Are memories all we are?

clarsct

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If you follow the Forum Community threads, you'll find my more emotional posts there. I will cross link these as I get them all together. I will also post a thread in the Science forum, as I get time.

So, anyway, my wife's grandmother died this weekend. She was in the last stages of Alzhiemer's disease(sp?). When she passed, she wasn't swallowing food because she apparently didn't remember what she was supposed to do with it. She had ceased talking a while ago. I think she forgot how.

So, in comforting my wife, I also noted that the person that was her grandmother was no longer there, and what was left was a 'shell'.

So are memories all we are? Aren't our personalities and reasoning all tied to memory, ultimately? Is what we think of as 'consciousness' just a byproduct of our ability to remember?

It's a scary thought, when I think about exactly how absent minded I tend to be. How much of 'me' am I missing?

I'm sorry if this has been posted before, but its got me thinking lately.
 
Do newborn babies have memories? No ... outside of any rudimentary sensations they may have experienced in the womb that is ... but, they are very much alive and aware that they exist in the moment.
 
clarsct said:
So are memories all we are? Aren't our personalities and reasoning all tied to memory, ultimately? Is what we think of as 'consciousness' just a byproduct of our ability to remember?
Click to expand...

Not all we are, but a very large part anyway. Certain abilities, talents, behaviors, instincts, diseases etc. are more or less hardcoded in our brains, but the way we form memories is also extremely important. If you could convince yourself that you have (not) experienced certain things then your personality would be completely different. The problem is that your environment keeps reminding to you what your real life has been so far, and even if you could somehow move to a place where everything was new, you still couldn't avoid knowing that your self-implanted memories are fake.

The closest workaround I've found is acting. I got this idea many years ago when I was in a theatrical play and noticed that after all those rehearsals I had started feeling a little like the person I was playing. I was responding in real life situations with quotes from the play and was even reacting the same way that that fantastic person would react! So I thought, what if start playing myself with a few modifications ? What if I act like I am myself but with the good parts accentuated, the bad parts downgraded and a few new characteristics thrown in for variety ? So I did, and I still do from time to time. It works amazingly well! For example, if anger is your problem and you find yourself in a situation where you would normally get angry, you suddenly remember that you are supposed to play a better "you" that doesn't get easily angry. I don't know why, but this seems to work better than trying to fight anger directly. And -back to the point- eventually you form a memory that you are not really a person who gets angry easily! The way I see it, this is a kind of self-implanted memory or at least as close as we can get with the limited tools we have.
 
Hmmmmmmm.

Iachhus: I would put forth that a baby isn't a whole, fully functioning human yet. After all, when was the last time you saw one vote.

El Greco:
Ultimately, it still ties into the memory process.
After all, without the theatre experience in your memory, you wouldn't have hit on that nifty trick. How does experience differ from memory?
 
clarsct said:
Ultimately, it still ties into the memory process.
After all, without the theatre experience in your memory, you wouldn't have hit on that nifty trick. How does experience differ from memory?
Click to expand...

Of course it ties to the memory process, but I find it interesting that we can at least slightly "modify" our memories.

Experience vs memory, that's interesting. I guess there are differences in the availability of each. My view is that memories can theoretically be identified in the same way you can identify data on a hard disk. It has to do with the way synapses form or atrophy. Experience on the other hand is the way you retrieve and use those memories.
 
Iacchus said:
Yes, but who is it or, what is it that's doing the experiencing? Is it just a memory?
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I would say that the ability to demonstrate experience by retrieving and using memories is one of the "hardcoded" qualities of the brain. Of course, different people and different species have this ability in varying degrees.
 
clarsct said:
So are memories all we are? Aren't our personalities and reasoning all tied to memory, ultimately? Is what we think of as 'consciousness' just a byproduct of our ability to remember?
Click to expand...
Perhaps. But byproduct or not, I think our abilities to reason and imagine are separate from our memories. They may have formed from our memories, but the process in which they take form is so complex that they sometimes don't resemble our memories at all, thus creating a new, separate part of our personality.
When it comes to modifying or faking memories for ourselves - I wonder were the limit is? Can we act in real life as any character, without our original character interfering? This is where our imagination comes in, and that's one of the reasons I think it's so important.

clarsct said:
Iachhus: I would put forth that a baby isn't a whole, fully functioning human yet. After all, when was the last time you saw one vote.
Click to expand...
Are you implying that only fully functioning human beings can vote? I think several political situations has proven otherwise...;)
 
I am passing through experiences that can be directly related to consiousness debates.

WARNING: anedoctal data, confuse text and poor English follows.

My grandmother´s consioussness has been fading away due to several health problems. The process started about one year ago. Her memories suffered a first great blow right at the start of the problems, and she lost a great ammount of stored data. Nowdays she spents most of her time sleeping or sedated in what I would call a semicomatose. When awake, usually she can´t recognizes us. Actually some of us were wiped from her memory, or had their identities mixed, and even blended. Sometimes there´s a glimpse of consiousness, she can elaborate a sentence or two. Few memories remained, and sometimes I can´t help but have the impression she´s not the same person she was before the health problems. Her personality, or why not say, her self, was changed, as well as her perceptions of the world.

On the bright side, a bit more than 3 weeks ago my son was born. And I am watching his consiousness evolve. I see his learning curve. I see that he learned how to differentiate between myself and my wife. His first memories, the way he´s using them to create behavior patterns. His self is being built as he receives and stores more information. His perceptions of the world are changing as his senses develop.

So, I would say that memories are a very important part of our consioussness. They are somehow used to create some behavior patterns, algorithms, if you want to call it. In some cases, the memories can be wiped out, but the behavior created or induced, whatever, by them may remain. And how much will changing or wiping ou memories will change oneself will depend on what is changed or wiped. We forget about "unimportant" things every time and yet we seem to be relatively unchanged. So, I would say we´re composed by memories and behavior patterns. Some of these elements are not critical, while changing or erasing some others will actually create changes that are perceivable in the personality, self, consiousness, whatever. I am not a specialist in any related field, so, these ideas may be completely wrong.
 
clarsct said:
If you follow the Forum Community threads, you'll find my more emotional posts there. I will cross link these as I get them all together. I will also post a thread in the Science forum, as I get time.

So, anyway, my wife's grandmother died this weekend. She was in the last stages of Alzhiemer's disease(sp?). When she passed, she wasn't swallowing food because she apparently didn't remember what she was supposed to do with it. She had ceased talking a while ago. I think she forgot how.

So, in comforting my wife, I also noted that the person that was her grandmother was no longer there, and what was left was a 'shell'.

So are memories all we are? Aren't our personalities and reasoning all tied to memory, ultimately? Is what we think of as 'consciousness' just a byproduct of our ability to remember?

It's a scary thought, when I think about exactly how absent minded I tend to be. How much of 'me' am I missing?

I'm sorry if this has been posted before, but its got me thinking lately.
Click to expand...

Yes, we have talked about this sort of thing before - in particular its implications for proposition of reincarnation. What does it mean to be reincarnated if you are not you (as defined by your recollections and experiences).
 
How do you know that babies don't have memories-- I'd bet they do. Infant IQ tests measure infant memory.

Also, there are three aspects to memory

encoding -- getting the experience into the brain
storage-- keeping it there
retrieval-- accessing it when and if you need it.

I'd bet everything a baby experiences is encoded into memory-- it's the retrieval part that's problematic. Ever have some current event trigger a memory of something you haven't thought of in 20 years? That to me suggests that all of experience is encoded. Whether it's stored and can be retrieved is another issue.

Plus, there's a distinction between episodic and semantic memories. The former is memory for personally experienced events (like coming out of the womb; one's first big wheel, etc). The later refers to general world knowledge (like vocabulary and concepts).

You may have no episodic memories from when you were young, but surely you have semantic ones (i.e., the first word you ever learned is a memory).

I'm too lazy to look for a site, but I'm pretty sure babies start categorizing things immediately. And, categorization can only be useful if one has memory.
 
Well, thank you all for the contributions.

Anyway, I just learned on the Science thread that the diease affects more than just memories. So maybe that is a part of the process...

But it does seem to me that memories are the basis. If we wiped all the memories from someone, and had them re-integrate into society, and then returned all their old memories, would they:
a) have the same personality they always did?
b) have a different personality after reintroducing the old memories?

billy: I must have missed that one. Sorry, but I guess it can be revisited, no?

So, is personality just memory compounded on memory? and algorithm, as was said earlier? or is there a 'ghost in the machine'?

Oh, and for the music reference:
"All you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be."
 
Yep. All we touch and all we see, is all our lives will ever be. That's exactly what I think. And

"For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave."

I admit I may be wrong, but what I think (perhaps too much biased by my own experiences) is that we are built by -or made of- memories plus behavior patterns. And these behavior patterns -that seem not to be unlike algorithms- are at least in part created, or built, based in experiences, stored as memories. In the end, our selves are self-learning algorithms, I would say. However, since these algorithms need to be stored somewhere, they are actually stored data - memories!

Personality changes will be induced depending on what would be erased or added. I think that if I received a complete memory wipe and then all the data (memories + algorithms) I had before the "wipe-out" were restored, I would be the very same person I was before the experience. I would suffer changes only if I have had significative experiences during the reformat/reinstall intervall (assuming these recollections will be kept after the reinstall) or suffered some changes in my "hardware" -brain and hormone glands- that could influentiate my behavior.

This conclusion, of course, is also influentiated or -a consequence of- the fact that I think consioussness not only is a composite feature, instead of a monolithic coponent, but also comes in levels and is discontinual. Deep dreamless sleep or coma = no consiousness or no self, for example.

Now, regarding the "ghost in the machine", well, one might ask "who writes the basic software?". Or suppose that the basic self-learning algorithm IS a soul or similar concept. This may bring us -unconfortably IMHO- close to an analogy to the "clock-without-a-maker" argument and the homuncle supposition. I see no need for such complications, regardless of what I would like to actually see.
 
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