Abstract
Memory costs. In a biological science sense, this means that large brains are expensive organs to run; and in order for evolution to select for them there must be an equivalent or more valuable pay-off associated with the cost. In the case of homo sapiens that pay-off is our immensely supple, adaptable and powerful minds; something that could be run on anything cheaper, biologically speaking, than the organ. This is because consciousness and self-consciousness depend to a large extent upon memory; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that consciousness and self-consciousness rely upon a sense of continuity through time, which is to say, upon memory. Memory is what we humans have instead of an actual panoptic view of the fourth dimension. We know all about its intermittencies and unreliabilities of course—indeed, the discourse of memory from Freud and Proust on has delved deeply into precisely those two quantities. My focus here happens to be on neither of those two qualities, but I don’t disagree: memory is often intermittent and unreliable. It’s also the best we’ve got.
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Notes
James G. Burns, Julien Foucaud and Frederic Mery, ‘Costs of Memory: Lessons from “Mini” Brains’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 278 (2011), 925.
David Chalmers, foreword to Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ix–x.
Jerry Fodor, ‘Where Is My Mind?’, London Review of Books, February 12 (2009), 13.
G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1910), 24–25.
Milan Kundera, Ignorance [2000] trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 12.
Christian Moraru, Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 21–22.
Not to derail the train of thought, here, but I may need to say a little more about dreaming. It is probably true that ‘dreams’ present themselves to us most commonly as memories of dreams—and often incomplete or fugitive memories at that. More, it is a common claim that dreams themselves are constituted of mashed together and mixed-up memories of things that happened the previous day or days. (Wittgenstein wondered if ‘the plot of a dream is a strange disturbance of memory that gathers together a great number of memories from the preceding day from days before that, even from childhood, and turns them into the memory of an event which took place whilst a person was sleeping’ [G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman (eds), C.G. Luckhardt and Maximilian A.E. Aue (trans.), Wittgenstein: Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology: Preliminary Studies for Part II of the Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell 1982), 84]—such that our memory of a dream is a memory of a composite of memories. My case, though, is that narratives like the Pilgrim’s Progress or Alice notionally at least reproduce the experience of a dream as it is dreamt, not as it is recollected afterwards.)
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© 2016 Adam Roberts
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Roberts, A. (2016). ‘We Can Remember It, Funes, Wholesale’: Borges, Total Recall and the Logic of Memory. In: Groes, S. (eds) Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_27
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