My Digital FootPrint

Is a fossil an immutable memory? An immutable object (in coding) is an object whose value cannot change. A more generic definition of “immutable” is that it is unchanging over time or unable to be changed.  Again, in code, what does immutable mean behind the scenes in terms of memory?  An object is created and given a value, is then assigned some space in memory . The variable name bound to the object points to that place in memory, and as long as the memory is not changed, it is immutable. As long as the memory is not changed, it is immutable. The risk is that something writes over that part of memory and the immutable is lost.   However, human memory is not immutable. Human memory is all rather made up.  We are poor at recall, and we can easily be biased to focus on one thing and miss the obvious ( remember the gorilla experiment on selective attention). At the same time, we don’t know how our memory works, and there are a lot of theories, the overall agre...

This strange question needs to be unpacked and to confirm no aminal was hurt in the writing!  This post is NOT addressing do animals feel emotions.  Anyone who has had a mouse to an elephant can easily answer that question; animals do present what humans interrupt as feeling and emotions. Can a dog feel disappointment is the wrong question!   If the question is, can a dog feel doggy-disappointment, surly the answer is yes?   What is doggy-disappointment, we don’t know as we are unable to determine the gap of expectation between what the dog thought they were getting and what actually happened.   Why is this important? What do we really mean when we ask when we think about, “can a dog feel disappointment?”  Is it, can a dog process the same feelings and emotions as a human as we understand disappointment?  We project onto the dog what we think and understand, without knowing what the dog does understand.  Given that emotions are chemistry/ bi...

Whilst the quote focuses on the human memory as a means to create personal identity, the question to be looked at is “What types of memory do we have”, and “what do these memory type mean for identity?” The types of memory we have is somewhat easier to break out and explore, in fact so are the types of identity. The core of this article is the thinking about complexity that arises when we explore the interaction between memory and identity. This is very much a thought piece that needs lots of debate, I hope this starts it. Memory Before we go to far, it is worth reading the wikipedia entry on all memory as it breaks out the many uses of the word in different contexts. Nature has a wide variety of memory techniques, but none of the naturally occurring ones are similar to the one we propose to create for digital identity (near perfect). Our existing paper identity systems are closer to nature than the digital one we propose; existing schemes generally get worse over time, solve...