I know that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris, France. I’ve never actually been there. I’ve never seen it with my eyes. I do know several people that have been there, and I’ve seen lots of pictures of it.
I remember what I had for lunch today. I remember ordering it, paying for it and eating it. I remember dribbling some of it on my shirt.
When I was 6, I was a flowergirl in my grandfather’s second wedding. I was thinking about that today. I don’t actually have any memories of it. I’ve seen the pictures. I’ve heard the stories. I can’t pull up a mental picture of it. Not the event, not the location, not the emotions.
So, do I remember the wedding, or do I know about the wedding. What is the difference? If enough facts are presented, do we mistake knowledge for memory?
There is no difference. You know the Eiffel Tower is in Paris because credible sources told you in the past, more than once, and you remember it now. You are drawing a false distinction. Knowledge is memory.
I don’t have any real knowledge of this, but I think it is a fascinating subject. It can’t be as simple as memory=knowledge, or phenomena like amnesia wouldn’t exist. Or short term/long term memory problems, for instance.
A person with amnesia loses, or can lose, all knowledge of himself and the people around him without losing an understanding of how the world works, how to operate equipment, how to talk, how to read… I guess for the most part those are all skills actually. I don’t know what an amnesiac would say if you asked them about the Eiffel tower.
I think most of the data points in our minds are really interconnected nodes, linking to each other to create further meaning. I read once about an amnesiac who managed to lose his emotional connections to his close family but not his mental knowledge of them. At that point he stopped recognizing his parents as “mom and dad” and identified them as people who just looked like them - he thought they were polite impostors.
It’s a safe bet that no one here has dropped an egg from the top of the Eiffel tower, but everyone knows what would happen if you did. If you go with the line that memory is knowledge and knowledge is memory, that’s a little tough to explain.