Exhalation
Very impressive. Surely Ted Chiang is a genius. I especially liked The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling.
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
Search Engine Indexing Your Life
What is the notion of the exosuit of brains? The writing was once the most bleeding edge exosuit for brains. What is the meaning of the transition to a more digital auto-organized brain? Would the human brain be able to function properly, when replaced by faultless digital archives? Ted answers:
Just as there's a feedback loop in softening harsh memories, there's also one at work in the romanticization of childhood memories, and disrupting that process will have consequences.
Part of me wanted to stop this, to protect children's ability to see the beginning of their lives filtered through gauze, to keep those origin stories from being replaced by cold, desaturated video. But maybe they will feel just as warmly about their lossless digital memories as I do about my imperfect, organic memories.
Forgiveness involves Forgetting
"Forgive and forget" goes the expression, and for our idealized magnanimous selves, that is all you needed. But for our actual selves, the relationship between those two actions isn't so straightforward. In most cases we have to forget a little bit before we can forgive; when we no longer experience the pain as fresh, the insult is easier to forgive, which in turn makes it less memorable, and so on. It's this psychological feedback loop that makes initially infuriating offenses seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.
Episodic Memories and Identity
Psychologists make a distinction between semantic memory-- knowledge of general facts--and episodic memory, or recollection of personal experiences. We've been using technological supplements for semantic memory ever since the invention of writing: first books, then . By contrast, we've historically resisted such aids when it comes to episodic memory; few people have ever kept as many diaries or photo albums as they did ordinary books. The obvious reason is convenience; if we wanted a book on the birds of North America, we could consult one that an ornithologist has written, but if we wanted a daily diary, we had to write it for ourselves. But I also wonder if another reason is that, subconsciously, we regarded our episodic memories as such an integral part of our identities that we were reluctant to externalize them, to relegate them to books on a shelf or files on a computer.