A Hall of Mirrors

We live in hall of mirrors, a world of augmented memories constantly recreating not only the past, but also the memories of past futures never realized. Those futures were also built on memories reconstituted according to the beliefs of their times (as our ours) with the memory technologies of their times, in turn incorporating earlier futures past, in infinite regress. Past and future are continuously revisited, re-imagined, and reconstructed as we feel it should have been, sometimes taken as fact, sometimes as fiction, but always fictitious.

Most of the time we are no more aware of this than we are that all of our memories are re-imagined each time we recall them. Memory, both personal and collective, is an act of imagination that rewrites each memory even as it is remembered. Like Heraclitus' river, it is an ever-changing stream into which we can never step twice.

This is what neuroscience tells us about memory, but we do not act upon these findings, instead continuing to behave as if memory, and thus reality, were fixed entities. Just as the ancient Greeks and most philosophers in the West have rejected Heraclitus' notions of flux and constant change as the bases for reality, in favor of eternal verities and archetypes, we will most likely reject the science that tells us that our minds are in a constant state of flux and change, forever failing to understand or acknowledge the consequences.

Curiously, we know these things to be true, as we speak often of how unreliable our memories are, and legally accept the possibilities of false memories. Is it so much easier to ignore this and go on living in a world of a fixed and concrete sort? This is an issue long recognized by historians, though only a few books, such Thomas Desjardin's, These Honored Dead, about the construction and reconstruction of the Battle of Gettysburg, or Jill Lepore's, The Name of War, (about King Phillip's War) deal with it at length.

These are no mere academic arguments; as a people that argues political and cultural positions from history on a daily basis in the national media, these are vital issues. If we are going to make cases based on the ideas of the Founding Fathers (though which ones and at what point in their lives is always a sticky point), beliefs found in the Bible (where again we are dealing with the problem of which one and even more with what point in time), the Enlightenment (with a diversity of opinion ranging from Hume to Rousseau, generally I prefer Montesquieu), Lincoln (whose ideas evolved rapidly), FDR (the idealistic pragmatist), then we need to understand how they re-imagined events themselves, and how we have re-imagined them as well. If we can't be bothered to do this, then we are simply surrendering our minds to manipulation by extremists, propagandists, and advertisers.

This is not the worst; the way it contributes to an inflexible mindset is the greater danger. If you think you can fit the past into a little, unchanging box, you are more likely to treat the present in the same way. In an era of rapid change and rolling crises, that is a recipe for disaster, if not extinction. Neuroscience is undoubtedly getting a lot wrong that will have to be corrected latter, and a number of unsupportable claims are being based on it's findings, but our own experiences of memory and perception show that it is fundamentally right about remembering being a form of re-imagining. We need to learn to act on that insight and stop ignoring it.