Hovering on the Brink of Amnesia
I've been reading Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens". This brilliant book creates, with enormous thoroughness, a convincing story of the nature and the component parts of what constitutes the conscious experience. He usefully creates the concept of a variety of selves, (core self, autobigraphical self etc.). The former is the experiencer of immediate sensations and feelings (I think I'm getting this right). The latter is what I have termed elsewhere the self-model, (the one I have proposed that is used as part of the simulations we run of the future.) What I feel he needs in this "autobiographical self" is an indication of how compact a thing it is. I contend that by containing just a few elements and by being kept "up to date" nearly every instant of the day the self-model or autobiographical self is able to be used very quickly and with reasonable accuracy. I claim that it is from the almost obsessive reassessment required in the maintenance of the efficacy of the self-model that the very particular sensation of consciousness derives.Reading over the notes to the Quisnunc story, (unfortunately, I haven't been shamed into finishing it yet..) I was struck by the line that the Humunculus, to be successful, needed to continually forget who he was...
Domasio, in his book, describes a patient who has almost total amnesia. His short-term memory (60 seconds only) is fine, but nothing is retained after that. The startling thing is how happy and normal and obviously conscious this patient is.
Clearly, the self-model lives within this 60 second lifespan of short-term memory.
I wonder why the short-term memory lasts this particular amount of time? Perhaps, if its longer we don't so immediately need to process the data in the way that commends it to medum-term storage, i.e. we don't need to actively think about it so soon. If its shorter we may not be able to think about in its context accurately enough. We'd be continually fussing ourselves over isolated snippets of events whose relation to each other would be less apparent. Maybe the length of time knowledge is held in short-term memory is related to optimising the conscious experience.
By having a sufficiently short short-term memory we are forced into a near continual process of self-reflection and and thereby are given the option of near continual re-assessment. Too short and the self-model has too little useful detail. Too long and it may be out of date. (Remember, you may be trying to outrun a sabre-tooth tiger that, moments before, you were sure was going to be your winter coat.)
Maybe we are at our most alive when we are hovering on the brink of forgetting who we are.
