"The wizard knows that to be truly alive, she must die to the past at every moment."
Since I had to choose something a bit more conventional to study in graduate school, I ended up studying memory. Good choice, as it turns out.
I hinted at the importance of memory mechanisms last week. How is it useful to understand the fragile nature of memory, the different levels of encoding, the mechanisms of encoding, the role of attention in encoding, the function of sleep in sorting partially-processed information, long-term potentiation, etc.?
So glad you asked.
Current theories of quantum physics hold that once I have observed the outcome, something (the wave function) has 'collapsed' and the outcome I observed is now the only possible outcome I will ever observe. Gotta disagree there... A observation is nothing more than a particular pattern of neural activity. Further, it is a pattern of activity at a particular moment in time. That pattern of activity, which is the sum of goings-on at the subatomic level, will influence future patterns of activity, but there is nothing supporting the idea that an observation casts a permanent change in the state of universe, other than that usually most future observations are consistent with it. This does not mean that future observations have to be consistent with it.
And how do we know that most observations are consistent with past observations? By accessing our memories of past observations. Suppose it were possible to find a future outcome that is inconsistent with a past outcome, and to have experienced them both? (Remember the UNDO project?) So let's ask the following questions...
What does it mean to UNDO an event? What factors might determine whether an event can be UNDONE?
To 'UNDO' an event means that new observations exist, and that these observations are inconsistent with previous observations. Furthermore, this inconsistency cannot be resolved with a 4-dimensional explanation. It's possible an event could be fully or partially UNDONE. Accordingly, new observations can be described in terms of their consistency with past observations using the following continuum...
consistent -- compatible -- inconsistent -- incompatible
You cannot tell that an event has been UNDONE until key observations exist which are incompatible.
Which raises the second question - What factors might determine whether or not an event can be UNDONE? From the Smearland perspective, the short answer is - the number and strength of the memories that must be 'overwritten' and/or contradicted. An event that is like many other events has little weight in the neural net. It might be more difficult to counter the impact of an event that is unique and significant.
Break it down a little bit more... A 'significant' event is one that generates many other moments of conscious experience (leaving many memory traces), and therefore has a lot of potential to influence expectations about future events/outcomes. A significant event will be much more difficult to UNDO in a single shot. An insignificant event, which is not prioritized within the neural net, is less likely to be recalled when a contradiction arises, or when expectations are being formed about a new event/outcome.
There's a lot more to be said about the role of memory, and the process of UNDOing. But unless you have personally experienced two sets of incompatible observations, you will need to think about this for awhile to understand the true impact of what I'm suggesting.
