Does consciousness require memory?

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
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Consul
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

Post by Consul »

Sy Borg wrote: July 16th, 2021, 6:08 pm We can parse memory and consciousness. My PC has memory, as do bacterial colonies…:
In the context of (computational) information-processing, memory is "a device or medium that can retain information for subsequent retrieval. The term is synonymous with storage and store, although it is most frequently used for referring to the internal storage of a computer that can be directly addressed by operating instructions." (Oxford Dictionary of Computer Science)

However, "memory" is ambiguous between "memory-hardware" (= the information-storing physical system) and "memory-software" (= the information stored). Correspondingly, there is a distinction between neural networks as memory-hardware and stored neural information as memory-software.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

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Consul, bacterial colonies display memory too.

https://www.news-medical.net/life-scien ... -Real.aspx
... the environment of the bacteria can affect their behavior. While it might not be so clear in individual cells, it seems that bacteria are able to change their behavior at the population level in response to their environment. In the case of P. aeruginosa and biofilm formation, the behavior change caused by exposure to a surface lasts for multiple following generations. Therefore, while bacteria may not strictly have a memory, changes in behavior can last for multiple generations. This is an area which should be investigated further, as exposure to antibiotics may have a similar effect on bacteria – if a bacterial community learns to tolerate an antibiotic by changing its behavior, then this is important to know as future treatment with this antibiotic may not be as effective.
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

Post by Nick_A »

Scott wrote: July 15th, 2021, 12:34 pm Does consciousness require memory?

How does amnesia and/or severe short-term memory loss (e.g. as depicted in the movie Memento) affect consciousness and the ability for a creature to be or become conscious?

Would we have to say that someone with severe amnesia and an inability to form new memories is less conscious than the average awake human, and significantly less consciousness than you or I?
Memory is the ability for a quality of being to work as intended by universal purpose. Memory allows a bird to build a nest, a clam to open and shut its shell, a tiger to be able to kill etc. These are all remembered skills natural for animal life to function.

However, for a person to express more than animal reactive consciousness, a person must remember what has been forgotten. Plato called this quality of memory anamnesis
According to Socrates and Plato, the most important forms of knowledge come not from instruction, but by a re-awakening of already existing dormant or latent knowledge. This is called anamnesis (an- = un-, amnesis = forgetting, as in amnesia; ).

Anamnesis comes in the form of "aha!" experiences -- insights, moments of unusual clarity, peak experiences, etc.

It involves only certain forms of knowledge: moral (e.g., what is goodness?), existential (e.g., what is the authentic 'me'?), spiritual/metaphysical, and mathematical.
Human consciousness must be remembered while reacting by conditioning along with the rest of organic life on earth is our norm.
Man would like to be an egoist and cannot. This is the most striking characteristic of his wretchedness and the source of his greatness." Simone Weil....Gravity and Grace
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Consul
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

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Sy Borg wrote: July 16th, 2021, 9:23 pm Consul, bacterial colonies display memory too.

https://www.news-medical.net/life-scien ... -Real.aspx
... the environment of the bacteria can affect their behavior. While it might not be so clear in individual cells, it seems that bacteria are able to change their behavior at the population level in response to their environment. In the case of P. aeruginosa and biofilm formation, the behavior change caused by exposure to a surface lasts for multiple following generations. Therefore, while bacteria may not strictly have a memory, changes in behavior can last for multiple generations. This is an area which should be investigated further, as exposure to antibiotics may have a similar effect on bacteria – if a bacterial community learns to tolerate an antibiotic by changing its behavior, then this is important to know as future treatment with this antibiotic may not be as effective.
"Complex organisms have the ability to remember, meaning that information about past experiences is memorized and can be recalled. While this is established, less is known about the memory of simple, unicellular organisms like bacteria. Do they somehow have the ability to recall information about their environment, for example? At least, their past experiences appear to have an effect on their behavior."

Source: https://www.news-medical.net/life-scien ... -Real.aspx

First of all, the "experience" of bacteria isn't subjective experience but mere exposure to chemical or physical stimuli.

Information about something is semantic information; and bacteria are surely incapable of processing semantic information. Semantic information tells its receiver something about something else, whereas asemantic information (mere signal-information) tells its receiver to do something simply by making the receiver do it, or causing the receiver to do it. That is, mere signal-information is instructive or imperative in a nonrepresentative way.

As I already mentioned, there are different kinds of memory; and in addition to the distinction between ultra-short-term memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory there is a distinction between declarative memory and nondeclarative (procedural) memory. See:

* Kinds of Memory: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/memory/#KindMemo

* Conscious and Unconscious Memory Systems: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4355270/

If bacteria can properly be said to have a memory, it's a primitive form of (consciousness-independent) nondeclarative memory, a primitive form of learning.

"Nondeclarative memory is dispositional and is expressed through performance rather than recollection.

Nondeclarative memory (sometimes termed implicit memory) refers to a collection of abilities that are expressed through performance without requiring conscious memory content. Study of nondeclarative memory began with motor skills and perceptual skills, as described above, but soon included additional abilities as well."


Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4355270/
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

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Consul wrote: July 16th, 2021, 11:38 pmIf bacteria can properly be said to have a memory, it's a primitive form of (consciousness-independent) nondeclarative memory, a primitive form of learning.

"Nondeclarative memory is dispositional and is expressed through performance rather than recollection.

Nondeclarative memory (sometimes termed implicit memory) refers to a collection of abilities that are expressed through performance without requiring conscious memory content. Study of nondeclarative memory began with motor skills and perceptual skills, as described above, but soon included additional abilities as well."


Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4355270/
I like it. You are a fount of knowledge!
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RJG
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

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Scott wrote:Does consciousness require memory?
The answer is YES.

Q. Without memory, how can you know anything? How can you know that you are experiencing something?
A. Without memory, there can be no consciousness. No memory = no recognition = no consciousness.

The answer can't be any more obvious.
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

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Scott wrote: July 15th, 2021, 12:34 pm Does consciousness require memory?

How does amnesia and/or severe short-term memory loss (e.g. as depicted in the movie Memento) affect consciousness and the ability for a creature to be or become conscious?

Would we have to say that someone with severe amnesia and an inability to form new memories is less conscious than the average awake human, and significantly less conscious than you or I?
This person would not be able to do anything. All actions would require some form of memory.

Try to design a useful algorithm that does not use any memory.

For example, 1+1=2 requires the memory of the first 1 and also the memory of the answer and how to understand it.

To be self-aware would require a memory of self.

We could be aware of ourselves but without any context. Doesn't seem that awareness without memory could be of any value. Without any memory, no logic can proceed. Emotion could exist, but without context, it would have no value.

It is possible but without value.
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

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Consul wrote: July 16th, 2021, 11:38 pm *Conscious and Unconscious Memory Systems: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4355270/
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

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If the stream of experience were a sequence of discrete and instantaneous experiences which are memorially unconnected to one another, the experience of temporal succession, persistence, continuous duration or motion, and change would be impossible.

QUOTE>
"To do full justice to our conscious perceptual experience, mention must be made of our awareness of succession, duration and change. Even the banal experience as I look out of my office window includes leaves and branches nodding in the wind, cars moving down the road, their lights blinking successively on-and-off as they turn, and now a bus pausing for a moment at its stop before moving on. Many theorists have suggested that our capacity to see such happenings, and more generally to perceive temporal aspects of reality, depends essentially on memory. …I begin by motivating the idea that memory must be involved in our temporal consciousness via the notorious slogan that a succession of experiences is not, in and of itself, an experience of succession."

(Phillips, Ian. "Consciousness, Time, and Memory." In The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, edited by Uriah Kriegel, 286-297. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. p. 286)
<QUOTE
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

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How could there be a diachronic unity and continuity of (contents of) consciousness without memory?

The Unity of Consciousness > Unity across Time: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... itAcroTime
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

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Consul wrote: July 16th, 2021, 7:22 pm
-0+ wrote: July 15th, 2021, 7:46 pmAll consciousness is present experience. Present experience could potentially be about the past or future. An experiencer may or may not experience some awareness that present experience relates to the past or the future.

While memory may be used to flag that present experience relates to the past, it may be possible to experience something as relating to the past without having any memory of this. Present experience could potentially be falsely flagged as relating to the past.
How long is the present of experience, the now of consciousness? What is its duration? Is it a temporally unextended instant or a temporally extended interval?

See: Temporal Consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... -temporal/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specious_present
The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time referred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous of the past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past—a recent past—delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series, no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then, considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three ... nonentities—the past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of the specious present.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

Post by RJG »

Consul wrote:How could there be a diachronic unity and continuity of (contents of) consciousness without memory?
Or better yet, how could there be a singular (momentary) conscious experience without memory? ...there can't! -- Consciousness OBVIOUSLY (self-evidently!) requires memory!

Here's the simple proof:
P1. Without memory there could be no recognition.
P2. Without recognition, there could be no consciousness (nothing to know).
C1. Therefore, without memory, there could be no consciousness
C2. Therefore, consciousness requires memory.

And possibly:
C3. Therefore, consciousness is the experience of recognition, made possible by memory.
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

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RJG wrote: July 17th, 2021, 5:29 pm
Consul wrote:How could there be a diachronic unity and continuity of (contents of) consciousness without memory?
Or better yet, how could there be a singular (momentary) conscious experience without memory? ...there can't! -- Consciousness OBVIOUSLY (self-evidently!) requires memory!

Here's the simple proof:
P1. Without memory there could be no recognition.
P2. Without recognition, there could be no consciousness (nothing to know).
C1. Therefore, without memory, there could be no consciousness
C2. Therefore, consciousness requires memory.

And possibly:
C3. Therefore, consciousness is the experience of recognition, made possible by memory.
why is P2 true ?
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

Post by Nick_A »

"My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists." —Nikola Tesla
The consensus of opinion is that Man creates consciouness through memory. Tesla believes that Consciousness as the source of the fragments of creation have always existed.

Man as well all organic life receives impressions in accordance with its quality of being. Man's problem isn't receiving the impressions of the external world but rather the tendency to subjectively interpreting them and calling the results memory. Is it possible to receive the impressions of the external world consciously and impartially without creating what we call normally call: "consciousness."
Man would like to be an egoist and cannot. This is the most striking characteristic of his wretchedness and the source of his greatness." Simone Weil....Gravity and Grace
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Re: Does consciousness require memory?

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RJG wrote:P1. Without memory there could be no recognition.
P2. Without recognition, there could be no consciousness (nothing to know).
C1. Therefore, without memory, there could be no consciousness
C2. Therefore, consciousness requires memory.
mystery wrote:Why is P2 true?
P2 is true because if we recognize nothing (i.e. are incapable of recognition) then we know nothing; are conscious of nothing. We are blank slates.

Without recognition, we would have no thoughts (...i.e. if we did, we wouldn't know it). -- not only could we not know/recognize that thoughts (monologues) were playing out in our head, but we also could not know/recognize the language in which these thoughts were speaking.

Without recognition, we would have no sensory experiences (...i.e. if we did, we wouldn't know it). -- not only could we not know/recognize that we were having bodily experiences (sensory experiences; physical bodily reactions), but we also could not know/recognize the different types of sensations.

Without recognition, we are blank slates; unable to know anything; conscious of nothing.


**************
Nick_A wrote:The consensus of opinion is that Man creates consciousness through memory.
I think it more accurate to say that Man "experiences" consciousness (aka "recognition"), through memory.

Consciousness is the experience of recognition, made possible by memory. -- without memory, there could be no recognition, and without recognition there could be no consciousness.
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