The persistence of memory
What happens to our minds when machines no longer forget?
In his 1942 short story "Funes, the Memorious," Jorge Luis Borges writes of a boy cursed with perfect memory.
Where ordinary people would see three glasses of wine, Funes saw “all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho."
His mind teemed with “nothing but details, almost contiguous details,” too crowded for rest. At night, he would lie in bed, tormented by his knowledge of “every crevice and every molding of the various houses which surrounded him.” His memory was like a “garbage disposal,” overflowing with images and sensations and dreams that he could neither sort through nor make sense of.
“To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.” Funes, who remembered everything, could not think.
What was once fantastical has now become real.
In early April, OpenAI expanded ChatGPT’s memory feature, enabling it to save and reference all past conversations with a user. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: “it points at something we are excited about: ai [sic] systems that get to know you over your life, and become extremely useful and personalized.”
This revives a question that intrigued so many writers like Borges: when machines can record of everything we do and say, how will that change the way we remember, think, and act?
As Funes exemplified, the ability to forget is critical to our freedom. Externalizing memory may strengthen the reliability of our narratives, but it risks constraining the scope of our lives by limiting our ability to think creatively and to act freely.
With technologies that can convert our experiences into information preserved in perpetuity, we should ask: are we building a memory palace, or a prison?
Humans have long worried about the effects of memory aids on our minds.
Around 370 BC, Socrates warned against the perils of writing, claiming that it would “produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.”
Unlike computers, our memory is not a storage unit, but a muscle; it must be exercised to prevent atrophy. Anyone who has labored to memorize a poem knows the feeling of the poem gradually settling into one’s body, capable of being conjured at any moment. To commit something to memory is to make it a part of oneself, to allow it to imprint upon one’s soul and evolve one’s inner life.
A memory, too, is something that no one can take from us. For many prisoners in Soviet gulags, poetry remained a “secret savior” because it could be silently recited even when the prisoner’s external reality remained out of their control. Soviet writer Eugenia Ginzburg recalled in her memoir: “They had taken my dress, my shoes and stockings, and my comb ... but [poetry] it was not in their power to take away.”
Memory also enables creativity. We form new ideas by making novel connections between stored concepts and memories, in flashes of insight that arise unbidden, unconsciously, from the corners of our minds. Information must reside within us to be drawn into this unconscious process; if we outsource the raw material of memory to machine, we thin the fertile soil in which new ideas take root.
Ted Chiang’s 2013 short story “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" imagines a product called Remem that records a user’s life and grants them frictionless recall. The narrator is worried that reliance on artificial recall will prevent humans from revisiting memories on their own and imbuing them with emotional meaning. He fears that if memories never fade or distort, the rawness of old wounds might never soften into forgiveness; childhood memories may not be romanticized; life might become "full of facts but devoid of feeling."
“An obvious drawback to such reliance is the possibility that people might become virtual amnesiacs whenever the software crashes,” the narrator reflects. “But just as worrying to me as the prospect of technological failure was that of technological success: how will it change a person’s conception of herself when she’s only seen her past through the unblinking eye of a video camera?”
But upon reviewing his daughter’s Remem lifelog, he is stunned. A memory he had of his daughter blaming him for his divorce was, in fact, a line he had delivered to her. This causes him to reconsider the benefit of digital memory: it forces confrontation with our own fallibility, and offers a corrective to the faulty narratives we sometimes reinforce. In this view, memory prostheses might make us more compassionate—toward others, and toward ourselves.
And yet — to move forward, we must be able to let go. Nietzsche believed that a person without the power to forget would be engulfed by a constant stream of information; he “would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming.”
“All action,” Nietzsche writes, “requires forgetting, just as the existence of all organic things requires not only light, but darkness as well.”
This darkness is what philosopher Lowry Pressly calls oblivion: a form of the unknown that is resistant to articulation and discovery, and thus cannot be entirely controlled. Oblivion is necessary for us to lead lives rich with meaning and possibility; to retain the sense that “the lives we live together contain unfathomable depths that cannot be called up or accessible at will,” and are therefore “fundamentally resistant to instrumentalization.”
Ambiguity and unknowability, Pressly argues, are essential to autonomy: the belief that we are not shackled to our past and can become someone new. Growth is constant reinvention toward an indeterminate end; life is interesting and worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what the future holds. A society that remembers everything may leave no room for people to grow.
Borges, too, understood that a mind lives on the tension between memory and oblivion. He had lost his sight by age 55, and sustained himself through the long passages of literature and poetry that resided in his mind. Yet, the man who relied so much on memory also saw the value of forgetting. To remember everything, he said, is to go mad like Funes; to forget everything is to cease to exist.
Since the advent of writing, our memories have been technologically mediated. Our task is not to reject these aids, but to steer between memory and oblivion. In the blending of the two—what Borges deemed essential—we find something deeply human, and sublime. We call it imagination.
Have been thinking about this too. The ability to 'filter out' is so essential to making life bearable, even beautiful.