When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future

In other words, memory consolidation creates meaning by putting information into an appropriate context.

Digital data are completely dependent on machines to render them accessible to human perception. In turn, those machines are completely dependent on uninterrupted supplies of energy

Culture provides the large-scale framework for memory and meaning. It aids in the creation of new knowledge, but it also acts as a filter that over time determines what is of long-term value from the social perspective.

We began to travel backward in time to understand causation, and forward in time to make predictions.

We began to think with things.

The moral of the story is that in Paradise, there is no curiosity.

in 1997

our information technologies all derive from the single insight that matter records the history of the universe because it is a slow, cold form of information. The universe writes its own autobiography in atoms.

Our ancestors, on the other hand, communicated through language and gesture, song and dance. They led rich interior lives, creating ideas, images, and wholly imagined realities that shaped their interior worlds just as deftly as their tools made clothes to keep them warm and huts to shelter them.

it is our emotions that tell what is valuable for our survival and well-being.