The scheme seems ingeniously simple and technically feasible. To overcome oblivion, say the authors, all you need are sensitive miniature sensors and several terabytes of storage, which are already or soon-to-be affordable. You can then record every minute of your life using video, audio, location and physiological signals, culminating in the commitment of this endless stream of information to your personal MyLifeBits account in your pocket and/or in cyberspace. Proper software will permit you to retrieve the information years later, and it will even pass by default to your progeny for eternity, with the hope that they will pay attention to it.
New Scientist: "Memory & Forgetting In The Digital Age" by Yadin Dudai
Dudai brings up some valuable criticisms of the claims being made by the authors, representing a certain faction of technologically minded futurists.
More worrisome than the idea itself is the prevailing assumption that such a recall would in fact be total. Even in its most outlandishly comprehensive form, such technology would merely opportune an augmented reiteration of a numerically unique prior occurrence. Assuming the commonly held empirical view of time, experiencing such a recollection would, no matter its immersiveness, retain distinction, even if only by merit of such numeric identity.
Let's suppose such a device has been built and that it is able to record and induce a recollection so immersive as to be indistinguishable from the original experience. By means of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI, yet another emerging innovation) the device thoroughly records the user's external context as well as affected perceptions and corresponding mental states. In fact the user of this device becomes so immersed in the recollection that he or she would have no idea that it was in fact a recollection, their brain state having been reverted to the time of the initial occurance. They may have forgotten the intervening memories, or else are unable to recollect them. Either way, they essentially live the experience as if for the first time. Of course, when the user is brought back to the present, they become aware of having gone back into their archived past. This shift may be disorienting, or perhaps as banal as turning off a television. Either way, they now have knowledge of having lived the experience, archived it, and subsequently recalled it. All the while, they are recording information. This means they may now recollect recollecting.
What happens when they step back into the moment of stepping back into another moment? Deffering any conclusions bearing resemblence to popular science fiction, this shows that even the most immersive recollection will retain its numerical uniqueness, if only in retrospect.
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