From the paper:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.0126v1.pdf
“In particular, memory functions must be vastly non-lossy, otherwise retrieving them repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay. ”
I wonder if they’ve ever met a human being? That’s pretty much how we work. Memories don’t so much decay as get influenced slightly every time we remember them. That’s one reason why they get witnesses to crimes to write stuff down straight away, rather than waiting till a trial, etc.
Sigh. To go from ‘brains are pretty good at storing information’ to ‘therefore brains must never leak lose data in an information theoretic sense’ is so misleading that it makes me wonder if it’s deliberate.
They seem to be doing this to build up the argument that a non-lossy consciousness isn’t computable. (And therefore, humans are special. ) The irony is that they’re trying to make human consciousness special by making it more stereotypically robot-like, by implying it can’t lose information.
From the paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.0126v1.pdf “In particular, memory functions must be vastly non-lossy, otherwise retrieving them repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay. ” I wonder if they’ve ever met a human being? That’s pretty much how we work. Memories don’t so much decay as get influenced slightly every time we remember them. That’s one reason why they get witnesses to crimes to write stuff down straight away, rather than waiting till a trial, etc.
Sigh. To go from ‘brains are pretty good at storing information’ to ‘therefore brains must never leak lose data in an information theoretic sense’ is so misleading that it makes me wonder if it’s deliberate.
They seem to be doing this to build up the argument that a non-lossy consciousness isn’t computable. (And therefore, humans are special. ) The irony is that they’re trying to make human consciousness special by making it more stereotypically robot-like, by implying it can’t lose information.