I haven't posted one of these in a while mainly because I haven't had the time to do it with midterms and other nasty school stuff constantly being shot at me. So right now I'm just sitting here with my laptop killing time and thinking. What a perfect environment to do a new theoretical question!
P.S. in my last theoretical question thread somebody mentioned that my thread was way too long for a very simple question. I assume he meant my "ultimate question" at the end. I just want to clarify that that is not really the whole point of the thread. I just add at the very end the question that inspired me to write the thread. Most of my ideas are put into the body so don't just skip to the end question and read that. The main content for the thread is in the body!
So without further ado...


MEMORIES- I am a computer scientist so I really have no medical background but does anybody really know how our memories work? How they are stored in our minds. The amazing part is that they are the only record we have of our past. I read somewhere that there is not a cell in your body that was there 7 years ago. Your body constantly makes new cells and gets rid of the old ones, but if that is true what links us to ourselves. Are our memories the only thing that makes myself me? Well sure I guess there is DNA but the only way we can see that is our appearance, which changes anyway. What if you somehow found out that what you remember was not what you actually did. What if your memories were a lie?

So this brings me to my ultimate question for this thread....
What if you were trapped in the same time lapse for your entire life but you didn't know it. What if your life is only a few hours long and after those hours are up then your mind was restored how it was two hours ago and then you relive the same two hours again without realizing it. And everything you remember from before those two hours never really happened, they are just false memories... I know its a stretch but I find myself thinking this a lot especially when I am really looking forward to something. I think "what if I never get to that point in time? What if I am constantly reliving the hours before it and never experience it?

 

 

 

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There are about three things i see here: (1) In order for this to be possible, you would have to have been placed on earth (or wherever) at a predestined age. For imagine if a child who is one hour old, of what would their mind be? They still exist, but their mind says otherwise. The child would die, for its body cannot survive with a "dead" mind. Therefore, it would have to be at an age where the person bears conscious of their own existence and is capable of maintaining themselves. (2) What if one person had a time-reset at 10:30 PM, that would mean they would have their memory reset to 8:30 PM. Now let's say another person existed and was living with that person, but this person's time-reset was at 9:30 PM. That would mean one is able to tell the other person that they did something that they don't remember an hour ago. I'm not entirely sure how to phrase that, however. But i think you can bear some insight on what i mean. (3) This one relates to number 2. It's more relative, however, to the person rather than a third party telling them what they did. Let's say someone writes notes of what they did, you know, a journal. Within this two hour time period, they took the time to write it in in a new page. After the time-reset, the person goes back to write in the journal. But wait. What's this? What they wanted to write is already written. Is someone playing a joke? But how is that possible? Is someone capable of reading my mind before i even think up something? ...Anyways, you get the idea. And think of the possibilities where this could lead to! People may be too confused to advance in anything.

And imagine hygiene.

Nice topic, btw.

 

 

 

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And, as always Alex has some great question for us

From what I mannaged to dig up from the Web, it appears that long lasting memories we have, change our brain also in a physical way... So, your theory that people coul'd have a reset time after some period of time, is totaly plausible to me...

And if we suppose this does happen, a person does "reset"... Well... What truefusion said about those 3 point, they all stand... It would be hard to be all alone when that reset time comes, and nobady to notice it... But, I guess the biggest problem would be with some written trace we leave behind us, be it a journal, some notes, or just thoughts... Heck, even posts on a forum can count... And then you read something you "allegedly" wrote, but you have no idea about that... That would be a mess... I believe people would start going out of their mind...

Of course, there is a possibility that we all have the same reset time... We conviniently reset at the same hour, say, midnight, when we're all asleep... That would be freaky... Who would know what's happening? People would go insane reading what they wrote, looking at their own work, their own masterpieces of art, paintings, music, computer scientists at their programs...

We do not know if there is some sort of redundancy in the brain... Is only one brain synapse storing individual memories, or is there some sort of a backup? We only use, what, 1% of the brain, 2%? What about the rest og it? Is it just a huge storage for our memories? If it is, and memories are indeed redunant, how to restore that backup of yours? Many, many questions, and so little answers...

P.S.
It sounds to me as a global conspiracy theory again

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WHAT? I didn't post this! Oh wait, did I? Was my mind reset? Haha just kidding...

Well I'm glad that you guys enjoy my topic. When I was first thinking about it, it seemed like a great idea to post but while I was writing it, it started to sound really weird so I apologize. So first to address TrueFusion. You brought up a point I forgot to mention, because of course if everything was how it was before your memory was tampered with then you would realise that something was up, but I was thinking of everything just being reset when your memory was reset. Like you would never know you are reliving your past experiances over and over.

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Hmmm.... that's a very interesting question, and something that I've never really thought about before.

@truefusion: I wasn't thinking about a person only getting to live the first couple hours over and over again.... that just adds a whole other dimension to this idea for me. But I don't really think it would be about the body not being able to survive because it wouldn't be aware of it's own consciousness, because I figure, a child at that age wouldn't be alone anyway... wouldn't it have to have the parents with it (in the real world, or in the repeating world) to survive? So if that's the case, I suppose the people caring for the child would also have to be repeating the same time frame as the child... and here I was thinking everyone would have to be in there own loop, but if that's the case, either it's all multi-dimensions where the same person can be repeating several stages of life, or everyone in the world would probably have to repeat the same two hour time slot, because of all the interactions. I'm confusing myself, so I'll stop there lol...

@galahad: Interesting... and I wonder how written things would work in the equation, because if everything was being reset, wouldn't the written things be reset as well, so it was like it never really existed in the first place? Like Maybe I've been writing this forum post over and over again, and when the time resets, it's as if the post wasn't here, because I hadn't done the things yet? As for people's times being reset at different times so they have some of the memories, while the other person has lost them and because of their personal "reset", that would open up a whole other can of worms.

Like what if person A was somewhere, then met up with person B who has their time reset, leaving person A mid conversation with a person that is no longer there. Because person B was reset and is now repeating what they were doing before the meeting, so they in essence "disappeared" for no good reason from person A's timeline. Unless there could be different people in each time so that one wouldn't disappear... and I'm really losing this train of thought, so I'm going to stop there for that one too lol...


Now let me tell you my take on it all, if you can make any sense of my ramblings, because I tend to ramble on about things that are interesting, but baffle me just the same:

Anyway, the first thing that came to mind for me was "now there's something that explains deja vu"... Not really sure if this is the case for reliving a single set of hours over and over again, cause then you'd probably feel deja vu more often or perhaps a much stronger feeling of it, but maybe it is possible that we do relive certain periods of time over again, and that could be why we feel that way.

Well, now that I've got that out of my system lol...

I would really hope that those last few hours that I'd be living over and over again would be something great. Even if it's the hours that lead into something great that is coming, that would still be decent to relive, cause even if you never make it to the actual even, it can be sometimes a lot of fun being excited for the upcoming events, just as much as the special day itself. I'm thinking about Christmas right now... like on Christmas eve, I get all excited over the fact that it's only one more sleep until it's Christmas day, and the joy that can bring to a person is great. You feel great, and things just seem to be happier during that time just before bed when you are waiting for Santa to arrive.

So, a case like that, it wouldn't seem so bad to relive something like that over and over again... cause it's a joyful time and something that I'd be happy to unknowingly do time and time again.

Now what would worry me, would be that I'd get stuck into a rut where my three hours that I get to repeat would be while I was doing something that I really dislike, or while I'm bored or even sleeping. That wouldn't seem to be a good way to go through life (if you can call it that, because it's not really going through it, other than that brief time period of it).

But should I really be worried about being stuck inside a rut like that? Because if it were really happening, then it would mean that I'd be doing this same thing over and over again... therefore, I'd be on this forum, posting this same message hundreds of times (I must really be racking up the credits now, right?! But no... it's all reset again when I start the loop over lol. Anyway...) and feeling a bit tired and hungry all at the same time, because that's the way that I feel now.

I wonder what it would be like to have those fake memories too... like we base the things we think about and feel on what we've done and felt in the past... so if all these things never really happened, and the memories were fake, I wonder if they could be changed each time that we started the loop again, so that we'd have a completely different past.

Mind you, on second thought that doesn't really work either, because if I had a completely different past I probably wouldn't have been making websites, or found myself on this forum, and then I wouldn't be posting here either. So it wouldn't really be living the same couple hours over and over, but rather, the same couple of hours would always be completely different - not that you'd ever really know (because you wouldn't remember.)

Anyway... My final thought on this whole crazy business (great topic by the way!) is I read somewhere a while back that you must forget something 7 times for it to enter into your long term memory. Perhaps then, all the things that are now in our long term memories are events that were significant enough in our lives that we've had to repeat them 7 times in the past?

I guess now it's time for me to go and look up some informations on memories, because you've sparked my curiosity. It's an interesting fact to know though that your entire body has nothing in it from seven years ago though... so if every thing's been replaced, I wonder how your brain or cells or whatever it is passes along all the information to the "new" cells as the are changing over. Oh.. so many things to think about, so little time...

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Explain the details of this "time lapse" a bit to me. Suppose you were running 3 miles right before the time lapse. Would you then clueless as to how your body is so darn tired or would your body be restored to an earlier state? Also, I'm wondering why your memories wouldn't carry on from one lapse to the next. For example, it would appear as elections are coming up and it would appear to continue so for 20 years, so perhaps you might think something peculiar is going on. If you would care to answer those questions then I can perhaps ask some better ones (I can't now, don't want to waste my time if I'm completely wrong). Thanks for your time.

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I watched somewhere that he mind can store infinite amounts of data, just to give you a comparison. If every atom in the universe was turned into data, it would fit into a person's mind.
Why we forget? We forget because the mind considers some data to be 'old' and just stores it and doesn't catalogue or index it, thats why we get the 'I was going to say something but now I forgot'. And why hypnosis can bring back old memories.
People say that, if I can store infinite data into my brain, why can't I remember a book when I read it the first time?
That is because it isn't how much data we can store, its how we store it!
Storing data isn't just a matter of 'Compute, COMPUTE! COM-PUTE!!!!!' our minds can only process limited amounts of data at one time, and so thats why reading slower helps you to remember more than reading maybe 1500WPM?

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What I want to know is, what is the scientific explanation for dejavu? Its a complete anomaly. I believe that some people have a vision of the future in their dreams and just dont remember until the event has already happened or is in the middle of happening.

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Doing something and thinking to yourself "I've done this/been here before," ect. without actual prior experience. Personally I think it's just a bunch of crap or a poor memory, I've never experienced anything like that. I'm guessing the reason why the definition is so vague in the first place is that they don't know what it is themselves, making me believe it's a bunch of crap.

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this sounds alot like the matrix or something. I have thought about this kind of thing, what if we are just hooked up to a machine that simulates life as we imagine it. It could be the year 8567 for all we know. We could be being tested on by some advanced race. Also, I sometimes remember things that have never happened. Then one day, it happens, like dejavu. It could either be that I lived a past life or that I have had a premontion or vision of the future.

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