Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I remember when I first took a data structures course, learning things like trees and linked lists, I had a total paradigm shift with respect to how I understood my own mind.

I had never really thought about the different ways that data could be organized, and how they perform differently. I figured that since this was so basic to computer science, my own mind couldn't be doing something completely different. It might not be the same in detail as any computer data structure, but it couldn't be completely unrelated either.

I realized that data structures might make information feel different. For example, I can only tell you what the 16th letter of the alphabet is by counting from "A". I can't sing the alphabet song backwards. These are at least qualitatively characteristics of a singly linked list. The same goes for my phone number and my credit card number. I wouldn't be able to dictate them backwards, except by mentally traversing them forwards and then holding the whole number in my conscious memory as I reverse the digits, or if that's too tiring, traversing it forwards multiple times and stopping at different points.

I have many detailed memories of past events, conversations, and trivial facts, but it's hard for me to remember them on command. I need some kind of prompt to point me to the right index where I can retrieve it.

I agree a lot with the interpretation that we have a messy OS that bungles memory management and does lossy compression and a poor job of disk defrag, running on some very impressive hardware.




Recently I was thinking about how my brain answers the question "What's your favorite movie?" and how I can easily answer that question, but it's harder to answer a question like "What's your favorite movie where a gun is fired?"

It seems to me that whenever I watch a movie, if I really liked it, I check my perceived quality of the movie against the quality of my current favorite movie, and if the new movie beats the old favorite, I update the "favorite movie" pointer to point to the new movie. When someone asks "What's your favorite movie?" I just return the name of whatever the favorite_movie points to.

The question of "Favorite movie where a gun is shot" is much harder, I think, because my memories aren't really indexed that way. I can't query by "gun is shot" so I can't get the subset of movies I've seen with gun shots and pick my favorite.

To me, it seems like my brain, at least for movies, has something of a key value store, which I can scan, slowly and imperfectly, but not query with complex questions. Or, maybe, if the queries are too complex they timeout and I don't get back any results.


>The question of "Favorite movie where a gun is shot" is much harder, I think, because my memories aren't really indexed that way. I can't query by "gun is shot" so I can't get the subset of movies I've seen with gun shots and pick my favorite.

And yet as much as yours or mine, or likely most people's memories aren't indexed that way, I bet if you asked enough people you'd find someone who organized their memories in some obscure strange way that would let them answer that question immediately.


>Recently I was thinking about how my brain answers the question "What's your favorite movie?" and how I can easily answer that question,

I can hardly answer that question

I think I need to make a table of all movies I watched, with columns for different quality aspects, and then I could calculate a score for all movies. Then the favorite movie has the highest score.

Then I think a few minutes about the table, before answering that I do not really have a favorite movie


Some very interesting points.

I would like to say that the hardware is a bit of a mess as well. There are weird redundant bits of legacy hardware that aren't required any more, but nobody's bothered to remove them from the system (appendix, wisdom teeth). There are oddly paired systems (genitals combine waste removal with reproduction; the nose combines air filtering with scent detection; the mouth combines food intake and air intake/outlet). And oddly co-dependent systems (lose your sense of smell and your sense of taste takes a significant hit).


What do you mean? That sounds just like a modern CPU to me! :)




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: