[ExI] Essential Upload Data

[spike at rainier66.com]

> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Essential Upload Data

 

If my memory is serving me well (not likely) it has been estimated that only about 25% of what is said is adequately communicated.  Part of that, I suppose, is that you have to count both errors: errors in what is said, and errors in what is understood by the receiver.  It gets even worse, I think, when you consider class reunions:  the communicator doesn't remember an event well and then states it poorly, and the receiver has different memories of the event and then garbles what he hears.  Bill

 

 

Hi BillW,

 

(Hey where the heck is BillK these days?)  I had some fun experimenting with your class reunion observation.  At my 30th, I found three others who were present at a math competition the four of us attended.  I asked them to tell me what they remembered about it.  The three of them described a scene which bore little resemblance to my own memory of it, and little resemblance to each other.

 

I found it most striking: my memories of the event were very detailed, far more so than anything else that happened that school year.  But their memories of that were vague, nearly gone.  It was just something they did on a whim, never anything they took seriously.  But I did.

 

Perhaps BillW can explain this.  Mainstream theory has it that when we recall an event from long ago, our minds fill in details that fit our understanding of how things work.  Then each time a memory is accessed, a new copy of the event is written in our minds.  This phenom causes post-trauma distress, for the victim cannot stop making of new copies of a bad or scary event.  But can also lead to what I fear happened to me: I remember an event as being a lot more interesting and fun and pleasant than it really was.  I had a blast at that competition.  My compatriots scarcely recalled it at all, or if so, it was only that they were there and played in it.

 

BillW or any other memory-hipsters among us, do enlighten us por favor.

 

spike

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