Hi Ray,
Apologizing for my
tardiness, as always, I now offer my follow-up to your Persistence of Cloud Storage post,
trying to tackle another of the Great Modern Emotions. The Second Great Emotion, Forgetting Without a Connection, is the foundation of all
things. We could dedicate this entire blog to it in perpetuity. And perpetuity
is what it's all about, isn't it?
"This world has only one sweet moment
set aside for us"
Oh, Freddie, how I miss you
For those just tuning in, our last post covered
the First Great Modern Emotion in The World
According to Dubicki: Sadness Without Disconnection. It's an important one, so do click the link and go back and
read it so you are up to speed with the rest of the class. On to the Second
Great Modern Emotion…
Like you, I have a few scenarios I find extraordinarily scary. I try not to think about your particle accelerator cataclysm or hitting the edge of space a la The Truman Show, but I do recall laying in bed at night as a young child, thinking about how the sun was going to go nova some day. Yes, I am aware I was a strange child. But it is troubling, no? At some point, everything all of humanity has ever done goes POOF. There is no one left to remember. Not even Neil deGrasse Tyson. No one.
Dinosaurs? Forgotten. Cave men... Cave who?
- Vlad Țepeș, Nero, Idi Amin, Genghis Khan, Elizabeth Bathory, Robespierre, Torquemada, Hitler, Mengele, Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević...
- Mother Teresa, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, MLK, Mary Wollstonecraft, Oskar Schindler, Sophie Scholl, Sir Nicholas Winston, Nelson Mandela, Audrey Hepburn, Edward R. Murrow, Václav Havel...
- Michaelangelo, Picasso, Shepard Fairey, Buster Keaton, Bela Lugosi, Ian McKellen, Mozart, Woody Guthrie, Frank Sinatra, Thomas Edison, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Amelia Earhart, Jane Goodall, John Glenn, Sally Ride...
- Every sonnet, symphony, masterpiece, novel, play, cave painting, photograph and film.
- Every invention. Every monument. Every product of our collective imagination and experience from the beginning to the end of time.
Even the famous and infamous like those I listed above have a shelf life. Another celebrity of history, Ramses II, was a really big deal in the 12th century B.C. He ruled for longer than most people even lived back then, was a formidable warrior, but was wise enough to see the value of peace and kind of invented the concept of the peace treaty. Yet most people on the planet today have never heard of him and those who have mostly know him because he had 46 bazillion statues of himself erected across Egypt.
Societies die. Civilizations disappear. The planet will survive our environmental and technological folly longer than our species will. A future incarnation of life may look on the ruin we left of the earth and try to piece together who we were in much the same way as present-day archaeologists piece together shards of prehistoric pottery. Guaranteed, we will make no sense to them, childish and petty talking apes that we are. I mean, who trashes the only planet they've got and makes themselves extinct? At least the dinosaurs have an asteroid to blame.
When our sun explodes or, more accurately, when it expands into a Red Giant then collapses into White Dwarf, eventually fading into a Black Dwarf - it's game over for whatever futuristic amoebae or clever-monkeys that may manage to survive or redevelop here. Some people find a kind of comfort in this knowledge. A liberating freedom from knowing that in the long-term, none of this really matters anyway. Why sweat the small stuff (or even the big stuff) when you know that everything and everyone you have ever loved or who has ever loved you is destined to be erased in a manner so complete it will be as if none of us ever existed in the first place?
Not me. Oblivion holds a healthy portion of terror for Miss Demeanor. If you've been forgotten, is it like you never lived? If you leave no blood progeny, even your DNA disappears, right? That's a particularly dead kind of dead. The primal, mortal terror of completely ceasing to exist - even in the memory or genetic helix of the future - makes the very concept of forgetting threatening. In the twilight of religion, we've established new sacraments to ensure we have the illusion of immortality. Selfies, anyone? FaceBook. Google+. Twitter. Tumblr. Flickr. Snapfish. Shutterfly. Picasa.
Ahem, blogs.
Have you ever seen the Star Trek: TNG episode called The Inner Light? It deals with these issues of forgetting and remembering. No? Click the link and watch it. I can wait...
 |
| The Inner Light |
Your experience of having an Important Thought and letting it go without memorializing it for future reference, was indeed an odd act of bravery. Not odd as in you're weird (though, clearly, you are), but odd as in really uncommon. Your thought was a runaway train and you didn't chase it down on horseback, lasso in hand, or try to get in front of it like Spiderman saving the commuters. You made a conscious choice to be okay with forgetting. In a small way, you faced the abyss of nothingness and said, "I defy you. I will not allow your dark and eventual certainty to control me. Not today."
I find that pretty amazing. It sounds like your whole being was fighting against it, aching and gnawing and begging you to give chase, but you did not succumb. Once the fight or flight physical and emotional panic state passed, did you feel relief? A zen-like peacefulness? Buddhist monks and those Be Here Now new age gurus always seem so serene. Is Enlightenment really just Forgetting Without a Connection? I don't think so - not without the Third Emotion, Not Worrying - but it is definitely a part of it. Maybe Enlightenment is the combination of the Modern Emotions at the moment you experience them all simultaneously.
Your expanded thoughts on Emotion #2?
Best, Patricia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hi Patricia,
The Inner Light episode is fantastic and recommended to everyone. But I always put Darmok at the top of my list because of the circumstances where I watched it. One of my favorite high school teachers showed it in class and gave me a completely new perspective on how we communicate.
Language and memory, how about that?
When writing the last post, I toyed around with dropping the word "emotions" and replacing it with "sins" or "states of being." But "emotions" won out and I'm glad it did.
Google defines emotion as "a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others," or "instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge." I don't like them at all. Too passive and, for the record, reason and knowledge should not be contrasted with emotion so distinctly.
The big red dictionary I dragged across the country defines emotion as "a strong feeling often accompanied by a physical reaction." Fine but weak.
Merriam Webster (online, natch) defines "emotion" as:
a : the affective aspect of consciousness
b : a state of feeling
c : a conscious mental reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body
That's more like it, quality defining there. You can't be emotional without being. Whatever is going on in your head has a physical change in the body.
But what is happening in our heads, exactly, when we have a memory? Personally, I see it like I'm watching a show, a little detached viewing of a projected image in the theater behind my eyes. Most of the time it's just a show. There is that occasional memory trigger that's so all encompassing that you're suddenly THERE, if only for a moment.
Science suggests that it's neurons firing, and nothing can be more base physical than that. Across the tangled network of electric cells in our heads, the images of our lives get implanted as new wires wrap themselves together and a connection is made. Memories become stronger the more they are visited, changing the connection from a thread to a country road to an interstate.
It could be argued that makes the act of forgetting to be a kind of disconnection. So the idea of "forgetting without a connection" would be redundant. Standby, I'll come back to this.
Tapping our thoughts into the internet is another step in the same process. Just because it's done outside of our neurons, winding through our fingers and into metallic wires, it is still an effort to continue making memories.
That is not how we use the phrase "making memories" tho. Memories are something that just happen as we are out doing interesting stuff. Memories are automatic, given that you put the effort into life. It is a very important thing to live a life away from this little tiny flashing screen, but we feel so compelled to record.
How compelled? Well our greatest life livers, those thinkers and leaders, have always done it. All those people you listed wrote, or someone wrote for them. They painted or sculpted, or had someone do it for them. They dumped their memories into whatever forms were available to them. Their memories are recorded. We wouldn't know anything about them otherwise.
All that ability to save our smallest accomplishments (or non-accomplishments) has been digitized, democratized, and universalized. We have the power of pharaohs and kings. Shouldn't we use it all the time?
That power is what makes Forgetting Without a Connection such a strong modern emotion and helps us understand where it is not redundant. It's a fight against our naturally evolved physical desire to record the mind. It's a fight against our newfound power to record our own best version of ourselves. And it's a fight against the erosion of eternity.
I like that definition of "emotion" because it reflects the physical result of such a mental exercise. To Forget Without a Connection does leave you feeling like you're in a fight. It's every bit as hard as breaking a habit and terrifying as looking at your own mortality. Such a huge price to pay just to throw away such a meaningless little piffle. It's easier to just click and send.
To step back from that habit and demand, then not pursue a memory as it drifts into nothingness? It was a struggle let myself forget, even the stupid little throw away thought that was wandering through my mind that day.
We should all do it more often.
Holding on to so many memories can be devastating. There's a line, variously attributed, that suggests middle age is when your memories exceed your dreams. What happens when everything is remembered?
Holding on to so many memories can be devastating, if only because we are the people that have to deal with them. Our brains are extraordinary, but our minds are imperfect. The way we experience living in our own heads sucks. I say this from a lifetime of experience. There is a brutality to how the machine works, or doesn't if I oversugared my coffee or failed to sleep enough.
On top of this, our minds constantly reinterpret. That may be the defining characteristic of humanity. Not our opposable thumbs or our engineering prowess or our development of something as awe inspiring as baseball. But our ability to look at the same thing twice and see something novel each time. Then - and here's the twist - knowing the change.
Perhaps that is why the Perfect Digital Memory is really destructive. Our minds and our brains live together, pouring over each other constantly, each time seeing something new and changing the grey matter in the process. Digital copies are something apart, and they don't change each time we look at them. What is the same is always the same. There are no misinterpretations or happy accidental mistakes. Motion is frozen and ends are all dead. The Perfect Digital Memory does not evolve.
I do not take any comfort in being forgotten. Indeed, your opening serve had me fighting back a panic attack. But I do know that humanity will never escape this planet. When we get to the stars, we will be inherently different. Clearer eyed and more open minded than the current occupants of this little rock, one hopes. But that will take a step in evolution, something not possible for Perfect Digital Memory. Maybe Forgetting Without a Connection, that modern emotion, gets us closer to that goal of not being forgotten as a world.
Google defines emotion as "a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others," or "instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge." I don't like them at all. Too passive and, for the record, reason and knowledge should not be contrasted with emotion so distinctly.
The big red dictionary I dragged across the country defines emotion as "a strong feeling often accompanied by a physical reaction." Fine but weak.
Merriam Webster (online, natch) defines "emotion" as:
a : the affective aspect of consciousness
b : a state of feeling
c : a conscious mental reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body
That's more like it, quality defining there. You can't be emotional without being. Whatever is going on in your head has a physical change in the body.
But what is happening in our heads, exactly, when we have a memory? Personally, I see it like I'm watching a show, a little detached viewing of a projected image in the theater behind my eyes. Most of the time it's just a show. There is that occasional memory trigger that's so all encompassing that you're suddenly THERE, if only for a moment.
And let's be honest:
Most of my memories involve food. And Pixar movies.
Science suggests that it's neurons firing, and nothing can be more base physical than that. Across the tangled network of electric cells in our heads, the images of our lives get implanted as new wires wrap themselves together and a connection is made. Memories become stronger the more they are visited, changing the connection from a thread to a country road to an interstate.
It could be argued that makes the act of forgetting to be a kind of disconnection. So the idea of "forgetting without a connection" would be redundant. Standby, I'll come back to this.
Tapping our thoughts into the internet is another step in the same process. Just because it's done outside of our neurons, winding through our fingers and into metallic wires, it is still an effort to continue making memories.
That is not how we use the phrase "making memories" tho. Memories are something that just happen as we are out doing interesting stuff. Memories are automatic, given that you put the effort into life. It is a very important thing to live a life away from this little tiny flashing screen, but we feel so compelled to record.
How compelled? Well our greatest life livers, those thinkers and leaders, have always done it. All those people you listed wrote, or someone wrote for them. They painted or sculpted, or had someone do it for them. They dumped their memories into whatever forms were available to them. Their memories are recorded. We wouldn't know anything about them otherwise.
All that ability to save our smallest accomplishments (or non-accomplishments) has been digitized, democratized, and universalized. We have the power of pharaohs and kings. Shouldn't we use it all the time?
That power is what makes Forgetting Without a Connection such a strong modern emotion and helps us understand where it is not redundant. It's a fight against our naturally evolved physical desire to record the mind. It's a fight against our newfound power to record our own best version of ourselves. And it's a fight against the erosion of eternity.
 |
| Twenty years of professional work ready for posterity.Somewhere in here I have written Important Things. |
To step back from that habit and demand, then not pursue a memory as it drifts into nothingness? It was a struggle let myself forget, even the stupid little throw away thought that was wandering through my mind that day.
We should all do it more often.
Holding on to so many memories can be devastating. There's a line, variously attributed, that suggests middle age is when your memories exceed your dreams. What happens when everything is remembered?
Holding on to so many memories can be devastating, if only because we are the people that have to deal with them. Our brains are extraordinary, but our minds are imperfect. The way we experience living in our own heads sucks. I say this from a lifetime of experience. There is a brutality to how the machine works, or doesn't if I oversugared my coffee or failed to sleep enough.
On top of this, our minds constantly reinterpret. That may be the defining characteristic of humanity. Not our opposable thumbs or our engineering prowess or our development of something as awe inspiring as baseball. But our ability to look at the same thing twice and see something novel each time. Then - and here's the twist - knowing the change.
Perhaps that is why the Perfect Digital Memory is really destructive. Our minds and our brains live together, pouring over each other constantly, each time seeing something new and changing the grey matter in the process. Digital copies are something apart, and they don't change each time we look at them. What is the same is always the same. There are no misinterpretations or happy accidental mistakes. Motion is frozen and ends are all dead. The Perfect Digital Memory does not evolve.
Carl's going to be here somewhere,
Let's just let him hang out here.
Cheers,
Ray
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