Take a moment to think back to your 4 or 5 earliest memories.
Have them in mind? Good. Now, is there a common thread that runs through them? A theme? Maybe if you had difficulty finding five memories at first, there might be a theme because you based your retrieval of the next memory by branching off the one you just thought of. Perhaps try comparing these memories by their continuity to each other.
Here’s what I mean. Say I asked you to recall your 4 or 5 most recent memories. Well, those are going to be things that happened today, maybe some spillover into yesterday. Then I ask, okay can you go back just a little further and retrieve five more? One more time. Can you give me your 25 most recent memories this week?
We’re going to continue this experiment for the rest of the afternoon, okay? Five memories at a time, going back in time little by little. We’re eventually going to get to a point where your accuracy starts to waver. We are back three years now, and you told me about that cute girl you dated for a few weeks back in August of that year – but wait – now you’re telling me that before that you got into cooking. I’ve been comparing your recalling of your memories to the data spit out by this omniscient machine over here, and it tells me you started getting into cooking in September of that year. AFTER you met that girl.
Your ability to recall the correct order of events is getting fuzzy. As we go further back in this experiment, your accuracy is rapidly falling. You are starting to recall the past about as accurately as you can predict the future. We haven’t even gotten into the details that you fudged, edited, and rewritten. This experiment is about continuity. As far as evolution is concerned, your memories aren’t about cherishing treasured moments – it doesn’t give a shit. It just needs useful information. That sense of continuity you feel in the time surrounding the immediate present is for the purposes of moving your organism in time and space for its survival. The further back in time, the less useful it is for your survival; the further forward in time you go, the less crucial it is to make predictions [for your survival].
Here’s what memoirists do that I find annoying. They take some of their earliest memories and they project a significance onto them that isn’t there. The memoirist takes these distant memories, which are isolated from each other and from the strand of continuity that runs through their life, and fills those gaps with total bullshit. I’m not saying they are making up facts, just that they are trying to simulate there being one continuous narrative.
Let’s say we tried our experiment forward in time. We would start in our early childhood with a handful of isolated memories. And no clear indication of where they stand against each other in the passage of time. Then, we start to get the occasional dyad, or triad, of a few connected memories. A few isolated memories here, three connected memories there, and suddenly we start to see strings of 4 or 5 continuous memories. Before we know it, there are long stretches of time that appear lucid to us. A summer camp here, our senior year of high school over there.
The glue that holds our recent memories together is a narrative. While narratives are useful for ordering and structuring our memories, they are good at distorting them too. You misremembered when you started getting into cooking because of a narrative: that chick you were dating was really into cooking and so you remembered, “Oh yeah! I’m totally into cooking, too.” And you weren’t lying to her. There were enough examples in your recent memory of you enjoying cooking to convince even yourself. This whole time, you were totally into cooking.
You were just doing what the memoirist does. They aren’t telling a factual account of their life so much as they are using facts to tell you a narrative. Sometimes narratives are outright lies, sure, but the point is that even with 100% verified facts, the narrative that strings them together is always outside the realm of facts. It’s fact independent.
Journalists do this too, and it’s even more frustrating than when memoirists do it. They sincerely believe their job is to give you the facts. They say so all the time. Yet they never just give us a table of data. If they do, it’s only collateral to the story they are telling us. Scientists are just a little bit better at this. Many of them understand that their job is to produce a model or a theory – which is similar in nature, but different in structure, to a narrative. Science still has its bozos, though; the moron who yells at you, “I’m a scientist! I’m just here to give you the facts!!” He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. No one has ever won a Nobel Prize for producing a table of data.
All the highest honors in science go to the guy who produced the most interesting models and theories. Sometimes to the guy who created a cure for a disease. In either case, they’re for things that go beyond the realm of facts. Sometimes those cures are produced by accident by a bad a theory, or a good theory with some bad data. Those cases are a rare, but the point is that even when a theory is formulated from a set of 100% verified facts, it is conceivable to have produced the same theory (its structure and its nature) from pure falsehoods. Theories – like narratives – are in fact, fact independent.