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could androids one day have inner lives and memories, like we do? What about other animals, or a computer?
What is the mind? Is it simply a working brain? Is it merely the activity of billions of neurons, or something more than that? And, if the former is the case, how do these neurons store and retrieve so much information about our lives?
As we try to understand how the activity of neurons encodes the remembrance of our experiences, we are inevitably led to ask about self-awareness, about the thing that makes us feel that we are a person.
neurons are the basis of brain function, arranged in groups, connected with one another in networks, producing with their activity our ability to see, listen, feel, and remember. But how do neurons generate the different functions of the brain?
one can define a total network energy and create an energy landscape—each point in the landscape corresponds to a different configuration—assigning memories to energy minima determined by the connectivity patterns across the neurons.
In particular, how can the brain, with its mere three pounds of matter, store so many memories in such rich detail? Or, more explicitly: Do we have enough neurons to account for such a feat?
The idea that we remember a great deal of the subtleties and details of our experiences, as if we are playing back a movie, is nothing more than an illusion, a construct of the brain.
Forgetting gives us the pleasurable heartache of blurry photographs and unfinished stories, a tango that laments the sorrows of our scarce memory while acknowledging that some things are better glimpsed dimly.
we’ve seen that our memories are shaped and stored based on our interpretations of them.
