Sometimes I think about the arguments about LLMs being conscious/not conscious because they have X or don’t have Y capability, and then I think about this. I wonder sometimes if they knew what it was like, people would consider this “less than human”. Quite like your last paragraph here.
Thanks, this resonated with me too and was I had never heard about it before! I was doing more research into it., and there seems to be the opposite of this called HSAM or highly superior autobiographical memorywhere some people can vividly relive their life given just a specific date like April 15, 1995. However, it seems to be less common (only 100 people diagnosed with it worldwide)
That made this whole thing feel even more alien to me.
The blank I drew with my grandfather is just an example of what you might call a “memory void.” It’s not that I tend to forget people. Indeed, my loved ones are safe in my mind, albeit in that intangible and elusive form, with no risk of being forgotten—more on this later. My memory voids are specifically about the concrete things I did in my life.
Ask me how my childhood was, or if I had fun in my twenties, and all I can answer is “I think so.” Not because I wasn’t sure about it at the time, but because I don’t remember what I thought of it. With such broad and general questions, I have almost no hope of coming up with representative memories to help me answer those questions. No flashbacks to times I thought “this is great!” nor to moments of sadness. Again, many such events are buried as facts and observations somewhere in my memory, but that’s not how I can recover them.
My past feels like someone else’s. I know a great deal about it, more than anyone else in fact, yet I don’t remember being in it. I can create a year-by-year history of my whole life with information such as the places I lived in, the schools I went to, the major turning points in my life; I can explain many facts about the key people and events of each time period; I can even arrange many of these in the form of stories or ordered stages of growth—yet none of this feels like things I did. It’s like being the world’s top expert about a stranger’s life.
This may go beyond aphantasia and to something called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). It looks like our understanding of SDAM is still in its infancy though.
Sometimes I think about the arguments about LLMs being conscious/not conscious because they have X or don’t have Y capability, and then I think about this. I wonder sometimes if they knew what it was like, people would consider this “less than human”. Quite like your last paragraph here.
Thanks, this resonated with me too and was I had never heard about it before! I was doing more research into it., and there seems to be the opposite of this called HSAM or highly superior autobiographical memory where some people can vividly relive their life given just a specific date like April 15, 1995. However, it seems to be less common (only 100 people diagnosed with it worldwide)
That made this whole thing feel even more alien to me.
Yeah this sounds more like SDAM. Here is another self-description blog post of SDAM (via Hacker News).