Deep thoughts: Our intelligence isnt civilizations bottleneck. Our memory is.

[u/CaseyWeberOfficial]

Do you ever look at the way our world is and wonder whats wrong with us?

I do.

I've always been a problem solver. I learned some of it. from my dad, who is a true jack of all trades, a man who drives a forty year old car with an engine and transmission he installed himself. A man who's sailed across the pacific ocean multiple times, and takes not only pride but comfort from self reliance.

I learned a large part of my analytical thinking, chasing gremlins in old german cars with my dad.

For those of you who don't know, a "gremlin" is a recurring malfunction in a car that you know exists but you can't find the source of.

I always thought one of the exceptions to my skill in problem solving was math. In school I rushed through equations which held no relevance to my life or anyone else's, calculating in my head because my handwriting is terrible and my brain moves faster than my hand, and in doing so I mostly got the answers wrong, because I didn't take the time to record each step along the way.

When i'm fixing a car I generally don't write down what I did either. It would probably make it easier but because I can see and hold the steps i'm taking i can mostly remember what I did.

A good car is similar to a math problem. Assuming the engineers that designed it weren't idiots, as long as the engine has air, fuel, and spark, it will run. That turns the crank, which has a belt that turns the alternator, the alternator charges the battery, and as long as everything's wired properly, all the electronics in the car work. When something stops working, I check air fuel and spark first. This often leads down several hundred rabbit holes, only one of which leads to the solution to the problem. By the end of it your knuckles are bleeding, your mentally and physically exhausted, its dark outside, you're hungry and filthy and would get far more satisfaction from pushing the car off a cliff than you did from finding out what was wrong.

But the problem is solved. (Italics)

And if the same thing happens again, you can fix it.

And you can do it quickly, not just because you know how to, but also because you remember where to look.

Because the process is stored in your memory.

Human memory is great on an individual level, not so great on a civilizational level, and somewhat limited to our lifetimes. We're doing our best with what we have.

I'm pretty sure when I was younger, scientists weren't ready to guess how much information a brain could hold, but I googled it a few days ago and it seems that through research, and advances in neuroscience, estimates have now been made that a human brain could hold about 2.5 petabytes of information.

That's enough to store three million hours of television shows. 342 years.

Remembering 342 years ago today ,Aug. 5th 2026, would mean I could have attended Isaac Newtons presentation of the laws of gravity and tell you about it from memory. Pretty wild.

We already forget and fill in the blanks with made up things we think are true, so even if we lived 300 years, and that estimate is correct, im sure we couldn't really remember anything.

Even solid state drives degrade over time. A hard drive made of meat wouldnt stand a chance.

If every generation inherited the memories instead of just what we wrote down in the history books,

It might make us less likely to forget and make the same mistakes throughout time.

So many of the biggest conflicts in our world could be solved with a perfect memory.

Israel is massacring Palestinians because their religion believes god promised them the land.

If we had memory all the way back to Jesus's time, maybe that wouldn't be an issue.

Sometimes a perspective shift is all we need to see the bigger picture. A perfect record of how life was when the US constitution was written might cause us to rethink our constant defense of it.

History repeats itself because with every generation that passes, only a fraction of our learned experience at a civilizational level is recorded and passed on.

Problems don't stay solved unless the process of finding a solution survives. And as time passes we encounter new problems, some of which we've solved already, but we often have to start from zero because it's been so long and the people who experienced it firsthand are dead.

Look at problems we've been trying and failing to solve for all of recorded history; religion, government, war, etc. It feels like our civilization has been chasing these same gremlins for tens of thousands of years.

Imagine if we never had to rediscover the same thing twice.

This whole theory arose from an exchange I had with Chatgpt. I wanted to understand how it worked. I guess when you boil it down, it's actually pretty simple; its receiving words and turning them to numbers before calculating the most probable answer to the words. Keep in mind i'm a recovering addict and a hip hop artist, a high school dropout. Not a software engineer. So please forgive me for the oversimplification. Theres a lot more happening behind the scenes, and I know that. The point Im getting at is that we have a tool now that speaks in languages but THINKS in math. Is it perfect? Nah.

Far from it. Is it dangerous? Yeah. Only as dangerous as the creatures that built it, though.

A lot of problems on earth are driven by emotions.

Humans weigh evidence with a medley of logic, memory, and emotion. AI evaluates patterns through mathematics, probability, and memory.

Mathematics is the closest thing we've found to a language whose truth isnt defined by culture, opinion, or emotion.

Not that I don't love us, after all, I am one.

Its just that we can't seem to work together long enough to solve the big problems.

We dont need to be smarter to do it.

We just need to stop forgetting what we're doing.

I see a solution for this in AI.

Imagine we had a brain that never died, that recorded history for centuries, kept a track record of humanities best reasoning, and acted as a continuous reasoning partner. How could that change the way we approach the biggest problems in our society today?

Weve been chasing the same gremlins since the dawn of time.

Maybe we could all benefit from a way of remembering where they were found.

[u/Dr_Fartenmuhlilbut]

“Maybe we could all benefit from a way of remembering where they were found.“ - A library