that biological inheritance or evolution were "wrong."

The author closes by saying "Perhaps the brain’s role is not to house the past, but to facilitate our engagement with it." This is intriguing, but how do you engage with the past if you do not create a record of it?

The problem with that perspective, the author argues, is that the hard problem of consciousness has not been solved.


That is indeed a problem, but it is not a falsification. It is something we simply don't know. There was a time where we didn't know about genes, but that did not imply

memories are harder to recover after a lesion, but not impossible. And if there are certain cues that are unique to the spared connections, they can reliably recover those memories.

The author also argues that the storage metaphor stems from materialist assumptions about consciousness.

There's not a lot of contrary evidence here. The author mentions cases where even with brain damage and dementia, memories can still be recovered with certain cues.



However, you can demonstrate this behavior pretty easily in a neural network with distributed connections. In these cases,

The author argues that it's not "proven" that memories are stored in the brain.

Sure, but science cannot prove!

 There is a lot of very good evidence that memories are stored in the brain. Damage to the hippocampus completely annihilates the ability to create new ones.

She was such a sweet and beautiful cat. She was my best friend and got me through some really tough times.

She chose me when I adopted her. We always had a special bond.

There's only one point I can think of - people with prior grant success likely have experience in coordinating long-term projects with a team. But that can occur even without grants, and I feel like that could be assessed *directly.*

The way I see it, if someone has a great track record with research but doesn't necessarily get a lot of grant funding, wouldn't that make their application *stronger*, if anything? They clearly achieved a lot of that without a lot of funding.

This is an excellent point. There are some good theoretical explanations of why memory would be organized by recency, but not why loss would occur in the same way.

Thanks! But has there been an explanation offered as to why systems consolidation takes longer in humans than other animals?

I don't really have any good answer on this, and I was wondering if any folks that are a bit sharper on the neuro side than myself might know? I also talked about the rodent work, showing that consolidation periods were estimated to be much shorter - on the order of days or weeks

should have attacked him for being basic with his shirt choice instead

all of these arguments largely agree with the authors - I'm not saying this as a knock on the authors for not citing these papers, but rather that there has been some important theoretical evidence for a while on the topic and I'm happy to do my part to make sure they get more recognition!

there are some other examples of this as well. Minerva 2 - an episodic memory model that uses a retrieval process that generalizes across related episodes - can construct semantic representations in the same manner as episodic ones: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

from a theoretical viewpoint, you can build semantic representations using episodic learning. for instance, you can apply the temporal context model - a model that associates items to temporal context - to a corpus and build semantic representations: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....