Towards the end, we get into language problems. Language developed long before the brain’s role in cognition was understood. Questions like ‘who’s doing the remembering’ make me wonder if we can talk about a ‘who’ and the neurons in a brain in the same sentence. Let’s say I had an operating system encoded in hardware and divided into many chunks, with some part of each system allocated to each chunk. I put these chunks all over the globe, and then run the OS. Does the question “where is the OS?” make sense? The language struggles, but the theory doesn’t.
The problem with ‘remembering last tuesday’ is the same. As far as we know, only people remember. Our language was set up around people remembering things and telling us about it, or us remembering things. Recently, certain parts of computers have been dubbed ‘memory’, and we use that to talk about the information capacity of a computer hard drive. But still, when we say ‘a memory’, we don’t think of it as something that can lie in a ditch. Can a pattern lie in a ditch? Yeah, if we throw the shape in the ditch that way. It’s more of an abuse of language than an abuse of reality. Are there correlations between thoughts and brains? Yes, and that’s not so strange. Can a running a process that is correlated with a thought lie in a ditch? No reason why it couldn’t. Can we eliminate all this explanation and say “there’s a memory of last tuesday lying in that ditch”? Only if we want to cloud the merits of a theory that is not significantly stranger than the predictions of other well-established and universally accepted theories (I don’t see why the shift to running a computer on a trillion people spread across the world isn’t as absurd. You could play Halo on these people. Playing Halo on people. What? That’s not weird? Come on).
This may be a slight tangent, but I think it is relevant background discussion for the topic at hand: If I give you a USB drive with a document on it, have I given you the document? No, not really. An alien culture which somehow obtained the drive couldn’t decode it, for a number of reasons: First, the 1s and 0s stored on it do not translate directly into the document. Rather, they talk to the computer system that will be running the drive, which interprets the drive in a standard way. The computer reading the drive inserts some information into the drive in the translation process. Then we get output into letters, and you read them. There is information inserted at this stage, because you must interpret the shapes into recognizable characters that mean something to you. Maybe I insert a few russian characters that look similar to english, but you read them as their english look-alikes. On top of that, you must interpret the words (maybe I spelled some wrong and you assumed I was using a totally different word), the sentences (maybe my sarcasm was lost), and the meaning of the whole piece (if you took it seriously and I meant it as a joke, you would understand it differently). Now, this drive had all the information on it to present to you the document I created, but much of the information is implied, and information must be inserted by other systems to interpret the data. So throwing a hard drive in a ditch isn’t enough, because part of our experience of a word processing document is in the way it is read by our computer.
Again carrying the analogy to the brain, a certain part of our brain might be associated with a memory, but that doesn’t mean that it is the only part of our brain that is active when we remember it. The rest of the brain could be playing a vital role in making sense of the ‘zeros and ones’ of that memory.