Sentient Life as Nature's Video Recorder

Hypothesis: Sentient life is nature's recording machine.

This morning, we are watch Mo Rocca's Innovation Nation, on which one of Mo's quiz answers was the invention of the video recording machine--what enabled television shows to be replayed later instead of live. 

Add to this the fact that I'm currently reading a work of post-apocalyptic fiction--The Second Sleep--in which all the information we've been storing online is lost, and only fragments of written works remain.

And, include my previous interest in the durability of oral records--Buddhist works being passed down through the ages by memory and recitation, the works of Homer possibly being memorized recitations before they were written down, etc.

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/intro/971
Magnetic Core Memory
These things stirred my mind to think that sentient lifeforms, and particularly human beings with our facility for language, might be nature's recording machine.

We witness the world, we remember it, and we speak it. Generations pass on this spoken history, which can be more durable than any written record, so that we as part of nature become an organic record of what has been going on in the world.

Anyone who has tried to keep written files, or audio/video recordings, over the past three or four decades will have run into the problem of magnetic recording getting distorted, and the discs or tapes and the machines they run on becoming obsolete. (I saw an exhibit about this at the Computer History Museum.)

But still you might meet up with an old friend and reminisce about old times, keeping the memories alive and maybe telling younger people about how it was in the old days. 


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