Humans spend a lifetime gathering information and building knowledge; but, what happens to this wealth when a human dies?
Are information and knowledge genetically transferred across generations?
Do they take part in the evolutionary process?
Does a newborn carry forward information and knowledge from his/her parents?
On the other hand, digital media, mostly inspired from humans, are considered reliable at safeguarding data; for example, when a computer gets worn-out the stored data is often easily transferred to another computer or storage medium.
So, are digital storage media better than the human mind at safeguarding data?
Storage is of no use if you don't know the contents of the file, or of the book. When the the human mind saves information, it has to understand it even at a minimal level because memorizing has to do with putting information in the right compartiment, or according to the image used by Cicero and by men with highly trained memory, in a place, as in a room where the mind had to deambulate. Of course artificial storage is useful, but the fantasm of some paedagogues that it would no longer be useful to train the mind to memorize is certainly wrong and explains some of the problems our western children have and the reducing of their scope of understanding (with my French first years it is obvious)
I would approach this question in two ways:
1. Is the human mind better at storing and retrieving data than digital media?
2. How can the data generated by humans be transferred across generations?
For the first question, I'd like to point out that the brain's storage capacity is not contested as much as its retrieval capabilities. Studies in the area of the fallacies of human memory will better answer this query.
For the second, it is true that human knowledge was transferred by rote and reproduction in the age without formalised linguistic systems and writing mechanisms. However, in today's day and age, human knowledge from one being to another, or from one generation to another cannot be transferred through only simplistic means, simply because of the vast amount of knowledge that every human possesses.
When you question whether knowledge transfer occurs through evolutionary mechanisms or genetics, I don't know whether it is a valid query really. If you speak of a fear of heights, sure it is knowledge transferred evolutionarily to protect us from a dangerous situation. But if you speak of more complex forms of knowledge transfer, I wouldn't know how to reply. Hence, I'd request you to define the kind of knowledge you speak of. Hope this helps :)
As far as I know, there is no evidence of genetic inheritance of memories. Recently I have seen some evidence in animal expriments where fear of some external stimuli could be demonstrated to appear in later generations. That is the old debate between Lamarck and Darwin. Anyway there is no proof of inheriting abstract thoughts by biological processes only by learning. In terms of capacity and speed machine memory is better than human memory (or will be so sooon), but is is a mechanical retieval system. Human consciusness and memory is not only data retrieval, but also active transformation, correlation, allusions etc. which are not present in machine memory. I know that artifical intelligence and slef-learning program, evolutive algortihms etc. develop at an amaizng speed but I believe they are still far from human capabilities.
Hansika: The knowledge I am speaking of is that one you accumulate throughout your life.
Dears Hansika and Gyorgy:
Leonardo da Vinci once said that "Human subtlety ... will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous."
Inspired by the above quote, it would be a shameful waste if all the knowledge that is accumulated in the mind of a human being throughout his/her life is gone once the person dies!
If nature is to be perfect, as described by da Vinci, then the information/knowledge we are addressing ought to be transferred easily throughout generations and not by relearning it from scratch!
Agreed that there must be some way for knowledge to get transferred faster, and I'd suggest that way may be the capacity to learn quicker. When babies are born today, they do not have inbuilt knowledge of how apps on a phone work; but they fiddle around with them long enough, showing persistence and learning, enabling them to make those apps work. Simple mobile applications for children teach then cause-effect relations and I believe simple aspects of conditioning. This may be a simplistic example, I agree, but it does highlight the fact that knowledge transfer occurs through experiential learning on the part of the organism, and knowledge that is documented and made available to them.
Dear colleagues,
I was attracted by this amazing question that highlights a very complicated subject. I would like to share my thoughts based on some scientific evidence. It is well known that the human memory and learning are inherent to both the synthesis of proteins within neurons and the plasticity of brain areas. All of this will dissociate once the organism dies, meaning that the subsequent retrieval of lifelong information from such organism is theoretically impossible. Our ability to understand how could we retrieve such information by means of high-tech instruments or sophisticated software is limited by our knowledge of memory/learning processes itself. For the transfer across generations, the basic capacities of memory and learning, inherited from parents, do not ensure the acquisition of their amount of knowledge by their offspring. It is simply a subjective matter! Finally, whether the machine is better than the human systems in safeguarding and retrieving information could not be properly answered at this time. We still miss many pieces of the puzzle :)
Dear Mohamed:
Many thanks for your valuable contribution to the above question!
Hello Christoph - Many thanks for your valuable comments.
I will answer later on.
Regards,
ZAF
Undoubtedly, with death all information is gone.
But, I am talking about Information management (mainly storage and transfer) in the living human.
Our methods of reading and writing are so primitive that they remind me of reading/writing from/to the old 5.25" floppy diskette and printing from a dot matrix printer - we were able to offset this impediment in technology at a geometrical rate following Moore's Law...
However, when it comes to our neural system, it is hard for me to accept that nature is so inefficient - we are slow readers, slow writers, and the information that we gather over a period of 75 years is lost once we die.
So, besides the trace of literature produced by humans there must be something that is passed on to generations beyond our conventional means.
Could it be that newer generations will possess highly developed senses with more efficient throughput, such as scanning of text or hearing of audio information at high speeds?
Thanks for inviting me to participate. I agree that digital storage of data is quite reliable, so I store important stuff on pendrives and CDs. The human mind is well able to store a lot more than we have uploaded onto it, yet even in a healthy person, forgetfulness can set in. The most careful person can forget. But we must also consider the effect of the stored data. A computer is cold and unfeeling, but the data or memories in a human can bring joy, happiness, thankfulness. This is valuable to humans.
My research focuses on musical mnemonics to help my students learn biology, help their mind to convert short term memory to long term memory more efficiently. See the proceedings, and listen to the simple and enjoyable tune recordings on my page on RG.
Thanks Ahed for your note - I look forward to receiving your input.
Kind regards,
Ziad
Very thought provoking question! Just thinking "aloud", I would consider the digital media the best safeguard if you wanted to just repeat information without thought-filled processing. I say that because not only do we die at some point and take our knowledge with us but some of us carry genetic components towards diseases which impede our memory processes. I am referring to diseases such as Alzheimer's which robs current memories of a person but tends to leave the long-term memory intact. BUT, when I say thought-filled memory of the human brain you get the thinking process not just a capitulation of data. I am going to have to chew on this one a little bit and make a decision one for the other if that is the true question. Thanks for sending the question to me!
Storage is of no use if you don't know the contents of the file, or of the book. When the the human mind saves information, it has to understand it even at a minimal level because memorizing has to do with putting information in the right compartiment, or according to the image used by Cicero and by men with highly trained memory, in a place, as in a room where the mind had to deambulate. Of course artificial storage is useful, but the fantasm of some paedagogues that it would no longer be useful to train the mind to memorize is certainly wrong and explains some of the problems our western children have and the reducing of their scope of understanding (with my French first years it is obvious)
The human brain is a marvelous complex network with extreme flexibility in the way information is handled and as supervised and directed by the owner. So, the brain stores tens of years of data and information which is simply sorted, categorized, and retrieved according to the will of the owner who decides which sectors must be active and which will remain inactive until further notice. Tangible technology is an imitation but is not activated except by the user. So, where we go from here?
The difference is that the brain is organic and interacts with the owner's conscious will as well as with the unconscious will. Data and information is brought out (retrieved) in the first stage with meaning and processed value while in the second stage data and information is retrieved in pictures and events (usually we call dreams) which may or may not mean something. So, that is something marvelous.
As for the transformation of data and information into knowledge, this needs exchange and interaction between more than two brains, and consequently value is added and this process occurs in large periods of time as long as the exchange process is ongoing leading to the generation of wisdom characterizing the communities in different physical places. This exchange, by the way, is encouraged even religiously to leave a legacy behind when one of the brains dies!
I think it's a very interesting question, and contrary to appearances, the answer to it is not necessarily obvious.
It seems that it is possible to agree with the advantage of digital media over human reason (memory) in respect of certain long-term preservation of information.
However, we would remember the fact, that the digital format store just as much as on it was previously saved.
On the other hand, are known for their history of excellent examples of "collective memory" of many peoples with details about their history, whose have been preserved in the form of orally transmitted stories.
To Ziad, Ahed, Ayaz, and all other Muslim RG members: I wish you a happy holiday in conjunction with Mailidur Rasul.
Related to Ziad's question, I recall Imam Shafiee. I was told the story (by my Muslim friends) about this bright poor boy who had no writing materials. So he wrote using saliva on his palm. As soon as the saliva dried up, the things he wrote went into his memory :) So here, Ziad, what can we conclude about the human memory?
PS: Imam means religious teacher.
The eternal issue of quality v/s quantity. The human mind might be more qualitative but there is no denying that computers can store a far greater amount of data. So, the decision would differ from situation to situation. where data security is an issue than there is no better firewalll than a human mind
Dears Hussin, Andrzej, Sana, Miranda, and Qurratulann:
I am fascinated with the different thoughts that were added to this rather philosophical question. Thank you!
Hussin and Andrzej good arguments!
Yes, Ziad. I'm very often amazed how RG friends EXPAND my feeble thoughts and bring my thinking to Near Perfection. Some of our RG friends are so caring! Thanks to all of them, they know WHO they are. Thanks also to those people who work behind the Scenes!
It depends, I personally think that digital media is creation of man whereas human's mind is creation of God. Then how do we compare both? God's creation is indeed superior than human's creation. But here the issue is of memorising quantitaive data and digital technology is much suitable.
1. Security problems of digital media versus human memory.
2. If human's mind is creation of God then may be there is an external human memory???
3. There are no instruments to "translate" the digital media content into different forms
as a human can. E. g.,, "text in the brain" to image and sound.
4. The human memory can sort its content according to the factor of importance and
there is a relationship between the physiological and psychological aspects and the memory using.We can "train" our memory.
5. We can not consider a human memory as a mechanical mixture of the computer
memory system components. Our memory is a self-organizing system with very interesting adaptive properties.
It is a good question indeed. But why we think preferring one over the other. The human beings in the past had no option and they had to store the data in their minds only but we have many options. Digital data storage is one of them. The human mind provides the foundation because it is the human mind that produces the data however the data can be stored in digital form. We should use both options so that data can be used even after the death of the human mind. In areas where the human beings saved data in their minds and did not allow it to use for others, such areas remained undeveloped.
The common problem of both options are viruses! A fear to lose data is always there but in different forms.
I will give more credit to the human mind since it is an entity by itself (supported by psychological and physiological stimuli) and at the same time the human mind designs the digital media for its use!
Dear Zirad
There is no exact answer to this question. It is impossible to compare the human brain to a machine , because the amount of informations we store can not be quantified. Throughout evolution , human brain increased in size and improved its functions , but the ability to store and recall facts is not entirely an enigma unraveled by science. The brain retains only fragments of what happened and the time to assemble the puzzle of memories, emotions and tell how the person perceived the fact .Who has memory is the computer. What we have is a vague memory !
Dear Nelson Elias!
" What we have is a vague memory ? !"
I thing that our brain remembers everything but we cannot represent everything.
Under the influence of hypnosis and in critical situations, a man suddenly reproduces absolutely forgotten facts. I know some real examples when anyone begin to speak at "unknown" language.
Dear Karolina, There is difference between data, information & knowledge.
Computer memory is a storage of a data (011101011). This data is transformed to
the information by the computer program and this program "knows" what must be
done. I do not know what is the content of our brain cells, what is a decision making process.
Our body also has "hardware memory" which does not depend on the experience, e. g., instincts.
Our discussion is very interesting but we must invite professionals !!!
Dear Karolina:
In our inventions we often tend to imitate nature.
I am not certain if that was the concept of a computer memory.
But, I believe that you have made a nice comparison between the two.
The concept behind the question posed here was that humankind has succeeded in modeling memory in digital form and that it was capable of storing and retrieving massive amounts of data almost instantaneously.
However, when it comes to nature, we still are unable to transfer information stored in human memory except mainly via speech and writing - a very slow process.
The question is, and using da Vinci's quote "Human subtlety...will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous", could nature be so inefficient in what could one person learn in a lifetime cannot be transmitted in a very short time to another person - like a computer?
Last weekend, I was watching "zardoz" a very interesting sci-fi movie, released in 1974 and starring Sean Connery, and there was a scene were they were transferring memory contents from a person into another being via osmosis... That scene reminded me of the concept behind the question posed here!
I hope that this clarifies the point behind this question.
Regards,
ZAF
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