I came across this thought experiment in The Emergent Mind: If a personâs knowledge is held in the hundreds of trillions of connections between their neurons, could we theoretically reanimate those cells to recreate the activation patterns of their life?
I immediately thought of the Highlander series, where immortals absorb the essence of those they defeat and behead. Iâd watched the movies and the subsequent TV series as a kid. I found the idea of the Quickening interesting, though it was gory. They never show how much knowledge actually transfers, but the premise is strange and tantalizing: what someone lived through over centuries somehow passes into the victor.
That intertextual connection between neuroscience and an 80s fantasy film felt worth following. Both seem to be asking the same question: Could what someone experienced, learned, and became be re-instantiated in a new vessel?
The Emergent Mind treats this as a mechanistic problemânot as a âspiritâ moving between bodies, but as a physical process akin to water flowing through a dry riverbed. In this view, your âselfâ isnât an ethereal ghost; it is the emergent result of your specific neural architecture whereas Highlander treats it as inheritance, each victor accumulating what came before until there can be only one.
I keep wanting to say these are two versions of the same thing, but Iâm not sure they actually are. What they do share is an assumption about lived experienceâthat the patterns that generate it might transcend their original biological vessel.
This led me to thinking about PKM. Not just as a third example of the same idea, but because putting notes from different domains next to each other is how connections like this one happen in the first place. When I build a digital garden or a networked note system, Iâm attempting a gentler version of the same process: externalizing the architecture of my thoughts, creating structures that might outlive my biological memoryâs limitations.
However, the book suggests a crucial breakdown in the analogy. In a neural network, knowledge is in the connections, but thinking is the active signaling between them. A note is a static artifactâwhat the authors call a record or film snippet. Real biological memory isnât a file we âreadâ; it is a set of connection weights that allow us to approximately reconstruct an experience when the right cue hits.
When we link notes, we are mimicking the connectionist property of the mindâbuilding a system of âweightsâ that makes certain insights more likely to fire. But even if we could transfer the structure of someoneâs thinking, would we get the process of insight, or only its dry riverbeds?
- âď¸ Do PKM systems capture thinking (the dynamic murmuration of activation), or just the dry riverbeds of our connections?