The mere possibility of tampering with memory is indeed the most dangerous thing that could happen to humanity. Imagine not being able to believe your own memory.
In fact we don't have to imagine, I believe I've been subjected to "mass gaslighting" on multiple occasions recently on the internet : some piece of information I'm sure I saw on the internet suddenly completely disappears. Google + Facebook + "right to be forgotten" type of policy, make for a very dangerous power never experienced before by humanity.
The honest truth is that you shouldn't. People treat memory like a video recording. It is more like a play that is reenacted every time you remember it, where props are pulled out of storage but sometimes the wrong prop is pulled out and yet nothing feels wrong. For example, maybe you remember the day you lost your keys and found them between the pottery. What exactly did that pottery look like? Pull the pottery prop out of storage, which is based off of the most recent memory of there being only two pots. You now have a memory of finding the keys between your two pots.
Happen to find a third pot that went missing and place it back on the stand? Next time you remember the incident with the keys, the pottery prop pulled out is the one involving 3 pots. So you clearly remember finding your keys between three plots.
Well what about the old memory? You pull up the memory of a memory, but each memory is generated with props and there is a chance you end up remembering your original memory had 3 pots as well.
The more trivial the detail, the more likely you'll only keep around the most recent prop only and thus have a false memory. There is a lot of psychological research into people watching cars driving where the psychologist then falsify memories of the vehicles (something that is never called out as being worth remembering at the start of the experiment). It works decently well in adults. It works horrifyingly well in kids.
In Ted Chiang's latest short story collection "Exhalation" there is a story called "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling"[1] that kind of touches on what you are talking about. In the story, one of the characters is writing up a critique about a new technology that constantly records video from a persons perspective and the video can be recalled at will (like memory). In his critique, he uses a memory (traditional - not using this new technology) he has of a large argument him and his daughter had. This moment/memory was a crucial part in his life and really defined how he viewed himself and his relationship with his daughter. I won't go into it, but the reality of the event and how he remembers it is very similar to your point - specifically, that memory is more like an imperfect play, replay and biased by your recall.
I highly recommend the book, but that story in general. As with most of his stories, he takes a premise that seems generic on it's face and twists it in ways that you wouldn't expect.
"The honest truth is that you shouldn't. " (believe your own memory)
That does not seem like a good way to live.
Imagine "not trusting your memory" tomorrow morning, and refusing to recognize your bedroom, your spouse, your kids, family, your house, car, coworkers etc.
Seems like one would go insane, quickly. So yeah, I guess you do need to trust your memory - but judiciously.
I think I remember you challenging my assumptions with your comment, but I can't be sure. Tomorrow I'll probably trust in a fallback model for what I think your comment's intention was.
Yeah for a decade I had an extremely vivid memory of my grandmother spanking me. But in my 20s I once brought it up when my grandmother mentioned never having spanked anyone. She denied it, said it was my mother and I got confirmation from all of my uncle's they were never spanked.
Really made me realize how untrustworthy even the most vivid memories are.
> Imagine not being able to believe your own memory.
I'm not aware of any evidence that we can believe our own memories. Memory is much like eyesight. There is a very complex process going on to give you the illusion of a clear and consistent picture that is at odds with what the messy and biological process we rely on can actually achieve.
The basic problem is that people don't by and large scientifically assess their memories for accuracy, so they are reliant on other people alerting them to problems. The feedback process there doesn't encourage correctness, it encourages conformance.
This is what rationalization looks like. "Oh, well, memories are kinda inaccurate, so, it really doesn't matter if we modify them wholesale." Fairly dangerous rationalization.
Just Devil's Advocate, but I think it's fairly well established that human memories are not "kinda inaccurate", they are woefully inaccurate. Most of the time a human can get some of the big stuff right, but the neuro-psychological underpinnings of "attention" and "memory" pretty much guarantee we will miss a lot of what's going on. (And if we can put the human under enough stress, s/he will not even get the big stuff right.) The fact is, humans rarely even "see" what's actually in front of them, let alone have any "memory" of what was actually in front of them. (For us, reality is not reality, rather our perception is our reality.)
Now the memory being inaccurate to start with does not make manipulating that already inaccurate memory "ok". There's no question about that. Though having said that, it's important to note that because memories are so malleable and inaccurate, we've actually been manipulating them for a long time. It's actually a pretty well researched area.
That sounds pretty level-headed to me. Acknowledging one's own fallibility/being humble in the face of one's own ignorance is broadly helpful. It seems it only becomes a problem when you start deeply distrusting yourself; you can never get away with wholly doubting yourself.
In my experience (I have a pretty TERRIBLE memory - people routinely reference events I participated in but have no recollection of, and when I consider if a particular believable event happened, I can imagine it and have no real way to distinguish the imagination from actual memory), the real problem comes with interacting with those that demonstrate full and utter confidence.
I doubt myself, but I still see the need to make decisions. Most people, faced with my caveats, allow that they can be wrong as well, and we decide things. But the problem cases are without any doubt - my caveats only prove their correctness. If presented with convincing evidence of their fault, they move on to the next thing and never learn that 100% confidence is overconfidence.
I don't know that my lack of trust in my memories makes me more vulnerable to such people or if they only react to facing others as immovable as themselves, with everyone else being indistinguishable speed bumps.
> The basic problem is that people don't by and large scientifically assess their memories for accuracy
But wouldn't any practice of assessing one's own memories intermediately depend on memory faculties? I can quickly think of two dependencies:
1. Working memory (maybe this is tangential and not really on topic for long-term memory)
2. Semantic memories required to assess the legitimacy of a memory. E.g. if we were to shoot for "scientific assessments" like you said, then said assessment would rely on memories that allow for scientific assessment. I'm no scientist and don't know quite what such "scientific assessment" would look like in practice, but if you have an assessment framework you're deliberately working within, it seems like you'd have to at least have semantic memory/existing knowledge of that same framework.
Perhaps manipulation of episodic memory doesn't clearly pose such problems, but I expect that's neither here nor there.
Yeah, to really get in among the weeds and measure the inaccuracies is hopefully impossible. But it wouldn't be too hard to build up a high-level feel for how much big picture stuff you forget from keeping a journal & photographs, then blindly writing how you remember things playing out and comparing the two. More scientific than what most would bother with.
I came across some ancient IRC logs just yesterday that let me look back at a situation I thought I remembered. Turns out I did not remember it.
We’ve got these small pottery bowls I really like. One day, I noticed there only seemed to be two of them. I asked my spouse what happened to the other two. She replied that we only ever owned two. I said, no that can’t be right, I’m certain we had four. She insisted only two. A while later I found a third. I went to her and said, ah ha, see, three bowls! Where did the fourth go?
And do you know what she says? “We’ve only ever had three.”
It’s been many months now, maybe a year, and there’s still only three, but hand to god, I’m going to find that fourth bowl.
I still can’t get a straight answer out of her why she’s so certain there were only ever three when she was just as certain there were only ever two until confronted with the physical reality of three bowls.
Now she thinks this is about being right, but I insist it isn’t. It’s the unsettling idea that my memory isn’t correct.
I’ve argued that point. We think we got them at a pottery tent at the state fair where they may have been in bulk and we just purchased three, but I don’t know why we would have bought an odd number.
I have fun from time to time attempting to reconcile divergent memories, so allow me to hypothesize one possible scenario:
There were only three available at the fair. You would normally only buy bowls in a set of four. However, as you mention, you really like this particular style. Perhaps you liked it so much that you made an exception in this case and bought the three because that was the maximum available. But then you lost the third, and so the memories you were triangulating from were "there are two in the cupboard," "that's not the full set," and "four is a full set."
Now onto your spouse's memory. They remembered two at first, because they were triangulating between "we normally buy four," "there are fewer than four of these," and "we always buy an even number." Confronted with the existence of a third, the other memory, "there are fewer than four" remains in effect.
As I child I regularly heard the debates on various talk shows (I watched alot of TV). What was happening was that child psychologists were effectively implanting memories into these children. I found that idea fascinating.
At some point I came up with a game that I would play on the bus ride home from school. There was an undeveloped, partially wooded lot that the bus passed by every day. People would leave things there, especially kids. But the important thing is that week-to-week and even day-to-day the lot would change. Kids might build a fort; somebody might leave or take away some trash; the neighbor might cut the grass or clear some dead wood. The game consisted of 1) noticing something that had changed and 2) inventing something that changed. The next day I would try to pick, before passing the lot, which was the real change and which was the one I invented, and then confirm as I passed.
I very quickly realized how incredibly easy it was to create false memories. Even though I was the one deliberately picking the false memories, I regularly fooled myself. In fact, I got really good at fooling myself. If you visualize an imagined scene and mentally interact with it--imagine walking through it, imagine fake relationships between elements--then for all intents & purposes your memory of it will be little different than if you had been looking at and interacting with something real. Even more scary, I learned that I could consistently misremember things; that is, for a good fake memory I'd consistently pick it day-after-day, even though each prior day I would have realized it was the fake one.
Another thing I learned with my game is that memories are largely about associations, especially plausible associations. We filter particular memories by how well they fit together and how well they comport with the larger narrative. (Which is I think why visualizations are so powerful, as they make it easy to create many elements that fit well together.) If a memory doesn't fit into other memories, like you rationally know you couldn't possibly have been somewhere on some particular day, we tend to discard it. For innocuous memories (e.g. maybe some thought of doing something at the time, but which you didn't actually perform) we filter these out almost imperceptibly. OTOH, sometimes it's difficult to rule out memories, particular innocuous ones, which is why we misremember small stuff so often.
One small thing I've avoided ever since then is looking at photographs. I've found that the mere act of looking at a photograph can almost instantly replace your own memory of an event. That doesn't mean my original memory was any more truthful. But the original is often imbued with certain emotional artifacts that, in my experience, can get washed away by the visual fidelity of a photograph.
In "Ghost in the Shell" there is a sub plot with a man who talks all day about his family until it is revealed to him that it is all false memories. I always found this one of the most horrifying scenes in the movie.
This was already in Blade Runner (which Ghost in the Shell was doubtlessly influenced by), where the replicants have photographs of their families, who never existed, as they were implanted memories.
Ironically, I don't remember if this was in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which Blade Runner was loosely based on), but even if it's not, it's a very common theme in Philip K Dick's work.
A similar thing happens in Total Recall, which was also loosely based on PKD's We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, where memories of the protagonist's family and prevois life have been implanted. In this case, the protagonist does not rely on photographs, as he has a wife in the present, but (spoiler) it turns out she's not really his wife.
Oliver Sacks is also worth reading on these themes, as he tells of many real-life cases of people misremembering, misrecognizing, and disbelieving things most everyone else takes for granted, from faces to family to their own body parts to language.
ST:TNG, season 5, episode 25, "The Inner Light" broadly could be described similarly, except whether it is horrifying or wonderful is hard to decide. One of the best TNG episodes.
The right to be forgotten is a right, as the name suggests.
It always existed, if I want to be fogotten IRL I can, why shouldn't it be possible online?
What's the difference between deleting my social timeline and burning my pictures or my diary?
One of my favourite books is "The Late Mattia Pascal" (Il fu Mattia Pascal) from Luigi Pirandello, it was written in 1904 and it's the story of a man who's unhappy and one day discovers that his wife and mother in law found a body and declared it to be his own, so he becomes officialy a dead person.
He takes advantage of the fact to escape his true identity and create a new one, settling in Rome, far from were he was born.
The story is fascinating and a masterpiece about what's really "identity", how we all wear masks and how we all are different (sometimes very) people depending on who you ask.
> If I want my picture gone from the high school yearbook
AFAIK right to be forgotten, at least in EU, is the right to request that search engines do not display information about an individual that is factually incorrect, obsolete.... it has nothing to do with deleting actual information.
The right to be forgotten (or to oblivion) is just the right to have your private informations deleted and the guarantee that what you delete online is really deleted and nobody can recover it.
It's not the right to be removed from other's people memory.
>The right to be forgotten (or to oblivion) is just the right to have your private informations deleted and the guarantee that what you delete online is really deleted and nobody can recover it.
You say "this" and then written something completely different to what I wrote.
As I said, AFAIK the right to be forgotten doesn't give you the right to delete any information. It just gives you the right to remove some information from appearing in search engines.
An example I remember that happened in Netherlands is of a doctor that lost her medical license. When you searched her name, the first result was an article on some news site that she lost her license.
On appeal she got it back and using the right to be forgotten she removed that news article from search results. The article is still there on that news site it just doesn't appear in search results when you search her name.
> As I said, AFAIK the right to be forgotten doesn't give you the right to delete any information. It just gives you the right to remove some information from appearing in search engines.
Sorry, probably lost in translation.
I never said you have the right to delete any information, just you private informations and any data you own and you ask the controller to delete.
I don't know if you are aware that in EU for EU citizens we have the GDPR legislation.
Let's cite the law, Article 17, GDPR legislation
> Art. 17 GDPR
> Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)
> The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure
> of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller
> shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay
In particular, the controller has the right to retain your personal data (including the data you posted publicly) until you consent to it, if you revoke the consent, you can ask to stop the processing (art. 18) and delete everything they have about you.
If you comment on a social network, for example, that comment identifies you, because it is linked to your username, it has metadata attached to it, it can be used to track you, it is considered personal data, you can ask for removal.
Unless there is a (very) valid reason, the controller has to comply and delete every copy of the data, including backups (and soft deleted data that's still there).
The right to be forgotten predates GDPR, it's less about private data and more about obsolete public data. Like a prison sentence that you served and you have "paid your debt" to society, it avoids past mistakes to follow you forever even after you redeemed yourself.
Let me take a shot at answering this.
The idea is that the internet is a social construct. The information it holds is shared knowledge accessible to everyone.
Contrast burning your photos with burning all copies of a book. On the internet, a lot of things exist in the gray area between them.
That makes it difficult to judge if the info that was is private or public.
Yeah. The widespread belief that memory is reliable - a false belief that this article propogates - is probably a lot more problematic than any of the research being discussed. It's not uncommon to see people presented with facts suggesting that their memories are false, and respond by dismissing the facts ("That can't be true, I remember it, I was there").
> tampering with memory is indeed the most dangerous thing that could happen to humanity.
For almost two decades now I believed that "Total Recall" was mostly science fiction, that almost none of it will happen in real life anytime soon. Looks like I was wrong. [1] Philip K. Dick was a genius, with Paul Verhoeven not too far behind.
"We can remember it for you wholesale" is the original short story, I think. Philip K. Dick's works taken as a whole, are mind-boggling. At some point, I want to work through Ubik.
Stanislaw Lem, the great Polish sci-fi author of works like Solaris, called Western sci-fi "A Hopeless Case with exceptions" - one of the very very few exceptions was Philip K. Dick. There's also a nice essay on Philip K. Dick specifically. [1], [2]
My favorite line in the film was actually a clever aside, when Quaid is being solicited by one of the mutant clairvoyants with an offer to tell him his future, his sardonic rejoinder is, "how about the past?".
I could swear this happened with the errant USB-C configuration that the latest Raspberry Pi 4 screwed up.
At least 4 other projects I know of configured their USB-C the same exact incorrect way. Three of them absolutely swear that a Google search gave an online application note that told them to do this, but they can't find it anymore--it presumably got yanked as soon as the RPi error came to light and then dropped off the Google rankings. POOF Gone.
I'm guessing from your post that it was gone before archive.org could crawl it? You can force archive.org to save specific sites immediately so that you can use their (permanent) link as a future-proof citation [0].
Alternatively, something like WebSatchel [1]. I have no experience with it, so can't tell you if it's any good, or whether there's other software that does a similar thing.
But imagine having much better memories than you have now. It is much better to wake up and go to work knowing that you spent a good vacation last three month, than having boring eternal life of a regular worker with low wage. Forget that your SO cheated on you. Believe that all people are good.
If you’d sell memory tampering devices, are you sure that most of them would be used against someone other instead of on buyers themselves?
What if we had special devices that could sneakily push preferences or suggestions to unaware person? It would be a very dangerous tech! (Oh, nevermind, I use one of them to write this comment)
imagine starting every day of your working life thinking you just got done with a wonderful two weeks vacation, energized and ready to continue on with your employment tasks! in fact with our new happy memory management service your employees will never need to take a vacation, weekend, or fake sick day again - because they will think they just did!
Plot twist: you're actually a moderator for Facebook looking at child porn and beheadings all day. Further plot twist: that FB gig was another fake memory to cover up your involvement in a secret government project involving lots of enhanced interrogation, to provide plausible cause for the psychological damage that wasn't entirely fixed by memory replacement.
It is exactly what I meant. Unless you’re meaningless truth seeker, that life is a charm to live. People will do it to themselves, no need for special memory service guys. If you dig deep enough on what happiness, energy and fresh feelings are (against reality), there will be a plast of blurred lines very soon. Even health issues have many roots in your mental state. It is basically side-effect free, natural heroin.
Remind me of Robin Hanson's Age of Em. Ems are human minds copied into computers and executable there. Being easy to copy, you can spin up as many Elon Musks as you need. And if you have the brain state stored, every day you can have those Elons on the best, most work ready, focused day of their lives. All digitally, of course.
People already self-medicate themselves with alcohol and other drugs. Altering memories will just be one more thing on this list.
Since we are on a metaphorical treadmill where the vast majority of our wages are used on rivalrous goods like real estate or education the end result will be that people will work harder then alter their memories to continue beyond their breaking point. A 20 hour workday is no big deal because the company provides you with free memory alteration at the end of the work day. It doesn't matter that you slept at the office because you remember being at your nice single family home in the suburbs and sleeping for 8 hours.
It also complicates the legal system as it exists today. The fact that artificial memory can be induced in someone's brain makes believing a witness a lot harder. So in addition to social and ethical concerns, it also upends the legal system.
To be honest, witness testimony should never be or have been the sole basis for convictions. Peoples’ memory is so fraught with error that it’s basically useless on its own merits.
I think this is an exaggeration. Witnesses often try to be as helpful as possible and in doing so may supply too much information they themselves aren't able to verify. Of course that can prove to undermine their statements in the first place, but I don't believe attesting memory failures addresses the core of the problem with witness reports.
And yet, direct witness statements from two helpful people standing next to each other, made immediately after the event can vary so wildly that you would wonder if they are describing the same event.
paraphrased from "The Invisible Gorilla: and other ways our intuition deceives us" (Chabris and Simons)
No, witnesses should never be believed. Especially not if you have a bunch of witnesses that tell you the same story. Sounds unintuitive, but it's true. And we know this for at least a hundred years, already. If anyone is interested in further reading on this, I recommend "Mass Psychology" by Gustave Le Bon.
> The mere possibility of tampering with memory is indeed the most dangerous thing that could happen to humanity. Imagine not being able to believe your own memory.
We've been doing it for a while with drugs. Some of them can cause a temporary loss of your short term memory.
It's a really bizarre sensation. You suddenly lose the ability to comprehend the chronology of recent events and can make no connection between real events and your own memory. There is no "now", you only have memories, and because you lost the causal link, you can't tell the difference between an authentic memory and your own imagination. I can only imagine how terrifying it would be to live like that constantly.
No need for drugs. You can train to use it against traumatic events, though the side-effects seem to be severe (inability to actually process what happened is only the beginning). You want temporarily accessible episodic memory, just so you can think about recent past.
Well, info on the internet is different than a memory. And perhaps books, speech recording etc are the antidote anyway to tampered memories - making an argument to strengthen First Amendment protections.
More powerful than personal memory, though, might be common knowledge. As they said at Epsilon Theory (using Harvey Weinstein as an example),
Even if everyone in the world believes a certain piece of private information, no one will alter their behavior. Behavior changes ONLY when we believe that everyone else believes the information.
Seeing a webpage/story/comment be changed used to unsettle me - I couldn't understand what had happened, since books don't change. Especially subtle wording changes. Why did I remember it differently than it was...? But I don't seem to notice it any more.
There once was kind of nasty piece on Laurene Jobs, with lots of authentic-seeming detail. It's been completely gone for years now. Maybe this comment too will discover where it went.
How is content disappearing from the internet "gas lighting"? Internet content are not "memories" and if you didn't post the content yourself and didn't even bother to store a local copy of it, why should you be entitled to that information in the future?
Memories are already highly infallible, we have numerous examples from eyewitness testimony to Trump's fabrication of Muslims cheering to any time someone else's story became your story because "its a good story". So, I don't think memories being changed is radical, it's par for the course IMO.
You think mouse scent memory being tampered with is more dangerous than mass nuclear weaponry or bio-engineered pathogens?
Whats preventing the gaslighters from being gaslighted?
It's not a bad thing if we can change Putin or the Saudi Head Looneys memory and behavior. These kind of Debates always get won by the Edward Teller's in the room.
Ofcourse them too. They are more of less programmed as it is to chase likes/clicks/views of their respective fan clubs. Tweaking the counts of what their fan club likes automatically changes their behavior. They just don't know they are all deeply trapped.
It's easy if they are on social media everyday.
You just have to encourage them to believe whatever bullshit they already do. Compliment them. Encourage their fan clubs. Give them stories about how their opponents are lying/cheating/dening their brilliance etc etc. The more it happens, the higher their social media counts climb, the further and faster they get disconnected from reality.
It's what happened to Obama. Which is why he is in hiding unable to influence shit.
I believe more in Putin changing your memory than the other way around. Small details I suppose. And that I believe that Putin would indeed nuke you before letting that happen.
I have been aware of how easily my own memory can be manipulated, even by my own self. I've taken stories told to me years ago and have retold them as I had lived them. Then there was the whole Shaq Kazam movie that people swore existed but never did.
Personally, I think it happened because Sinbad regularly wore windbreakers and parachute pants, the name Sinbad sounds stereotypically Arabic, and perhaps because of his darker skin and pan-ethnic features. When I stumbled onto the meme I never once thought I remembered such a movie, but I instantly understood why people would think that way.
Interesting article but I was hoping for more discussion of the ethical implications mentioned in the title.
As a society we frequently start with with consent as a cornerstone of whether something is ethical or not (if it's done to you against your will, it's bad). Then we decide whether there are certain lines you shouldn't cross because the result would be harmful for you or society. For instance, you can drink as much alcohol as you want but at a certain point you can't get into a car afterwards, because you might kill or maim someone else. And you can take out a loan, but there's usually a cap on how much interest the lender can charge because above a certain level you'd ruin yourself financially.
So we'll probably say you can alter your memories, but are there lines which shouldn't be crossed?
Those lines will be crossed by just visiting a country that has different interpretations of what's acceptable to do.
I could also see the severely mentally ill or mentally handicapped, having no personal say in what happens to them and similar to today when it comes to medication being used.
> Those lines will be crossed by just visiting a country that has different interpretations of what's acceptable to do.
To some extent. For instance, I know of no country that allows you to drive while intoxicated (modulo varying minimums) while having enough car and population density for such driving to be a problem.
You're probably thinking of China and their laxer approach towards human genetic research. But that's arguably just having lines that shall not be crossed and staying on the good side of them; US and Europe seem to have decided instead to ban the whole field.
One of the regulations must be that hacking someone’s brain, as in deleting or inserting memories into someone without consent, is a crime akin to rape and torture. You are violating someone’s sense of self and identity in ways the person can’t reverse (the offender merely has to insert a memory of the person consenting, or delete the experience entirely) and you reduce the person’s agency by treating them like an object to achieve your goals.
We can’t wait for this technology to be abused, we need regulations and International treaties way ahead of time.
They WON'T have regulations or treaties though - not any that mean a damn, anyway. Putting aside the obvious issues of doing this against someone's will, let's have a quick look at some extremes that could be done with someone's full consent:
What if someone WANTED a memory implanted of raping someone, so they could get off to it? The consensual BDSM sphere is huge. Obviously pedophilic false memories would be outlawed immediately, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't exist.
What if someone wanted to self-identify as a robot, or a sex slave, or just plain simple property. Could they have elective surgery for blank-memory-removal to assist with their transition?
Say we went nope, full blanket-banning of the technology as a whole, it's just too legally messy to allow. What if someone has experienced severe emotional trauma from real-life events, and needs them dulled or removed to function in society? It instantly becomes a politically-charged pro-life/pro-choice ticket issue that gets carted out every time the government wants to make some noise.
What if someone is the victim of such a procedure (done illegally) - is it okay to have some governmental arm "anti-hack" their brain.
Also, <insert the whole plot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind>. Also, <insert plots of various Ghost In the Shell TV series>.
If the technology ever genuinely bears fruit, then only two things are certain to happen: it will be used illegally, and it will be used by governments in secret. Sometimes both of these at once :-)
I would not even qualify this as an "artificial" experience. In both cases, the mice are subjected to very similar stimuli. The technology used to create those stimuli seems completely irrelevant to the resulting conditioning. I would have been surprised by any other outcome, to be honest.
This seems quite different from the type of memory that is described afterwards.
That was my thought as well, but the article was confusing. It was talking about memories when what it was describing seemed more like experiences, but I’m not familiar enough with the technical aspects to be sure.
An artificial memory would be if they directly altered the system for storage of memories (however that works), rather than spoofing inputs to that system.
Artificial memories in humans have already been done. In the 1980's there was an epidemic of psychologists implanting memories of sexual abuse in children who grew up believing they had actually been abused.
I have my own example of this. Something I remember with clarity, but didn't happen. Not as horrific as sexual abuse, but close enough to convince me how fallible our memories are.
A few years ago a friend an I were having dinner at a restaurant. The waiter came by to serve water, and as he was filling our glasses, he would raise the pitcher up very high above the glass while saying to himself, "Easy, Franciso... Eeeasy!" It was funny.
Except that's not what happened at all. What really happened was that we were there at dinner when my friend told me the story of some other time he had a waiter that did just that. He must have described it to me in sufficient detail for me to form the mental image and merge it with our dinner that night.
A couple years later, I start telling this story as if I had been there, to a group of people that included my friend from that night. That's when I learned that it was a false memory.
It was disorienting to say the least. As soon as this was pointed out to me, I did remember the real conversation and him telling me.
Eh? You mean, "not at all"? I assume they're talking about the 'satanic ritual abuse' collective delusion here. In this, young children were convinced, through improper questioning (largely by untrained police, not proper psychologists AIUI), that they'd been exposed to some pretty non-specific abuse, often with supernatural elements.
This is worlds apart from an adult saying, spontaneously and without any brainwashing from the police, that they were abused by a specific person.
I only asked on similarities of big public involvement in both cases. If vague memories or feelings can turn into false memories under high informational stream, could it be related? I didn’t mean anything that could be viewed as a refusal or silly joking.
I have a couple of my false memories myself, and these feel very real (but still false). What prevents few of metoo public-induced cases to be alike?
> Memories are essential to the sense of identity that emerges from the narrative of personal experience.
That, for me, is one of the main ethical issues. No matter in which society you live, a very large part of its identity is derived from memory and/or common history. If you can manipulate that, you can manipulate society. And we already have so many subconscious levers pushing our perception of self (social media for one), we shouldn't have another one.
> a very large part of its identity is derived from memory and/or common history
There is vast literature about how this identity is partially built on collective false myths and the desire to collectively forget inconvenient facts. Our public identities are largely defined by our willingless to tell white lies to each other.
"Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation."
This is a provocative experiment, both in terms of the results and certain elements of the employed experimental techniques.
What I found particularly interesting is that it elicits a consideration of what is memory. Is the association of stimulus-response a 'memory'? (Where does that leave 'instinct'?)
One could argue that the experiment has created an artificial 'instinct' and not 'memory' given that there was no 'experience'. If one were to counter that the invasive (modifying) preparatory steps of the experiment are "the experience", then we have discarded the 'body' entirely and are in the realm of brains in vat conception of 'consciousness', since we are asserting that direct manipulation of brain is functionally equivalent to 'phenomena' as experienced through the mediation of the body, the sensory apparatus, and the nervous system.
It is obvious and well known that phenomena happen in the outisde world, but experience happens in the brain - Perception, usually mediated through Sensing. But when I remember seeing a friend in a dream, that is a real memory of a real experience, but there was no phenomenon in the world outside my head that caused the experience.
At the current level of understanding, it is pretty clear that if we could send the correct signals we control on the optic nerve, we would be causing the brain to have an experience to the same extent that the retina does. I don't think we know enough yet to go further than the optic nerve and say that we could induce a signal 'after' the optic nerve and produce the exact same effect,but that is still plausible. The next level of manipulation would be to induce signals into the brain as if they are coming from the visual processing area without directly stimulating the visual processing center at all - this is far further into the future, if it is even possible.
> The next level of manipulation would be to induce signals into the brain as if they are coming from the visual processing area without directly stimulating the visual processing center at all - this is far further into the future, if it is even possible.
There's a new wave of interesting work regarding inducing patterns of activity in the cortex using spatially precise two-photon excitation methods (two-photon holography). This paper does a relatively good job in controlling for the behavior of the animals in the study and shows that recalling patterns of activity can reliably reproduce a learned behavior based on the pattern of activity (and also probes at some aspects of general computations in the cortex): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6711485/
Animal models are definitely inaccurate in general. But memory mechanisms are conserved and it's also false to believe that our brain's intuitions are true. We have blind spots left and right, a false sense of free will and a long history of inaccurate memories.
An animal with analytical and self-reflective mental faculties other animals do not seem to possess, or be able to articulate.
For example, I know that some of my memories are not original. They are memories of me previously remembering something, which I was able to remember clearly at the time, but can’t recall as clearly now. But my memory of the experience of remembering it and the circumstances in which I did so are quite clear. So I know some of my memories are reconstructions.
It seems unlikely there are many nonhuman animals capable of making that sort of distinction.
None of which addresses the point in question. To re-iterate:
>Just because an animal can't tell the difference between the real and artificial memory does not mean a human couldn't do the same.
These animals seem to uncritically follow the artificially stimulated behaviour as though it was 'real' or original to them. It seems a reasonable suggestion that, perhaps, a human would be able to distinguish it from an original memory.
Are you suggesting that is wrong? If so sure, explain why.
It seems to me these objections are merely intellectual nit-pick points scoring, devoid of any actual critical or analytical point that I can discern.
”””These animals seem to uncritically follow the artificially stimulated behaviour as though it was 'real' or original to them. It seems a reasonable suggestion that, perhaps, a human would be able to distinguish it from an original memory.
Are you suggesting that is wrong? If so sure, explain why.”””
What you describe is behaviour I observe in humans. I wonder if I demonstrate such behaviour, and how I might find out. To the extent that I am self-critical it has been by observing that other people are not.
When I was a teenager I was interested in the occult, and had several experiences which seemed totally real at the time, but which I can only explain now as self-hypnosis — while my accidental Philosophy A-level taught me not to believe everything in the New Age section of the bookstore, my mother continued to believe that Bach flower remedies could help her memory right up until she forgot what those “remedies” are because of encroaching Alzheimer’s.
My earliest childhood memories are 2/3rds dreams and I only found out by asking my relatives about things which occurred within them, not by introspection.
And then Brexit, where… well I can say with high probability that half the country believes the other half is out of touch with reality, and vice-versa, but all the online arguments seem to show each side accusing the other of uncritically parroting cliches.
> It seems unlikely there are many nonhuman animals capable of making that sort of distinction
It doesn't seem that unlikely to me. We've no way of telling if the mice in this experiment know the memory is untrustworthy, but avoid the smell anyway just in case
This is very good remark. I saw Vsauce video about chimpanzees' photographic memory compared to normal human memory. Proposed explanation is cognitive tradeoff hypothesis - basically that while chimpanzees' memory is visual, human memory is influenced by language - basically how you describe event in your head.
"Downloads taking too long? Subscribe to our notifications service. Get faster downloads for just a single daily memory implantation of a product you 've never bought but already love! Hurry up, supply is limited!"
Introducing new ad blocker: WetBlock Origin, for each new false desire injected by a marketing campaign, WetBlock will introduce a false memory of you already having a satisfying amount of the desired object and enough time of using it as to be slightly bored by the concept.
No, you'll just have a free learn-french-in-3-seconds course by Google, which will bundle a set of preferences (like cheeseburger, detergent, or designer bag brand) from advertisers who are paying this. At this point all that remains of "you" is a bag of meat.
It might have some downsides, but let’s not forget about the daily torture and atrocities we experienced before the government started manipulating our memories.
The description of what they have accomplished sounds misleading.
They stimulated an olfactory sensory nerve. That causes a real memory of an artificial sensation. They also stimulated the VTA, causing the mouse to learn that the stimuli is bad.
The mouse will not have any memory it can "look back on" of receiving a shock. It will just have a general feeling that the scent is "bad" and to be avoided.
This seems to be the defacto state of the world, right? I mean, take a look in any history book (especially US vs European, or any Latin American countries).
Now that it's being called a science perhaps the layperson can get better metrics and telemetry on how it's already being performed by big actors at scale.
If I remember correctly, Shoko Asahara's cult zapped the brain of Asahara' driver so that he lost memory. There were people with PhD's in the cult and they had all kinds of crazy sci-fi plot schemes.
The next most interesting direction the researchers could go would be if deletion is possible. I’m assuming the question of deletion being even possible would be amazing to find certainty. I’m speculating for an existing memory to be deleted, it has to be rewritten and thus typical deletion is impossible without rewriting. Once all this is perfected, the future technology of brain interface for humans will have even more potential. We’re going to be able to interact with our minds as we do everyday with computers. Very exciting!
Most of this research is actually driven (and funded) by the desire to identify and erase memories for e.g. PTSD victims. It doesn't require "rewriting", there are ways to delete engrams with chemical inactivation for example.
I know this is all in the realm of pure speculation anyway, but why would you think it's plausible that a memory must be re-written instead of being deleted? People forget things all the time, so obviously you don't need to have an uninterrupted memory of your life so far. Are you simply thinking that memories only get deleted to make room for some other memories, not necessarily of the same events?
My theory is re-writing is simpler, more efficient, basically elegant and all that's needed for achieving the task of producing a memory. I don't necessarily think forgetting an event is illustrating memories being deleted because the same result can be from re-writing neurons for newer memories.
It's not the next step. That was the previous step. It's already known and demonstrated many times that deletion is possible, so now they wanted to know if they could also create memories.
I'v been aware of some of the work you're referencing because of the popular goal for solving ptsd in psychiatry.
The methods of "drug-induced amnesia, selective memory suppression, destruction of neurons, interruption of memory, reconsolidation,[1] and the disruption of specific molecular mechanism" are not necessarily as great comapred to what was done in the article where optogenetics is referenced as the method of creating memories.
The current methods being used to attempt at deleting memories have resulted in consequences and typically considered extremely dangerous because of the inaccuracy of the methods. Making me skeptical if it's not just damage to the brain.
Sure, if you want to ensure 100% that's there's no collateral damage to any other memories than what you try to delete, more refined methods like optogenetics will be needed.
We experience blue screens dropping a bottle of milk. There's ways to freeze a brain or trap it into a kernal panic that require zero technology whatsoever.
In fact we don't have to imagine, I believe I've been subjected to "mass gaslighting" on multiple occasions recently on the internet : some piece of information I'm sure I saw on the internet suddenly completely disappears. Google + Facebook + "right to be forgotten" type of policy, make for a very dangerous power never experienced before by humanity.