Memory is the most interesting thing in the Universe to me.
Without memory, awareness is a dull concept. Without memory, you couldn’t think. You wouldn’t be aware of change what-so-ever…
Awareness is not even awareness without memory… Relativity is impossible without it…
Good and bad wouldn’t exist. Nor would any emotion.
However, what is memory without sensation?
processment of info?
But where does it go? There is no process, it’s gone as soon as it came about.
At least until you forget about it and remember that other thing that’s even more interesting. 
Good points. I think sensation is almost a necessary foundation for memory to occur at all. I wonder whether it is even biologically possible…? What could be the content of memory be if not fueled by sensation?
Exactly. I believe that awareness is perhaps a trait of existence, but only with chemicals creating memory can there be consciousness.
To soon to tell probably.
I would assume its the same thing a computer experiences when it remembers something.
As for what happens too it, probably the same thing that happens to a computer’s memory. When the drive is destroyed so is the memory.
A computer experiences… but a computer doesn’t /experience/ in the first place. So it’s not the same thing.
Have you ever asked a computer if it experiences? We can’t know for sure.
And maybe not experiencing is exactly what happens when you have memory without sensation.
Actually thinking back, I feel that’s exactly what happens.
Imagine for the sake of my argument that all you remember is that today is December 23 2011.
But with no sensations.
You never experienced seeing a calender telling you it was Dec 23, you never had a conversation where someone told you the day. Nor have you sensed anything similar in any past day. No sensation ever.
Just December 23 2011.
But even putting it in language you experience the sense of sound, and the words/numbers have a meaning to you based on past experiences.
I suppose the best way to think of memory without sensation would be like reading it in braille except you don’t understand braille, you just kinda know where the dots are (but not really).
Kinda like a computer has no clue what binary is. It doesn’t experience, it doesn’t think, it just holds up the braille cards so something else can read them and never tell it what they mean. But it doesn’t sense curiosity so unlike a person in the situation, it doesn’t care or even know to care. No sensation makes things drastically depressing and boring. Expect you don’t have the sensations of boredom/depression.
…so yeah. that’s the best i could how I envision it and even that’s horrible confusing. Best answer is probably don’t know and probably never will.
Maybe, but I wouldn’t think so.
Do you have reason to think so? You said it in your last post as if it was obvious that a computer experiences. I question that.
The problem is that human memory and computer memory, although functioning in similar ways, just aren’t quite the same kind of memory, are they?
we don’t actually know that yet. We barely know how the brain works at all.
If sure there is some kind of experience involved, something happens so there must be some kind of experience right?
It might not be a sensation, like something that can actually be sensed, but I would expect some kind of experience to occur.
They don’t function in similar ways unless you tell them to, ie fuzzy logic, which is probably a superficial simulation of the way we think at best. Let’s face it our memories are deeply flawed, but a computers memory has almost 100% integrity, and checksums will point out errors. You have to “tell” a computer to learn from mistakes, or even make them and if it makes a mistake it’s our fault. GIGO.
I think that’s the difference a computer thinks only in the way we tell it to, it therefore it has no experience, ours is the experience.
Computers just arrange grids of 0s an 1s that are either entered or stored and retrieved from somewhere by us, in a fashion that is then processed according to pre-existing conditions we specify. It can’t originate anything, Ie it has no creativity.
They aren’t remotely like the same kind of memory I agree.
And I wouldn’t expect any type of experience (what we know as experience) to occur. We each have two different expectations and no clear way of knowing what’s true. So just to clarify, you lean towards thinking that computers, like my laptop, are somewhat sentient?
I would really say sentient (they don’t really feel) but they think at least. I would put them on par with like a rat or something on a sentience scale.
Hmm, I think that’s totally absurd. And I’ll try to explain why-
See, I think of a computer as simply a more complicated version of the game “Mouse Trap,” or any other Rube Golderberg-like machine. A computer works like a simple chain reaction guided by micro-scale electronic machinery – instead of large-scale mechanical machinery – that allows for their coding and programming. I would say a computer is sentient to the same degree that a constructed Mouse Trap game is sentient, which is to say non-sentient. We’re having enough trouble as it is figuring out how to create Artificial Intelligence that’s actually intelligent without the additional trouble of also trying to create truly sentient life from inorganic material. Because AI and sentience don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand, i.e. aren’t mutually inclusive.
I think a requirement of experience is sentience. All other uses of the word experience as applied to non-living things I think are metaphorical…figurative. If all the “thinking” computers do is prompted by human programming, is that really thinking then? Also, rats do feel.
That’s how I think all intelligence works, even organic intelligence. But the micro-scale electronic machinery is replaced with neural connections.
Well, humans don’t need to be programmed because our neurons are created to do that on their own, computer chips can’t grow and prune their connections on their own. And in a way you could say we are programmed by genetics as each nerve cell knows exactly where to go in the brain and what its job will be at the moment of its creation.
Sadly, neither of our opinions can be proven right yet so i guess we’ll just have to wait and see who ends up being right.
But without the knowledge you’ve acquired from the physiologists, you wouldn’t know this. And without that knowledge, which would be extracted from memory to tell you, there would be no experience of it to you in a question/answer discussion about it. So everything that is discussed is from the standpoint of the knowledge you have accumulated in memory. You are memory. Man is memory.
I’m not saying life is memory, no. Life, somehow, is aware of itself. But even saying that ‘it’s aware of itself’ means that you have some past experience of knowing what it is to be aware. So we end up making a distinction between life (which has its own programmed in intelligence without the need to acquire anything else) and acquired knowledge that’s stored in memory and leads to thoughts, ideas and other mentations .
Memory is the affirmation (documentation) of experience. And yes, without it, there can be no mind at all; mindless wondering through futile circumstances, always being used and manipulated by those with memory, those most certain of their superiority and thus right in such use. Keep the people forgetful and confused by thus maintain the justness of your reign.
… and since we came with no individual mind, where does it come from? Who or what decides what will be put into memory and thus create ‘you?’