Knowledge and Memory

Summary

September 6, 2025 The other day, I asked Claude how to do some­thing using a par­tic­ular Ruby library, and it hal­lu­ci­nated three nonex­is­tent methods in a row. We can ask “why do lan­guage models do this?” but/and we can also ask, “why doesn’t Robin do this?” I think it’s because I don’t only know things: I remember learning them. My knowl­edge is sedimentary, and I can “feel” the posi­tion and solidity of dif­ferent facts and ideas in that mass. I can feel, too, the airy dis­con­nect of a guess. If you’d chal­lenged me to simply guess the methods I was looking for, I would have typed exactly what Claude hal­lu­ci­nated. Same goes for most Ruby programmers. So, why didn’t I guess, and then find myself sin­cerely sur­prised (as Claude surely was) when the methods didn’t exist? Well, searching my memory, I found no record of ever learning them in the first place. Not that I can con­nect every Ruby method I know to the pre­cise time and place of its memorization — but there is some tag, some tether, some … some­thing. It’s a wild sort of proprioception. I’ll remind you that biol­o­gists do not, in the year 2025, know memory’s phys­ical sub­strate in the brain! Plenty of hypotheses — no agreement. Is there any more cen­tral mys­tery in human biology, maybe even human existence? Lan­guage models don’t have memory at all, because they don’t have expe­ri­ences that com­pound and inform each other. Don’t the model weights encode a vast store­house of memory? No — those are closer to DNA, an inheritance. The model weights are awe­some the way an embryo’s devel­op­ment is awe­some, rather than the way Steph Curry’s three-pointers are awe­some. Many engi­neers have pinned their hopes on the con­text window as a kind of memory, a place where “expe­ri­ences” might accrue, leave useful traces. There’s cer­tainly some utility there … but the analogy is waking up in a hotel room and finding a scratchpad full of notes that you don’t remember making. (Lan­guage models might, aft...