Deleting The Past
Deleting The Past

Deleting The Past

Does the possibility that we will make consciousness compatible with a digital framework mean that one day we will be able to simply delete things we don’t like from our brains?

I happen to be rereading Julian May’s Galactic Milieu books, (1 series written in the 80’s and one in the 90’s) and something suddenly leapt out at me.  Her characters use the word delete in speech to tell somebody to forget something.  Instead of saying “forget about it,” they say “delete that.”

Now for a start, that’s a pretty astute shot at possible future slang.  Especially when you take into consideration the fact that these books are not about a “computerised” future, like Gibson novels are, for example.

Side Note: These books were sent to SA for me as a present from a great guy on my forum. He found them and posted them to me just because he knew I was short of reading material at the time.

For another thing, this is actually the 2nd time in the last few days that something I was reading in them was germane to conversations I’d been involved in recently.  The first was about the ethics of being able to read people’s minds.  And now this one, that seems particularly relevant to all the talk about downloading your thoughts / whatever into computers and attaining some sort of digital immortality.

Memories Are Made Of This

Now, I’m a memory-oriented sort of person.  I’ve got a good memory and I’m proud of it.  I trained and exercised it in my youth, (oh damn, I’m Father William :D ) committing chunks of mainly poetry, but some prose as well to it, and it stood me in good stead in my university days, when studying consisted of reading the textbook once or twice the night before an exam.

It’s doing pretty well as I age, and although the short term stuff is sometimes a little slippery, I can still summon The Destruction of Sennacherib, parts of The Lays of Ancient Rome or a wide selection of other stuff should the urge strike me. (Which, I must admit, it sometimes does to the chagrin of any witnesses. ;) )

So, memories, and the entire concept of memory is obviously something that interests me.

Easy Come, Easy Go

For all that we’ve put a lot of effort into studying memory, we’re still pretty much making guesses about a lot of its characteristics and attributes.

We’re pretty sure we know the spots in the brain where we keep them, and we’ve got some ideas about the different types of memory, and even some models of how they may hang together.  But they’re largely theories, except for the physiological aspects that have been determined by case studies etc.  We don’t know how they get made, or retrieved, or even why they degrade.

If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.” – Emerson Pugh

Now the astute will have identified that this is an obvious obstacle in the road to converting biological signals into binary ones, essential for any kind of artificial memory storage.  They’re working on it though, make no mistake, and that’s not why I’m writing this anyway.

No, what sparked this was wondering whether one day all our memory storage will be physical.  Whether we will in fact be able to “delete” things from our memory, the same way we do from our hard drives.  Of course, Eternal Sunshine springs to mind, but even there it was a fraught process, more biological than mechanical.

If our memories ever become compatible with hardware, it might be as easy as pressing a button to remove some unpleasant memory or thought.  And perhaps just as easy to store some new ones.

The Reality Of Reality

The implications are numerous.  If nobody remembers something, is it the same as if it never happened?  As somebody who generally treats reality as a consensual illusion generated by shared memory, the answer has to be no.

Hell, our own flesh and blood (or chemical) (or electrical) memories are modified according to factors we don’t even realise or understand, changing our reality all the time.  And everybody else involved modifies their own memories too, until what we have left is only a best guess scenario, different for everybody.  This is why eye-witness testimony is unreliable.

deleteAnd I haven’t even thought about the potential malicious applications either.  Phishing, hacking, malware…imagine your smart new brain interface downloads a trojan that broadcasts your memories (or your vision) to somebody else?  And people wonder why I’m paranoid about an internet-enhanced future? :D

Forgetting something is understandable.  Deleting it has not only an air of finality, but of consciousness, of deliberation, about it.  On the plus side…well, the implication is never having to forget anything again.  On the minus…there is a sense of achievement that comes with learning something.

Adding something to your head effortlessly doesn’t give you knowledge, it gives you information.

What you’ve committed something to memory, it can’t be taken away from you.  Certainly not by somebody pressing a button.  Call me old-fashioned, but I think I’d stick to the wet-ware even if it was an option already.