*, New York: Basic Books, 1988.



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