It’s All About the Context: Coding, Conversations, Books and Priming Capacity

January 11, 2023, 1496 Words.

I have often felt that working memory does not quite capture our entire context as we drift through the world. The common understanding of working memory claims that we can juggle 5-9 items in our heads, and does not seem to differentiate between the intentional and unintentional usage of these items. Yet when holding a conversation or writing an article, what I say or do is constrained and informed by an expansive swath of the context so far, often without me intentionally doing so (for example, not repeating what’s already been said).

This post runs through some of my thoughts on this matter, beginning with two prerequisite concepts of utterances and the Priming Effect. These lead into my working model of the above observation: the priming capacity. The post concludes with some thought experiments about savants with perfect priming capacity and why AI probably won’t just be a “copycat of what’s already out there”.

This is one of early posts and is hosted on my original platform. Access it here. It remains to be translated from Markdown.