Memory

The best analogy that I can use to explain how memories work is to say that the human brain is rather like a large net hanging from the ceiling and every memory you form is like a ball being that gets thrown into that net.  The bigger the impact the memory has the more likely it will stay in the net, but the smaller the impact the more likely it will be to slip through and fall to the floor.  The net is only so big and only so much can fit into it so inevitably things get pushed out and fall to the floor when you need to make room.  As time passes and as we grow in life, new experiences lead to new memories being formed and without conscious choice our brains decide what is important to keep in that net and what is not.

That analogy holds up but only to a point.  There are methods of chaining memories together where you can connect memories by association, this in effect lets you keep just one of the balls in the net and let the others hang down from it without needing to be in the net itself.  Various techniques like Mnemonic Peg Systems allow you to gain a certain degree of control over this process, but even these are not infallible.  Still we can't completely prevent those memories from falling out of the net and onto the floor.

I said the analogy holds up to a point, and that point is the moment you try to define the limit of the human brain in this analogy.  You might think the brain is simply the net but it is not.  In truth in this analogy the brain is the entire room.  The net serves as your working memory, a combination of short and long term memory that can be easily accessed and used when needed.  However, all those memories that fell onto the floor in most cases still exist somewhere inside the brain.  Despite the fact you can't recall any of it right now, all it takes is for one reminder, one thread that you can grasp onto, and with it you can pick up those memories off the floor and recall them.

I find this idea fascinating because it makes it difficult to define what is truly forgotten, where the definition of forgetting is defined not as the inability to recall consciously but the total and lasting inability to recall even with triggers and threads handed to you.  To be handed a picture from your youth and not be able to name a single person in it, that is what I would define as truly forgetting, as opposed to being unable to name people from your youth but then being able to name them once you see the picture.

If you were able to control your memory more effectively, how would you use that ability to your advantage?  Would that even be an advantage, or like a hard drive on a computer would eventually end up filling it with clutter and believing that certain things should have priority when in reality they serve us little or no practical benefit.  If the state of your hard drive were to be an accurate reflection of the state of your mind in that hypothetical scenario, how would you fair?

If there appears to be no rhyme nor reason as to the way your brain prioritises information, perhaps that isn't a reflection of its inefficiency or apparent ineptitude but rather a statement of the division and disparity that exists between your conscious and unconscious minds as to what is important to you in life.  This disparity is something I find interesting because it makes you consider your mind and the divisions that exist within it as being distinct entities almost as if you are inhabited by more than one intelligence - using the three mind model of conscious, subconscious, and unconscious minds you could argue that three intelligences exist and that sentience in the case of humanity is in reality the cooperation of three distinct intelligent systems with humanity itself being that which emerges at their intersection.

Many reasons are often posited as to why Human Intelligence and Machine Intelligence differ so greatly and why the latter has never been able to mimic the former with precision, perhaps the answer is that precision cannot be achieved without concision, that the task of mimicking a single intelligence has failed because it is not actually a single intelligence at all, but rather it is three and that sentient AI could only emerge when it abandons the attempt to create one unified algorithm and instead distributes the task creating three distinct algorithms with different priorities and approaches, and making them interact.  A conscious mind that processes logic and reason, a sub-conscious that moderates resources to try and achieve efficiency, and an unconscious mind that does everything by brute force until the sub-conscious interrupts the process or limits resources.