Peter Godfrey-Smith: Memory as Communication

[@cynocephalusw]

He tries to press to much into his lecture. In a certain way its bottomless, because as a philosopher he tries to circumvent the evolutional aspects of memory and communication. Nietzsche called this the heriditary defect of philosophers. In „Other Minds“ he did a far better job. The reaction of the audience is obvious. Memory seems to me a bridge in discontinuities, like DNA or an archive of scripts you can rely on. The amount and nature of memory often depends on what senses are involved in a certain animal. Olfactoric and tactile senses need a different kind of memory because they often bridge smaller discontinuities than the optical sense. For instance ants use scent trails, tandem walks, they carry conspecifics. So the amount of discontinuity is very low. It‘s like taken by the hand. That changes rapidly, when there is no guideline. If you have to transport optical gained information from one individual to another things are different. Abstraction comes into play. Bee language is such an abstract communication. Direction, length, fertility of the destination has to be packed into a analogue dance. More and more complex memory is required. It‘s not easy to unravel the interrelations of discontinuities, memory and communication, but very interesting.

[@modvs1]

Isn't this a trifle question begging? I'm assuming that someone with no memory would struggle or fail entirely to engage in 'communication'. So if 'communication' as it is ordinarily understood, involves memory, then the metaphor is circular.

[@cynocephalusw]

modvs1 Memory can be seen as a temporal structured bridge in a discontinuous space. Is there continuity, for instance a communicative scent trail, memory isn‘t necessary. Silver ants live in a very hot environment, where scent trails are volatile so they had to evolve a higher degree of memory than their relatives. The same with honey bees, who have to remember feeding sites. Patients with Korsakoff‘s syndrome are unable to navigate in their minds and in reality for even a short distance. They fill up their minds with old outdated stuff instead. Communication seems to me different with a split up in analogous (bee language, nerve conduction) and digital (DNA/Ribosome, language, script and finally electronic communication). Digitality is absolute because it‘s able to transport every meaning a n d store it. Communicational structures bridge in space, memory bridges in time.