Remembering and Forgetting as a Function of Life

As Derrida observes, the ideal of a perfect memory has a spectral quality. The desire to achieve it is like the wish of Hanson, the fictional archaeologist, to go beyond the physical remains to grasp the past itself. What seduces us is the thought that remembering is like mechanical reproduction. We forget, however, that a photograph does not remember what we looked like any more than a recording remembers the sound of our voice. Only a living being can remember. Seen in this light, the ultimate problem of the ideal of a perfect memory is that it abstracts remembering from the context in which it functions. In this paper, I argue that this context is that of our embodied being-alive, with all the limitations that this implies. Such limitations impose a teleological structure on our remembering. They determine how memory functions on both an individual and a collective level.Como observa Derrida, el ideal de la memoria perfecta tiene una cualidad espectral. El deseo de conseguirlo es como el de Hanson, el arqueólogo ficticio, de querer ir más allá de los restos físicos para alcanzar el pasado mismo. Nos seduce la idea de que recordar sea como una reproducción mecánica. Olvidamos, sin embargo, que una fotografía no recuerda cómo éramos más de lo que una grabación recuerda el sonido de nuestra voz. Sólo un ser vivo puede recordar. Desde este punto de vista, el problema último del ideal de la memoria perfecta es que abstrae el recordar del contexto en el que éste realizaría su función. En este artículo argumento que dicho contexto es el de nuestro estar-vivos encarnado, con todas las limitaciones que ello implica. Estas limitaciones imponen una estructura teleológica en nuestro recordar. Determinan como funciona la memoria, tanto a nivel individual como colectivo.

On Music, Order, and Memory: Investigating Augustine’s Descriptive Method in the Confessions

Augustine’s account in the Confessions Book IX of his ecstasy at Ostia remains unsurpassed in its poetic force, yet unusual, as a description of religious experience, in two particular respects. First of all, what he describes is not a “vision” of God, but an experience of listening. Second, it is not a solitary but a shared experience (e.g., with his mother, Monica). This essay considers the significance of these two elements by analyzing the relation between his description in Book IX and the understanding of rhythm that he develops in De musica. Drawing also on Book X (on memory) and Book XI (on time-consciousness) in the Confessions, I investigate a particular type of flowing memory – what I call, “perfect” memory – that characterizes the temporally ordered movements of musical rhythm, showing that it is in this type of memory that Augustine finds God.

Noisy Memory and Over-Reaction to News

We propose a model of optimal decision-making subject to a memory constraint. The constraint is a limit on the complexity of memory measured using Shannon's mutual information, as in models of rational inattention. We show that the model implies that both forecasts and actions will exhibit idiosyncratic random variation; that beliefs will fluctuate forever around the rational-expectations (perfect-memory) beliefs with a variance that does not fall to zero; and that more recent news will be given disproportionate weight. The model provides a simple explanation for a number of features of expectations in laboratory and field settings.

The Psychological Roots of Creativity in Messages Left by Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgio Vasari, and a Neanderthal Troglodyte

<p>The perfect memory that informs our local autistic facet is insufficient to deal with the unforeseen change that challenges our nonlocal artistic facet. The loss of quantum nonlocality leads autistics to fail tests rooted in overcoming the less-than-perfect ambiguity that elicits our creativity. The psychological structure by which perfect memory and less-than-perfect creativity empower each other remains in darkness. This article broaches the hypothesis that Leonardo da Vinci envisioned the union of local perfection and nonlocal less-than-perfection, and that he hid his insight in the Adoration of the Magi. Leonardo’s knowledge - expressed here as the logos heuristic—guides a psychological interpretation of the smile of Mona Lisa; of the four avatars of the Vitruvian Man; of the recognition and location of Leonardo’s unknown painting Natività; of the exact location of his lost work, Battaglia di Anghiari; and of a 39,000-year-old abstract engraving in Gorham’s cave at Gibraltar. Logos can be used to single out local, nonlocal computing, and their alliance in pursuing a humanistic path to progress.</p>