Bits of Knowledge
I found a beautiful book touching on the idea of forgetting as a critical human characteristic, part of what I was trying to express when I wrote the “Let Me Be” post. I was complaining about how it felt to be confronted with memories of my past situations by Amazon’s disturbingly long and unsorted “memory” of me. Via Scribbling.net, Gina Trapani links to a post on if:book, called The Persistence of Memory, about Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes, the Memorious,” about a man who, after an injury, can forget nothing. But he can’t think abstractly, can’t make sense of anything because all his brain can do is store the unique state of something he perceived in the moment he perceived it.
“As humans, we forget by default; maybe it’s the greatest sign of the Internet’s inhumanity that it remembers.”
I think a big part of living is about forgetting. Not going back to a state of unknowing, but of having been human enough to process and understand, and gain perspective, where the memory is “put in its place” (all meanings apply). To me that’s part of how you’d define mercy, and sanity. We just celebrated Mother’s Day, and my mom says of childbirth (I was due Jan 28, and born Mar 7 - always the late sleeper). In the end I was an emergency c-section, and probably no fun at all. “The second the baby’s born you forget all the pain, and feel like everything’s worth it” she tells me. Maybe she just wants grandkids, but this also makes sense as part of how human’s evolved. Otherwise, birth control would be women with new babies killing men, the pain and gore fresh in their minds. If I twisted my ankle while hunting down a mammoth, or falling from a cliff to steal eggs, I’d be a less successful hunter-gatherer. We’re supposed to forget so that we can continue.
When painful thoughts loop, that’s where we run into trouble. Perhaps that why he neural hard-wiring during development is so hard to get over, and what the early pysch guys were on to.
I complained about the internet’s long memory and how that affected its interaction with me, its usability and how it make me very uncomfortable with how it “thoughtlessly” reminded me of a previous marriage, etc, I felt silly but admittedly, “on to something.” (i’m very sensitive, so they say. pish tosh, i say)
Currently a man with a fabulous name, Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, has aworking paper addressing this problem of never-forgetting, as he is striving to find ways to train computer systems to let go of their memories.
It’s funny, going to his paper and seeing “Ubiquitous Computing” reminds me instantly of the beautiful book “Everyware
These are mostly wonderful bits of knowledge to carry around.
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