I was looking at the bookshelf a few days ago, and realised that though their relative position indicates they are among my favourites, I couldn’t recall some specific plot points and in some cases, even the ending, of some of the books! I was more than a little dismayed, but thankfully, found some solace in this post “How You Know“, specifically “Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists.” It immediately set me thinking on the idea of consciousness and what technology can do to it, and it was a wonderful coincidence that the author too touched upon it towards the end of that post. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
Two nieces have ‘happened’ to me in the recent past, 🙂 and I have clocked a few hours with them. The older one is just over a year old and is in general, a happy child. In my erm, ‘conversations’ with her during her stay with us, I have wondered what she perceives of the world around her. This was probably influenced by the fact that I had just finished reading Michio Kaku’s “The Future of the Mind” (must read!) and the four levels (starts at zero – plants) of consciousness. The final level, where humans are, are distinguished because of self awareness, and our understanding of time – specifically the enormous amount of feedback loops. This allows us to simulate, in our mind, possible future situations, and go beyond instinct and even emotions.
What bothered me about the books and not remembering them in detail was whether it would take away from my ability to simulate well. It’s not just books, most of us can’t even remember most things that happened early in our life. For instance, my niece didn’t seem to remember me from our meeting a few weeks ago, though to her credit, despite me, she quickly moved to her generic reaction – a smile, sometimes showing off her new teeth! So, at what point do we start storing memories, (previous posts on the subject) and become aware that we are storing it? And at what point, and how, do we choose to forget certain memories?
Meanwhile, as Paul Graham mentions in the article linked to earlier, technology is increasingly allowing us to store memories better, and we will begin learning even more from our experiences. Indeed, memory is probably the first step in our level of consciousness, and we will increasingly get better at defining the true nature of our ‘self’. But, as this wonderful post at Brain Pickings points out, there is a difference between truth and meaning. Technology will definitely help us finding the truth/facts, but I wonder whether even at Level 4 consciousness, we will be able to find the meaning we are searching for. After all,
