Back at the dawn of the millennium, I had scribbled a few lines as a welcoming message to my photo.net page ^{(1) (2)}

Existence is not experience; existence is memory.

The very meaning of our being is defined by the things we choose to remember and the ways we choose to remember them. The moment in itself is nothing but a spontaneous, transitional point from time A to time B, an event that will never be again. It is the prolonged reflection of the event, the memory stored in our brain, that gives it a substance and makes it robust against time. We are not what we live. We are what we remember. Under that scope, written language and visual representations are our mortal weapons against entropy. Sadly, the winner of the struggle is predetermined but we shall not fall without a fight. Oblivion wins in the end, but who will remember to celebrate its victory?

As I am revisiting these lines today I find myself disagreeing with more than a few of the points stated above. That’s a good thing I guess. It means I have learned something in the last 20 years.

Focusing specifically on this line:

 We are not what we live. We are what we remember.

I would now change that to:

We are what we live but we also are what we inherit. We are what we remember but we also are what we have lived and no longer remember.”

This rewording is necessary to address all aspects of self-identity that are not solely related to conscious experience. Neural architecture, genetic inheritance, subconscious memories, motor skills, body awareness beyond the brain, all contribute to the sense of self. None is depended on our ability to recollect events (aka memory).

Nevertheless, there is a certain point that still holds well on the text. And this becomes apparent if we attempt to invert its causality. So instead of saying:

Memory causes self

What if we say :

Self cannot exist without memory

This way, conscious memory is not the sole defining force of self-perception. But at the same time, lack of memory nullifies any concept of self. We can imagine a creature that forgets instantly everything it experiences, a creature incapable of storing memories. Such a creature lacks the continuum of existence necessary for self-definition. Such a creature cannot support a notion of conscious self. Ultimately such a creature cannot self-exist. It can only exist in the mindscape of other conscious creatures. In the memory of external observers.

I think this establishes memory as a crucial and necessary element for self-definition.

So here start the problems…

The more we learn about memory, the more we realise what an unreliable mechanism it is. The common understanding that memory works as a recording device, storing away data for later recollection is fatally flawed. A simple and nice de-construction of this concept is outlined in the recent popular Vox documentary “Memory Explained”

For many years now, research by leading scientists of the field has demonstrated that memory operates more as a mechanisms of creative reconstruction rather than as a direct re-caller of stored events. As a result, memory has recently came down to be viewed as way more unreliable and less pragmatic that previously thought. The work of Dr Loftus on this field is both awe-inspiring and deeply disturbing at the same time.

Especially the notion that careful planning and rigorous experimentation can instigate false memories in subjects’ minds is something to make us pause and re-think what we know about ourselves. Notably such memory insertion happens at a conceptual (may we call it software) level and not on a biological (hardware) level. In other words we do not open the scull, and physically manipulate neurons to insert memories. Instead we instigate false memories by re-wiring the brain “from a distance” through insertion of false information, literally acting at a subversive level. I am not sure what would be more amazing. Memory manipulation at a neurosurgical (physical) level or that achieved at an immaterial level of brain hacking through manipulation of external stimuli.

If Dr Loftus’s TED talk is not enough for you, you can find an older article published in scientific American (in 1997!) here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/13946572_Creating_False_Memories

Ok, What now?

So, we seem to have established a central relation between the concept of self and memory and now we also learned that our capability to remember and recall the reality we have previously experienced is utter shit. Where does that lives us?

Truth is that we are facing a situation where our very concept of self is a loose and ridiculous mess. What else could it be?  Self is the product of a process that is neither reliable nor rational.

Take this realisation and go wherever you want from this point. Think again of your precariously built identity, your sacred and precious beliefs, your ideological fixations, you rock solid understanding of the world. No matter how infused such concepts are in your brain, they are based on a flawed and unstable intake, processing and storage of objective reality.

It gets worse…

Sam Harris offers a very nice set of examples in his book “The Moral Landscape” which I shamelesly copy below (seriously the book is good- read it or listen to it):

[…] people tend to evaluate an experience based on its peak intensity (whether positive or negative) and the quality of its final moments. In psychology, this is known as the “peak/end rule.” Testing this rule in a clinical environment, one group found that patients undergoing colonoscopies (in the days when this procedure was done without anesthetic) could have their perception of suffering markedly reduced, and their likelihood of returning for a follow-up exam increased, if their physician needlessly prolonged the procedure at its lowest level of discomfort by leaving the colonoscope inserted for a few extra minutes. The same principle seems to hold for aversive sounds and for exposure to cold. Such findings suggest that, under certain conditions, it is compassionate to prolong a person’s pain unnecessarily so as to reduce his memory of suffering later on. Indeed, it might be unethical to do otherwise. Needless to say, this is a profoundly counterintuitive result.

also:

If you ask people to report on their level of well-being moment-to-moment—bygiving them a beeper that sounds at random intervals, prompting them to record their mental state—you get one measure of how happy they are. If, however, you simply ask them how satisfied they are with their lives generally, you often get a very different measure. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the first source of information “the experiencing self” and the second “the remembering self.” And his justification for partitioning the human mind in this way is that these two “selves” often disagree. Indeed, they can be experimentally shown to disagree, even across a relatively brief span of time.

We saw this earlier with respect to Kahneman’s data on colonoscopies: because “the remembering self” evaluates any experience by reference to its peak intensity and its final moments (the “peak/end rule”), it is possible to improve its lot, at the expense of “the experiencing self,” by simply prolonging an unpleasant procedure at its lowest level of intensity (and thereby reducing the negativity of future memories).

What applies to colonoscopies seems to apply elsewhere in life. Imagine, for instance, that you want to go on vacation: You are deciding between a trip to Hawaii and a trip to Rome. On Hawaii, you envision yourself swimming in the ocean, relaxing on the beach, playing tennis, and drinking mai tais. Rome will find you sitting in cafés, visiting museums and ancient ruins, and drinking an impressive amount of wine. Which vacation should you choose? It is quite possible that your “experiencing self” would be much happier on Hawaii, as indicated by an hourly tally of your emotional and sensory pleasure, while your remembering self would give a much more positive account of Rome one year hence. Which self would be right? Does the question even make sense?

Kahneman observes that while most of us think our “experiencing self” must be more important, it has no voice in our decisions about what to do in life. After all, we can’t choose from among experiences; we must choose from among remembered (or imagined) experiences. And, according to Kahneman, we don’t tend to think about the future as a set of experiences; we think of it as a set of “anticipated memories.” The problem, with regard to both doing science and living one’s life, is that the “remembering self” is the only one who can think and speak about the past. It is, therefore, the only one who can consciously make decisions in light of past experience.

According to Kahneman, the correlation in well-being between these two “selves” is around 0.5.8 This is essentially the same correlation observed between identical twins,or between a person and himself a decade later. It would seem, therefore, that about half the information about a person’s happiness is still left on the table whichever “self” we consult. What are we to make of a “remembering self” who claims to have a wonderful life, while his “experiencing self” suffers continuous marital stress, health complaints, and career anxiety? And what of a person whose “remembering self” claims to be deeply dissatisfied—having failed to reach his most important goals—but whose moment-to-moment state of happiness is quite high? Kahneman seems to think that there is no way to reconcile disparities of this sort.

These examples further extend our understating of the disparity between reliable and unreliable memories. Apparently, we cannot properly evaluate our basic status in the world let along process difficult concepts retrospectively.

But then, if memory is such an unreliable recorder of reality then how can we trust our perception to be capable of anything concrete? How can we speak of personal truths, of identity, of self definition?

I told you it doesn’t look good…

Our only refuge

I think all this mess obliges us to abandon certainties about perception and self image and start speaking like statisticians. Weinersmith, one of the most brilliant science /nerd comic artists of our time, puts it really well:

Much to my disdain I suspect this might be pushing us towards a radical relativism (the sort of which I abhor). But on the positive side at least it will save us from all sorts of absolutisms and universal truths.

To put it in another example:

Priest: X, do you take Y to be your wife? Do you promise to be faithful to her in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love her and to honor her all the days of your life?

Groom/ Bride: Most probably I do.

G.

(1) How cool is that we can now write stuff like “back at the dawn of the millennium I …”. )

(2) As I write this I realised that photo.net is still a thing, my page is still online serving as a sort of embarrassing relic from my early internet days (thankfully rockclimbing.com forum and my contribution there is forever gone) Which in turn makes me wonder if in twenty years from now this blog this blog will feel as embarrassing as my photo.net page feels today. )