What Is Memory that It May Have Hindsight and Foresight as well? - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 103

furrier would tell her “Here is your mink coat” by handing over to her a
slip on which is printed “HERE IS YOUR MINK COAT”.
At this point I don't believe that anybody may disagree with my insis-
tence on invariance of quality of entities when stored and retrieved and
with my choice of example illustrating this invariance. Consequently, one
may be tempted to use this concept for somewhat more esoteric entities
than mink coats as, for instance, “information”. Indeed, it may be argued
that there exist reasonable well functioning and huge information storage
and retrieval systems in the form of some advanced library search and
retrieval systems, the nationwide Educational Resources Information
Center (ERIC), etc., etc., which may well serve as appropriate models or
analogies for the functional organization of physiological memory.
Unfortunately, there is one crucial flaw in this analogy inasmuch as these
systems store topics, tapes, micro-fiches or other forms of documents,
because, of course, they can't store “information”. And it is again these
topics, tapes, micro-fiches or other documents that are retrieved which only
when looked upon by a human mind, may yield the desired “information”.
By confusing vehicles for potential information with information , one puts
the problem of cognition nicely into one's blind spot of intellectual vision,
and the problem conveniently disappears. If indeed the brain were seriously
compared with one of these document storage and retrieval systems, dis-
tinct from these only by its quantity of storage rather than by quality of
process, such theory would require a little demon, bestowed with cognitive
powers, who zooms through this huge storage system in order to extract the
necessary information for the owner of this brain to be a viable organism.
It is the aim of this paper to explore the brain of this demon in terms of
the little I know of neurophysiology so that we may ultimately dismiss the
demon and put his brain right there where ours is.
If there should be any doubt left as to the distinction between vehicles
of potential information and information proper, I suggest experimenting
with existent so-called “information storage and retrieval systems” by
actually requesting answers to some queries. He who did not yet have the
chance to work with these systems may be amused or shocked—depending
on his view of such systems—by the sheer amount of pounds or tens of
pounds, of documents that may arrive in response to a harmless query, some
of which—if he is lucky—may indeed carry the information he requested
in the first place.
I shall now turn to the second pair of terms I promised to discuss, namely
“Recognition and Recall”.
(ii) Recognition and Recall
I wish to associate with these terms the overt manifestations of results of
certain operations, and I wish not to confuse the results of these operations
with either the operations themselves or the mechanisms that implement
these operations.