Quote:
Originally Posted by hoggworks 
Is the author of this paper unaware of computers? Computers recall data that is stored on a physical medium. Precise information about the data is recorded, and recalled. All you need to do this is a mechanism to store the data, and a mechanism to recover them. Why would the brain be different in that regard? Computers do what the author says the brain can't do physically. Interesting.
Now, you could easily reply with a difference between the two types of data, or at least the retrieval method: there is indeed a difference between remembering your friend's face and requesting a known file to open in Excel. But when you see a person's face, presumably a search is run to see if this matches anyone you know, just in the way that you might, say, run a search for a file you're looking for but which name you don't recall.
To take the comparison even further, consider facial recognition software; computers can recognize human faces, and record rafts of people to recognize for a future date. Information about faces is stored, and could be safely stored for as long as the storage medium is viable. When the detection software is running, it is continually searching its visual fields for faces (using a camera or video camera). Initially it searches for the roughest shapes it can identify as faces, and once it finds a face, narrows the search down based on criteria. This would be akin to tagging, where the software -- and the brain -- would see face, then white skin, then beard, then hair of a length, then something then something, and make a connection.
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You seem to be saying that our memories are akin to a computers memory -- in other words memory is information. But a computer can't remember a felt experience. How could information -- a string of 0's and 1's -- stand for the taste and texture of vanilla ice cream for example?
Why can't the brain simply
allow access to our past experiences rather than create them? In other words why can't we just simply
directly apprehend what we have experienced in the past?