Of Time, Memory, Evidence, and Fantasy
I’m writing this Blog entry on Christmas morning… less than three months since my wife Joey died. I am fortunate to be surrounded by family. A cloud of memories surrounds me too. What exactly is memory?
Memory refers to the psychological processes of acquiring, storing, retaining, and later retrieving information. Memory involves three major processes: encoding, storage, and retrieval.
Human memory involves the ability to both preserve and recover information. However, this is not a flawless process. Sometimes people forget or misremember things. Other times, information is not properly encoded in memory in the first place. - VeryWellMind
I am fairly well convinced that some of my earliest memories aren’t real at all. Rather, they are “memories” fashioned from stories about me that my parents told and retold. Some are evoked from old photos. Again, do I really recall? Is the photo resurrecting a memory… or helping me fashion a reasonable facsimile? The photo is evidence that something happened in my past. Exactly WHAT is subject to conjecture… and manipulation.
From an amalgam of actual memories, photos, other evidence such as letters, and a dose of pure fantasy, one can fashion a secret life of the mind.
I saw you this morning
You were moving so fast
Can't seem to loosen my grip
On the past
And I miss you so much
There's no one in sight
And we're still making love
In my secret life
In my secret life ——Leonard Cohen
No matter how elaborate one makes this secret life, I believe it can only ever be second best. I don’t believe anyone can contact the dead. I’m not at all convinced that the dead exist. Nor can we go back in time. A second arrives, lasts for an instance, Vanishes. And so it goes.
Or does it?
What of parallel universes?
Parallel universes are no longer just a feature of a good sci-fi story. There are now some scientific theories that support the idea of parallel universes beyond our own. However, the multiverse theory remains one of the most controversial theories in science.
Our universe is unimaginably big. Hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of galaxies spin through space, each containing billions or trillions of stars. Some researchers studying models of the universe speculate that the universe's diameter could be 7 billion light-years across. Others think it could be infinite.—-Space.com
We —- or at least I —-tend to assume that living beyond our own deaths means being a self-aware entity. But an extension beyond death can take many forms. Film, video and sound recordings are all ways to sustain the individual’s “being” beyond the death and decay of the physical form. But the dead, I fear, are unaware of their continued existence. Once asked if he hoped to achieve immortality through his films, Woody Allen reportedly replied, “No, I hope to achieve immortality by not dying” or something to that effect. Likewise, we are unaware of ourselves in a parallel universe, even if the theory holds water.
So what of having our consciousness being uploaded onto a hard drive. In Fall, Neal Stephenson imagines a virtual world in which individuals are self aware but have no memory of their past, corporeal lives. I have no doubt that billionaires, such as (especially?) Elon Musk are actively exploring this possibility.
Digital immortality (or "virtual immortality")[1] is the hypothetical concept of storing (or cloning) a person's personality in digital substrate, i.e., a computer, robot or cyberspace[2] (mind uploading). The result might look like an avatar behaving, reacting, and thinking like a person on the basis of that person's digital archive.[3][4][5][6] After the death of the individual, this avatar could remain static or continue to learn and self-improve autonomously (possibly becoming seed AI).
A considerable portion of transhumanists and singularitarians place great hope into the belief that they may eventually become immortal[7] by creating one or many non-biological functional copies of their brains, thereby leaving their "biological shell". These copies may then "live eternally" in a version of digital "heaven" or paradise.
—- Wikipedia.
For most of us, the best we can do, I think, is Cohen’s secret life: mental congeries comprised of memories and fantasies. To the extent we are determined to populate that secret life with real people, viz. our departed loved one(s), evidence, such as photos and videos are highly useful. “Preserve your memories, They’re all that’s left you.” —— Paul Simon, Bookends. Not quite. On the down side, our memories are never exact reproductions or recoveries of a vanished reality. On the other, we are capable of embellishing and embroidering them.
Well… those are my reflections on memory, fantasy and the secret life of the mind on this bittersweet Christmas morn. Enjoy the reality of this holy day, which features a rare conjuncture of Christmas and Hanukkah. Create new memories and store them for later retrieval at a time when they are needed, and when they can be rewoven into a tapestry of memory and fantasy.
