Memories are only reproduced mental fragments. "Then what makes some recollections seem so real? The secret is that real-time experience is just as indirect! The closes we can come to apprehending the world, in any case, is through the descriptions our agents make." This leads to Minsky's "Immanence Illusion: Whenever you can answer a question without a noticeable delay, it seems as though tat answer were already active in your mind." (NB: This makes sense to me from the view that consciousness = recent memory.) Not all information is immediately available, though, which again reminds me of the temporal problems with consciousness that Dennett describes in Consciousness Explained.
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