Once you start to see human perception and interaction in terms of latent spaces, the entire concept of memory takes on a different meaning. It would be easy to think of a memory as some kind of internal recording, like a tape in a tape recorder, or a strip of movie film. But it would also be wrong.
Memories are not literal at all. They are reconstructed from patterns of thought that we have spent our entire lives building.
Your memory of a person’s face is not a literal recording of their face, but rather an impression that you carry with you, which relates their face to all of the other faces that you have seen in your life. In this sense, there is no such thing as a “memory of someone’s face” in isolation from the rest of our lived experience.
This way of looking at things makes it easier to understand how our conversations fall into patterns. When we talk with another person, most of what we say is framing, using our memory of conversations past to scaffold new thoughts.
That’s not a bad thing. In fact, we can better understand the meaning and import of a conversation by how it uses those conversational memories as a launching point to travel into new territory.