Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
Memory is a funny thing that doesn’t work the way we think it does. And when you realize how it actually works, you start feeling a weird sensation of weightlessness and unease that maybe we’re fundamentally, deeply mistaken about what this entire experience of existing is.
The brain does not write data and record things the way, say a memory card or hard drive does. The “snapshots” in a brain are more like linked together associations, a network of connected sensations and experiences that come together in a specific way to actually simulate an event.
You do not recall things. You simulate things. This is why memory is so unreliable and why we can remember false things. It’s very much like entering a prompt into a AI image generator, you ask the brain to create a scene based on the associations you had with an experience, and it runs what it thinks probably happened.
The deeply mistaken part of our experience is that our brains are somehow a logical device for storing data and then coming up with logical explanations. The brain doesn’t do that though, the brain is JUST a storytelling device, it links together experiences to create associations and then tells a story to make them connect. When you understand this, like when you really, finally internalize this fact, it can actually free you from a lot of mental health issues like ruminating depression. (The feelings of sadness will still be there at times, but it won’t be connected to your life, it won’t ruin your whole day or week or year.)
But it’s also deeply unsettling to realize we don’t really have a past or future, all we have is a simulating device that tells stories for the most likely explanation for why you’re here now, and what may happen next because of it.
I’ve always heard it as when you recall things you reenforce that memory. And memory does work in mysterious ways.
Sometimes I can remember what someone said word for word a decade ago, but not what I did at work a week ago. Selective attention I guess.
But I can tell you this… after witnessing my dad slowly (and then in the end very fast) declining cognitively because of a form of Alzheimers: cherish your memory, because one day it might fade away.
The worst part was in the middle of those 10+ yrs (yes he was somewhat ‘lucky’ in that aspect) when he realized he had trouble remembering things and seeing the utter frustration of him trying to get to the pt of a story or some memory halfway through.
I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy
I mean, you could say nothing is real. Computers is just electricity doing magic tricks, I’m not typing this comment, you’re not reading this comment, its just weird electron and radio magic tricks.
Money isn’t real… or is it? I mean, sure, its a bunch of arbitrary numbers, but at the end of the day, its these strange papers (or a card tap) that is required before you can obtain your survival needs. So it is very much real.
Nothing exists, its just atoms doing a weird dance?
This is reality, a reality that is born from emergence. Memories are real, it emerged from a very real moment in history. Einstein have proven to us that the universe is probably a block universe, that very past very much exists, and its effects are present. And memories can be useful. Its lets you know to never trust your abusive sibling again, it lets you know to never trust those power-trippin cops again, its reminds you that government is not to be trusted, authoity is to be questioned. It tells you how to identify propaganda, because you’ve seen it before. It gets you out of bad situations.
Memories don’t paint details, its give you a close outline. The core story are very much accurate, at least most of it. People remember false details, yes, because brains aren’t evolved to handle precise details. People don’t understand how to use their brain and inadvertently invent the details, and mis-recording the memory into their brain.
I don’t do that, I accept my brain is imperfect, and I don’t claim to know everything, but, while I do not remember the exact details, I know for a fact that my older brother’s abuse towards me was real, no amount of gaslighting can delete that.
No amount of gaslighting can erase the pain of being tied up for a few hours by my brother while my parents are at work, to be alone in the streets in a massive city after trying to run away because I didn’t feel safe at home, to be bullied by classmates, to face racism and xenophobia, unjustifiable detained in a police station for several agonizing hours, these are very much real, idk about the details, the the overall outline of it is real.
I’m sorry you went through that, my message is not meant to dismiss or invalidate what anyone has experienced, but to give you a better mental framework for deciding how literally any experience can or should impact you and how you can manage your thoughts to have more control over your feelings for a better quality of life to some regard.
Nothing is “real” in the strictest sense because there is no such thing as objective reality. Everything is just a personal experience or a frame of reference of changing events, but the only reason we think there’s a before and after “now” is because we have brains designed to simulate those evolutions. We’ve tested this over and over in very expensive experiments as well as experiments you can do at home, it’s a fundamental fact of reality, but I find this message empowering, not dismissive or downplaying our experiences, but rather it gives some measure of control over how we are going to let things like trauma effect our daily life.
Free will also isn’t real, but, ironically, we still have to “make decisions”.
What I’m saying is, even if the memories are just nothing more than neurons in the brain, there is still “ghosts” that continues to follow you.
Even if you can get a “mind wipe” and forget everything, trauma often causes permanent brain changes that’s outside of the memory part (hippocampus?), its a long-lasting change. Forgetting doesn’t fixes mental problems, it can actually exacerbate them since you wouldn’t have the memory to explain why you have these seemingly random fears.
The arrow of time of thermodymanics is definitely real, we aren’t omniscient, we don’t perceive everything all at once, so to us, there is a “before” and “after”. You can go visit Six Flags tomorrow*, but its impossible to visit the exact moment you went to Six Flags years ago when you were a kid.
*Yes I know its ironic, given I just mentioned free will doesn’t exist.
(Sorry its just a bunch of incoherent thoughts, kinda just thinking aloud you know? lol)
I am still torn about free will. Some of my darkest crashes in life have been realizing that I don’t know the “source” of my own thoughts and cognition, meaning I found my “rails.” I realized that my thoughts are being generated and I’m only responding to them.
But even if we’re just riding along on basically a movie with the illusion of free-will, we are still experiencing it, and that is something that lay outside even our interpretations of the universe and freedom of choices. Sure, your entire cognitive experience might be generated by neurons simulating a reality from deterministic information input, but there is still some “thing” that gives you a singular experience of the universe out of that. It might not be free-will, but maybe our notions of free will are lacking, maybe there’s something else that means more than whether or not you can actually decide out of “nowhere” if you’re going to walk into the next room. This is the Hard Problem of Consciousness and why no matter how many tests we do and how many brain patterns we scan, we can never actually know if you see blue the same way I do.
This is the only thing that’s separate from our memory, our experiences, our timeline, whether or not it’s on rails. Everything else is a simulation your brain is running and the structure of that brain evolving through time.
Sure, I agree but we’re still just talking about brain structure. There are massive parts of your brain, countless “layers” of thought, recognition, analysis and reasoning, but you’re not aware of them. This is why trauma can haunt you even if you don’t remember it, this is why someone who has a head injury can sometimes develop an entirely new personality, this is why if you have your hemispheres separated, someone can show your non-verbal hemisphere a picture of a cat, then instruct your verbal side to draw a picture and you will draw a cat without knowing why, and even make up a memory on the spot for why you decided to draw a cat.
Maybe unrelated but since we’re jamming with random ideas about consciousness, it’s a good time to make a small rant about how time-travel is portrayed in fiction. It’s utterly impossible to “go back” in time, since every point in time is just a potential configuration of space and particles. The only way you can see the past is reassemble the entire universe from starting conditions until it has that configuration again. If you were able to “rewind” time, your brain would also rewind and you would just be experiencing that configuration again without any knowledge of future events.
But really, we can’t even say for certain that six flags exists. We can’t say for certain that the universe didn’t spring into existence 5 minutes ago, and your brain is just assembling a reasonable explanation for your world, six flags and quasars and elephants and childhood trauma and all… it may be doing this at every moment.
All we can say for certain is that you are experiencing something right now and everything else is branching off that experience. This is idea can send people (like myself) into deep spirals of solipsistic despair, but I think at the end of the day I will take this over the alternative.
I have to remind myself that sometimes of the best times with friends that I have lost over time, sometimes distance, and sometimes growing apart.
Even if we were back in the same place with the same ppl, it would never be the same. Because of time.
Hard to accept but a breakthrough when you do.