About the use of memories

Minsky recently posted some thoughts from his book Society of Mind about our impression of continuous change in time. I also gave a reply :)

min...@media.mit.edu schrieb:

"The power of consciousness comes not from ceaseless change of state, but from having enough stability to discern significant changes in your surroundings. To "notice" change requires the ability to resist it, in order to sense what persists through time, but one can do this only by being able to examine and compare descriptions from the recent past. We notice change in spite of change, and not because of it. "

I agree that this is an interesting model to explain what our memories do: When our short-term memories can accurately predict a situation, we start to understand the world, form concepts and cause-effect relationships. It is also when our predictions are easy to make, that we start to get bored by a situation and that our higher-level reflective agents try to change their goals. Of course memories and learning are closely related. And what I find interesting, is, that when we are able to play we hardly notice that time passes ! For example, when I am programming, and am learning about a new abstraction of a problem, I hardly know what parts of the
design will work in the first place. Only much later I get an impression on which mistakes were necessary that solved my problem. My point is, before I try to resist change, I gratefully try to experience change. So, there are times when we read from our memories (resisting change), but equally there are times when we write to our memories (trying to make mistakes).