I found this written excerpt while digging through my crate of Notion notes. Publishing here for posterity.
The act of forgetting is often the first step towards forgiving. And forgiving plays a big role in amending relationships:
"Forgive and forget" goes the expression, and for our idealized magnanimous selves, that was all you needed. But for our actual selves the relationship between those two actions wasn’t so straightforward. In most cases we had to forget a little bit before we could forgive; when we no longer experienced the pain as fresh, the insult was easier to forgive, which in turn made it less memorable, and so on. It was this psychological feedback loop that made initially infuriating offences seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.What I feared was that Remem would make it impossible for this feedback loop to get rolling. By fixing every detail of an insult in indelible video, it could prevent the softening that’s needed for forgiveness to begin.
Also, Ted Chiang writes more about the reason for writing — which aims to imprint thoughts so that they can be restructured and rearranged until they compose the highest form of efficacy or intricacy:
As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant; writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.
This transitions into two types of memory: semantic vs episodic. Humans generally resisted inscribing their own experiences possibly because we form basic blocks of our identity through memories that only we possess:
Psychologists make a distinction between semantic memory—knowledge of general facts—and episodic memory—recollection of personal experiences. We’ve been using technological supplements for semantic memory ever since the invention of writing: first books, then search engines. 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.
Through time evolution, we develop romanticism of happy moments and softening of harsh periods which have helped us build our feelings towards those moments.
Regarding the role of truth in autobiography, the critic Roy Pascal wrote, "On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer’s feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance."
When I look back to my old photos and videos, I briefly remember what feelings I may have undergone, but usually the digital pictures usually overshadow my personal memories when trying to put a label on those past times.
Maybe it's a good thing to forget and forgive. But what about criminality? If we forget and forgive everyone in time, would that be fair on those who actually deserve true justice and mercy?
This following passage rang so true to me. It took me back to remembering my personal highlights of a Mexico trip with friends, and we were all amazed at what we each thought was the most fun to us:
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn.But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of selves? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.
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