A Comuniq essay distinguishes present experience from autobiographical memory in the debate over digital personal continuity
A Comuniq essay distinguishes present experience from autobiographical memory in the debate over digital personal continuity
On 4 August, Comuniq published an essay about memory and personal continuity. Using the stories of Henry Molaison and Clive Wearing, the author distinguishes the experience of the present, the ability to hold a current thought in mind, and the memory of one’s own life. This distinction raises a question for digital personal continuity: can a system connect new experiences to the history of a specific person?
The word “memory” covers several distinct functions. Working memory retains the beginning of a sentence while we read to the end, or the steps of a recipe while we make tea. Episodic memory preserves events from one’s own life, including a meeting, a promise, a loss, a decision, and its consequences. Working memory supports current thought, while episodic memory connects a person to their past.
A 1957 paper by William Scoville and Brenda Milner described the loss of the ability to remember recent events after bilateral surgery on the hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory formation. Henry Molaison was among the patients. In a 1995 clinical report, Barbara Wilson, Alan Baddeley, and Narinder Kapur described the amnesia that the musician Clive Wearing developed after herpes encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain caused by the herpes virus. According to their account, he spent years believing that he had just regained consciousness.
The essay’s author expresses the distinction in a single sentence:
“Being here is one thing; remembering that you have been here before is another.”
The author turns this distinction into an engineering problem. A digital continuation of a person must retain the context of the current conversation, retrieve personal episodes that are relevant to the situation, and incorporate each new experience into an ongoing biography. An archive of photographs, letters, and answers to questions provides material for this retrieval. A continuation of a person must integrate new experiences into the person’s broader biography.
In a model for gradually transferring brain functions to a silicon system, the biological and computational substrates remain active at the same time while functions are transferred in stages. During such a transition, the new substrate must connect each subsequent experience to the biography already lived.
In the author’s model, biographical continuity emerges when a new event is connected to the past and changes the broader life story.