owleye

I've always considered memory as recallable experiences and I too would describe myself as having poor memory. Moreover, I think the memory that is poor has a shorter and shorter lifecycle the older one gets. It is increasingly difficult to recall something we've "set our mind to" as we get older. Alzheimer's might be said to be what this converges to. But as you are undoubtedly aware we have other ways to compensate for such deficiencies.

One way, which it turns out is my strategy, is reconstruction -- i.e., detective work. If there is something I can't remember (like where I put my keys, I will try to arrive at it by reconstructing all my actions, including those that I undertake without being conscious of them (based on knowledge I have of my own actions built up through habituation). I rule in or out actions that make or don't make sense. It is possible that in doing so, the one actual (or most probable) series of events that were actually taken is resurrected.

A second way is not to rely on brute memory at all, but to use other resources to save and later recall what we experience -- through the recording of what our senses bring to us, coupled perhaps with annotations -- annotations that are sufficient to later make us realize what it is that we saved.

A third way is to save markers of every experience which when triggered cause us to re-experience it (if there is some difficulty with recall). In doing so the sign points to what the sign refers to and doesn't necessarily make it possible to go in the reverse direction. Given the experience we often find it more difficult to locate its marker.

owleye

emphryio

I think in a sense forgetting anything ever is horrible. All we are is a hollow shell with certain potentials and the rest is all memory.

To forget is the same as ceasing to exist. I consider ceasing to exist not a good thing.

I think the potential exists that someday the desdendants of humans could have perfect memory. And they would regard us with horror. (Gee this is the same thing I was saying about death in the input requested thread.)

Possible solutions?
1. Cameras recording our every move. (But can't record our thoughts.)
2. Maybe we forget because we our living wrongly in some sense?

I don't know, but it's depressing. Makes much of life seem pointless. Sometimes I think of how I am doing something that I will completely forget like it never happened and I try to do something to make me remember that moment. (Doesn't really work.)

emphryio

BTW, coldwind. You share that engineering problem with me and most other engineers.

(Also it took me a year or so to remember my wife's middle name.)