From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Sep 08 1999 - 05:52:21 MDT
Matt Gingell wrote:
>
> Doesn't it seem though that there must be more to it than that? You need some way of forgetting or pruning the past or you'll drown in irrelevant detail. I’m reminded of a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote about a mental patient with a photographic memory who couldn’t tell whether there was a glass on his bedside table, or he was remembering the one that was there yesterday.
>
> -matt
In _Coding a Transhuman AI_, I argue that a useful system of symbols and
memory requires context-sensitive reconstruction from (some presumably
more compact) coding, not just reloading a precise recording of the last
set of data structures. For example, if "cat" just loads in a picture
of every cat I've ever seen, how do I imagine a "purple cat"? And once
that infrastructure is in place - in fact, I suspect that the
infrastructure evolved that way to begin with - the tremendous storage
capacity necessary to store precise images doesn't seem worth the
evolutionary candle.
The legendary theory that all memories are stored subconsciously seems
to me like obvious bull. I recall, for example, the experiment showing
that (gaussian) women are better than (gaussian) men at memorizing the
location of objects, either relative or in spatial arrays; 70% better if
you're testing casual, rather than deliberate, memory. I'm not getting
into gender politics, but I do want to point out that a differential
selection pressure implies a selection pressure, and one strong enough
to get a 70% performance improvement; if we really have perfect memories
stored, why haven't such selection pressures resulted in perfect performance?
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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