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Lots of interesting issues, in our Monday night conversation last week and below.  A few that stick in my mind/I want to mull further ...

I hadn't thought a lot about the eidetic/photographic distinction before but think its a useful one to bear in mind, both because of existing literature and because of interesting conceptual issues.  "Photographic" brings to peoples' minds the obvious: a stored photograph, an unprocessed original image.  I seriously doubt the existence of such a thing on several counts.  By and large memory is something constructed each time its accessed rather than a stored record.  In addition, I think it unlikely that the brain ever has, or sigificantly stores, unprocessed images. 

Its interesting to think about Wiltshire in these terms.  Whatever he is drawing it is something constructed rather than a stored photograph of what he saw.  For the latter he would have had to hover in the helicopter at exactly one place, the place from which the scene he drew can be seen (if such a place exists). Wiltshire must instead have taken a whole series of retinal images and created from them something he saw "from his mind's eye".  Whether he drew that as stored in his brain or actually created it as he drew is an interesting/open question.

On the flip side, we all have some eidetic capability, as exemplified by the sense that something we don't quite remember is located in the upper right page of a book we remember.  And I'm very intrigued by the idea that eidetic memory, in this sense, may not actually be something we lose so much as something we lose access to.  More frequent in children, and in older people?  Similar to perfect pitch?   Maybe the "loss" isn't of the processing capability but rather of access to it from consciousness?  Because its less useful in social/cultural contexts? 

What will also stick in my mind is continuing discussion of the irreducibly subjective in relation to shared subjectivity.  Does "meaning" exist only in shared subjectivity ("if its not relateable to others it is meaningless").  Can one tell someone else they are not in pain? (child with skinned knee?). 

I'm attracted by the notion that science in its methodology depends fundamentally and importantly on shared subjectivity.  But have the feeling as well that it needs equally to be understood that science can't speak to the significance of irreducible subjectivities, though it can inform them.