Memories are made of these

Memories are made of these

 

14/7/19

 

Recently I was involved in a crash.  No, there is nothing to worry, there were no broken bone, spilt blood, depressing hospital visits, etc., the kind of images that might have crossed your mind, but it was of the common kind that you hear about these days – computer memory crash.  Nevertheless, there is no dearth of anxiety and hope, as you would have following a physical event – how much is lost, how much recoverable, at what cost.  The event triggered the following thoughts.

Whether it is digital or physiological, there are two kind of memories, one to deal with action and activities and the other to keep information.  In the case of digital memories we are more concerned with the later and not so much about the former.  The memory to perform actions, the things we call apps or programs are mainly for the performance of the holder of the memory while the other is for interactions with the rest of the world by the holder.  The former allows the memory holder to perform actions like calculate a number, create a document, play a song, etc.  We usually can borrow it, upgrade it, improve, create, etc. as many times as we want, and hence need not be too concerned about the fall out of a crash.  It is the other type of memory that stores information that we are most concerned about, in terms of recovery and reuse.

In my case, I had about 25 years worth of memories stored in my computer of which I am worried how much I could recover.  I know that most of this information is not of any use to me, except to give the comfort of the possibility of getting back in time to revisit the memories.  But in reality revisiting information from the past, even from  last year, seldom happens.

The problem with information is, once it is created it never dies.  That does not mean its meaning is stable or consistent.  This is the idea about history, it is a study of interpretation, where everyone has different standards of authenticity or impeccability of the information.  Once information is created, every time anyone visits it, it is always modified, corrupted, altered, distorted, etc.  This is the truth about the signals.  Information (signal) does not matter, what counts is how it is read and reacted against.  In endocrinology we learn that different tissues react differently to the same hormone.  Likewise, every reader of an information reacts to it differently, which ultimately is the purpose of the signal, to induce appropriate response, not a uniform one.

Information are only memories, which is a way by which we record the stimuli to which our sensory organs can respond.  Thus, we call memories signals such as sound, sight, odor, heat, etc.  Incidentally some of these we are able to digitize and store.  The data we store in our memory devices are things like words, numbers, sounds, pictures, etc.  But certain things like smell are yet to be transformed into storable signals which we can revisit directly, but there are other devices like perfumes which can take the place of a computer hard disk.  So, the bulk of the anxiety of not being able to retrieve information from a crashed memory device is the fear of losing the possibility of these experiences through the digitally stored information, whether it is an old song or the picture of your child as a toddler.

In the biological systems as well, memories / information once created is never lost, but it can be corrupted, modified, improvised, duplicated, conjugated.  New creations are mainly obtained by this corrupting process.  Thus, the process of memory crash is the process by which we expand its size (by new device with greater capacity) bring in new apps and devices (skills and capabilities), and thus it is a moment to cherish rather than feel dismayed.