• Benj96
    2.3k
    Imagine you had a perfect memory - perfect recall ever since birth and an endless capacity for adding new data. Nothing is ever forgotten.

    How do you think this would affect your perception of time? How would it affect your emotions - your ability to overcome traumatic experiences frozen in perfect detail and not fixate on past elation/joys and triumphs and live in endless mania? How would it affect your ability to apply meaning, and learn, as well as your ability to navigate contradictions, hypocrisy and paradoxes you've encountered and can perfectly recite at any time, would it make decision making more difficult, knowledge more difficult to attain?

    For me the ability to forget is not a flaw of human consciousness, but a necessity. I think the ability to forget is essential for tolerating pain and suffering, to give a sense of progression through time, chronology, and the ability to accept new paradigms and beliefs.

    This is the crux of the difference between computers and us. Computers don't forget so long as they have sufficient storage. Perhaps automatic forgetting is a neccesary feature of programming required to give AI more human attributes, but at the cost of being the perfect personal assistant.
  • Vera Mont
    4.1k
    This is the crux of the difference between computers and us. Computers don't forget so long as they have sufficient storage. Perhaps automatic forgetting is a necessary feature of programming required to give AI more human attributes,Benj96

    Forgetting is necessary to emotional creatures. I think it's a very big mistake to program emotion into computers. They don't need it in order to survive and raise young and have communities; it would serve no purpose except our vanity. Wanting to make it in our own image, we might also make it insane.
  • punos
    503

    I had an experience in my younger years when i experimented with all kinds of drugs that made me forget an entire day, and didn't even know it. Briefly, i had drank a 22 oz of beer with a bar or two of xanax and then i had some more beer. I hung out with my friends went to an arcade, played pool and won, met new people, went to IHOP.. it was a busy night. The next day when i see my friend whom i thought i had not seen in at least a week told me what had transpired the night before. He was there the whole time with me and i could not remember him at all, it was funny but concerning. I could not believe i couldn't remember any of yesterday at all, it was as if it was the universe that forgot me.. so strange.

    Thinking about it later, felt so strange to not have existed the day before. I don't really know the words to describe the feeling but i'm glad i had it. I believe it's informed my perspective on myself and consciousness, existence, and time.
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    I'm on Khan Academy and Salman Khan (it's a bloody one man show), who tutors members for $0.00 on math and a variety of other subjects, claims that he never memorizes proofs of mathematical theorems - he simply relies on his intuition and constructs proofs from scratch, every time! :cool:
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