[leafboi]

Memory is seemingly virtual but in reality all memory takes up physical space, so eventually you'll hit limitations.

I don't know about the whole "damage" part but from a logical perspective you have a limited amount of space in your head and therefore limited memory.

If a thing thinks, by induction it will be finite. I don't know if it will "want" to be.

[icedchai]

I'm skeptical. Old memories do fade quite a bit. Anything unimportant is somehow compressed... distilled to its essence... perhaps the equivalent of garbage collection. There is a window of time, say 25 years, and beyond that point things get pretty hazy. At least, that's how it feels to me. I have childhood memories that are so distant and fragmented, they barely exist anymore.

[leafboi]

There's no need to be skeptical. We live in a physical world where all information must be represented by a physical entity.

By induction there will be limits no matter what. You cannot have an infinite amount of memory in your head. You cannot have an infinite amount of anything anywhere.

However abstract something is, the symbolic nature of an abstraction must utilize at least one atom. For example, let's say we have a big number... <the number nine> that we want to abstract. We can choose to have that number be represented by a single symbol "9" rather than nine actual things. This is the true nature of what abstraction is, using smaller symbols to represent bigger things aka compression. But for that symbol to even exist it must be written down or memorized somewhere. This takes up physical space. Even your computer hard drive must use physical magnets flipped to different polarities to represent memory.

The biggest possible abstraction of a real world phenomena in terms of magnitude is to represent the entire universe with a single atom. In the end atoms take up space and even the biggest possible abstraction of the entire universe must take up the space of at least one atom. Your memories are no different... they are just symbols representing aspects of your life experience. Likely your memories take up much more space than a single atom and if your memories take up space and you have a finite amount of space in your skull, then by logic your memory is finite... this categorically true by logic.

Whether the finite memory problem is solved by garbage collection or whether it's not solved at all and people simply go insane is undetermined.

What is known for sure is that your memory is finite.

[icedchai]

It's not literally "infinite", you are right. And compression is probably the wrong term. Parts of my early memories are gone: literally gone, no where to be found. It feels like exponential decay the further you go back. Certainly it doesn't decay to nothing, but maybe it's close enough on a very long time scale. I don't know... how do others perceive their distant memories?

[leafboi]

Compression is the correct term.

Using symbols to represent bigger concepts is a form of compression. The representation/memory of an animal in your mind is done using symbols rather than an actual animal.

This isn't speculation. A animal exists in reality as construction of millions of biological cells each in turn made up of billions of atoms. Depending on how big the animal is it could be more atoms that make up your brain. Therefore, for the animal to exist in your mind as a memory there Must be a form of information compression. You cannot fully hold an actualization of an animal in your mind because it is too big to exist in your mind. Your brain holds symbols of the animal.

What happens with a jpeg is the exact same concept as what happens in your memory. A jpeg is a symbolic representation of the actual picture. It is a form of lossy compression because details from the original picture are lost.

[icedchai]

In some cases, yes, it is compression. What I was referring to was not, really. It's complete absence of detailed memory.

[leafboi]

In all cases memory exists as compression. If the memory is completely absent then we're talking about something that doesn't exist, there's no point.