Think about an actual first-person experience you recently had, though. Do you really see a full and clear image, as if you were looking at a true photo or video? If you really try to parse out the small details, can you say exactly what every shade of color was, how the lighting was, where every single thing was located, everything you heard and smelled?

I doubt many people have such an extremely vivid memory. I do think my memories of first-person experiences are in the first-person (if I'm understanding it right), but I feel like I just retain the general impression of "scenes", with details for the important things and vague, "smeared" descriptions for everything else. The information is sort of compressed, and more of it can be decompressed if I correlate the events with other things that happened at the time or do other things to jog my memory, but I think it's still a lossy compression. I kind of figured that's what memory is like for most people.

>Think about an actual first-person experience you recently had, though. Do you really see a full and clear image, as if you were looking at a true photo or video? If you really try to parse out the small details, can you say exactly what every shade of color was, how the lighting was, where every single thing was located, everything you heard and smelled? I doubt many people have such an extremely vivid memory.

Nobody has such an extremely vivid memory. We don't even have it for the present moment. But this is not what this is about.

When walking around and seeing things in real life you don't see "where every single thing was located" or what every shade is either. You only do that for things that you focus on. The rest is still visible but a kind of haze. And things on the periphery are lower res.

It's not about being able to see things with real life detail, as if you walk on some reconstructed 100% replica of the world then, and you get to look around, focus on things you didn't focus at the time, get closer and see detail, etc.

It's about being able to see past scenes as visual replay-like reconstructions.

A computer screen is real. The images are symbolic of non real things, but the images are real.

And especially to the point, since you are (controversially) claiming that raw sensory input is the core of memory, not interpretation of it, it's incoherent to claim that a visual artwork is less memorable than whatever the art represents.

>A computer screen is real

Which is neither here, nor there.

>The images are symbolic of non real things, but the images are real.

They are still not tied to touch, smell, sense of being in place, temperature, wind, and several other things.

In fact they can actively fight your environmental cues. E.g. you can watch a man drink coffee in the African heat on your screen while sitting in a room with no smell of coffee at all while freezing cold.

The real world intermix of sensory inputs tied to each environment work together and help make the scene, and eventually the memory, even more concrete.

>it's incoherent to claim that a visual artwork is less memorable than whatever the art represents.

Would you remember more being in a sea with huge waves rocking you, or having seen some artwork of such a scene?

Do you remember better a car accident you had, or pictures of random car accidents presented to you?