I continue to be intrigued by the concept of memory, and the phenomena of my several very brief experiences of greater memory loss. I suppose my ex-wife would also put in that I suffer from perpetual lesser memory loss, but I am not in a position to confirm or deny this. I am trepidatious about self-experimentation along these lines, because I certainly don’t want to do irreparable damage to my mind. This reluctance to risk my knowledge of self does not stem entirely from fear, but also the paradox that if I succeeded in absolving myself of all memory then my experiment would be fruitless, as I would have no memory of intentionally having done so. But as I pondered this point in the shower this morning, I stumbled upon a much more interesting idea. It’s a bit difficult to follow, so bear with me here.
As far as I’m aware, neurologists still don’t "really" understand how animal memory works. I certainly don’t. Consider these three analogues: computer memory, written language, and artwork. A computer’s Random Access Memory is, at least in my simplistic understanding, an architecture in which various bits may be recorded in different configurations. Such as 001100 010010 011110 100001 101101 110011. Therefore, we may encode any information about the past in this physical "memory" which is nothing more than a complicated arrangement of matter which we interpret according to certain protocols and consider to be reliable. A book (or scroll, or manuscript, etc) is essentially the same. We use a protocol to arrange patterns of ink on a medium which can then be revisited and reinterpreted later on, and we consider it to be reliable. Note: by reliable, I mean that we take for granted that the information accessed at a later time is unchanged/identical to the information encoded at an earlier time. We assume that our books, once completed, don’t gain or lose information as a function of time. Let’s consider artwork. A portrait or a sculpture which are meant to realistically represent an actual person to posterity are nothing more than matter arranged in a very specific manner. A painting or drawing of a person is a bit abstract, as it uses patterns of color on a two-dimensional medium to represent a three-dimensional object. A sculpture on the other hand is very straightforward- it is an effort at filling a space with an arrangement of matter in the exact same volume (or a larger/smaller scale of the volume) as the subject. These three examples demonstrate that we encode all of our information in arrangements of physical matter in varying degrees of complexity. I submit that it is likely that our animal memory works in a similar fashion. At some level, physical arrangement of neural matter comprises our ability to remember, and indeed our memories.
This hypothesis makes our notions of the world, society, and ourselves all the more unstable. If memory fails us on an individual level, our social constructs will be resilient enough to "fill in the gaps", so to speak. You may forget your name, your past, your family, etc. but there is a good chance that today (in the United States anyway) you could be identified by the authorities, introduced to your family members, and even a large portion of your past could be returned to you through the recitation of others’ memories of you, and personal artifacts such as email archives, text messages, love letters, etc. But this raises two fascinating questions.
First, what happens if everyone forgets? If we lost our manually recorded information and our neural information simultaneously as a species, then what would this mean? I’m not talking about the obvious consequences (violence, anarchy, chaos, "state of nature") but rather the more nuanced ones. Our ancient religions would cease to exist, nationalities, borders, property, histories, all would blink out of existence. Everything would be suddenly available. This is interesting because of the implications of how it would change the way we see the world, and the relationship between memory and reality. If nobody remembers something, does that change the essence of the event? Is it as "real" as something remembered?
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. I’ll repurpose one of Arthur C. Clarke’s plot devices here. Suppose an adult man uses a suspended animation device to wait for the distant future to arrive, and suppose he intends to spread misinformation and false propaganda in the future. To this end, he loads his sleeping pod with false and fictitious histories. But suppose his device malfunctions and he oversleeps, awakening in a wasteland. Eons have passed, and all trace of humanity is gone, save the man and his sleeping pod. Imagine he falls and injures his head, and loses all of his memories. He no longer has a name, no family, no nationality. In this state, is any of the man’s past "real"? All of humanity’s achievements and failures are forgotten, and no evidence exists for any of it. Humanity has passed on, and left no legacy.
Now suppose our man discovers his cargo of lies and proceeds to thoroughly "educate" himself, believing that the histories are honest ones. Now in his mind exists a framework of the past which is entirely false and yet he believes it to be accurate. Neither the actual history nor the false have left any evidence of their veracity on the face of Earth. So the only difference between the two is that one, which happened, will never be known again, and the other, which never happened, will be remembered and pondered for a time, and may even serve to influence the actions of the man and thereby influence his present reality. So the true history doesn’t even exist, except in a very obscure sense in which it exists in your and my mind, as outside observers of the universe. But if we are true to the thought experiment, we must consider that we don’t exist, so there is no mind to assign the value of "false" to the man’s history books. And what does it mean to say that something happened? If no evidence of the event in question exists and no person can attest to it, then I'm not sure we can make the claim that it is a part of reality.
For example, I could imagine a story which is extremely likely to have occurred, but which I have no evidence of and which unquestionably originated in my creative mind. Let's try: once upon a time, long before humans were recording history, there was a great storm which raged, unabated, for several weeks and culminated in a great volcanic eruption. Once the ash had settled, the storm broke and tranquility returned to the region. This story is essentially meaningless, but most people would be more surprised to learn that it hadn't transpired at some place, at some time, than that it had. Of course we have no means to investigate whether it occurred.
For example, I could imagine a story which is extremely likely to have occurred, but which I have no evidence of and which unquestionably originated in my creative mind. Let's try: once upon a time, long before humans were recording history, there was a great storm which raged, unabated, for several weeks and culminated in a great volcanic eruption. Once the ash had settled, the storm broke and tranquility returned to the region. This story is essentially meaningless, but most people would be more surprised to learn that it hadn't transpired at some place, at some time, than that it had. Of course we have no means to investigate whether it occurred.
Anyway, I’ll stop before this gets any more absurd. I believe this topic falls under the umbrella of ontology, possibly epistemology. Both of which are subtopics of metaphysics, which is probably my favorite human discipline.
--EDIT 2015.07.10--
I was visiting a friend recently, and we spent a few boozy nights reminiscing the days of our youth and all of the adventures we had. We each reminded the other of events and people which had been forgotten in the intervening years. At one point I was regaling him with a story from my time in the Fertile Crescent and (I'd had several beers) I mixed up a couple of names. As I was thinking about it that night in bed, about all the bizarre and surreal experiences I've had and the many which I have tried to not think about over the years. It occurred to me that even though I probably remembered the gist of the story accurately, I had misremembered someone's name, and would have gone on blindly had my friend not pointed it out. Isn't it possible, even likely, that I have misremembered other details from the story? Was I there at all? Did it happen to me? How could I possibly know?
On this same visit I went to a botanical garden with my friend and his family and, as we were walking through the rattlesnake exhibit, I made an offhand remark to his wife about rattlesnakes and our deeply-rooted evolutionary fear of them. She asked me how close I had ever been to a rattlesnake. I thought about it for a moment, and came up blank. Surely, growing up in the Sonoran Desert, I had had a close call once or twice. Nothing. My next thought was that I remember my dad having killed a few that I know of. I was stunned. I told her I didn't know, maybe five feet or so, and that I had never had occasion to kill one. I felt rather sheepish, but that's life. I feel sheepish a few times a week, probably.
Several days later, I remembered a chapter from my adolescence. A good friend in high school had taken me along a few times when he went with his little brother out to Wickenburg to capture rattlesnakes. These two had literally dozens if not scores of captive snakes in their house, many of which were venomous. We (by which I mean they) had captured numerous sidewinders and diamondbacks on our expeditions and transported them back to their house. Unless, of course, that is illegal in which case it never happened. I don't specifically recall ever handling the captive vipers, but I would bet that I at least touched them. I was that kind of stupid back then.
So my point is, in a moment of inquisition, I had failed to access this memory which should have been a prominent one as it was fun, dangerous, exciting, and possibly illegal. This begs the question, what else have I forgotten? What else have I misremembered?
--EDIT 2015.07.10--
I was visiting a friend recently, and we spent a few boozy nights reminiscing the days of our youth and all of the adventures we had. We each reminded the other of events and people which had been forgotten in the intervening years. At one point I was regaling him with a story from my time in the Fertile Crescent and (I'd had several beers) I mixed up a couple of names. As I was thinking about it that night in bed, about all the bizarre and surreal experiences I've had and the many which I have tried to not think about over the years. It occurred to me that even though I probably remembered the gist of the story accurately, I had misremembered someone's name, and would have gone on blindly had my friend not pointed it out. Isn't it possible, even likely, that I have misremembered other details from the story? Was I there at all? Did it happen to me? How could I possibly know?
On this same visit I went to a botanical garden with my friend and his family and, as we were walking through the rattlesnake exhibit, I made an offhand remark to his wife about rattlesnakes and our deeply-rooted evolutionary fear of them. She asked me how close I had ever been to a rattlesnake. I thought about it for a moment, and came up blank. Surely, growing up in the Sonoran Desert, I had had a close call once or twice. Nothing. My next thought was that I remember my dad having killed a few that I know of. I was stunned. I told her I didn't know, maybe five feet or so, and that I had never had occasion to kill one. I felt rather sheepish, but that's life. I feel sheepish a few times a week, probably.
Several days later, I remembered a chapter from my adolescence. A good friend in high school had taken me along a few times when he went with his little brother out to Wickenburg to capture rattlesnakes. These two had literally dozens if not scores of captive snakes in their house, many of which were venomous. We (by which I mean they) had captured numerous sidewinders and diamondbacks on our expeditions and transported them back to their house. Unless, of course, that is illegal in which case it never happened. I don't specifically recall ever handling the captive vipers, but I would bet that I at least touched them. I was that kind of stupid back then.
So my point is, in a moment of inquisition, I had failed to access this memory which should have been a prominent one as it was fun, dangerous, exciting, and possibly illegal. This begs the question, what else have I forgotten? What else have I misremembered?
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