Remembering The Deficiencies Of Memory

Every waking moment where a person recalls information or past experiences directly involves memory, as only immediate experiences require nothing but the thoughts and perceptions of that given moment in time.  Memory is a deeply vital part of human life for this reason and because of how it binds recalled experiences together in a way that develops personal identity.  In fact, although memory cannot ultimately reveal anything more than the contents of one's own mind, the very ability to even be aware of memory's deficiencies from moment to moment establishes something very important: memory is involved in the recollection of memory's own flaws.

The only way to argue against memory even in the relative privacy of one's own thoughts is to use one's memory.  The accuracy of one's memory in terms of internal consistency is proven by the lack of utter confusion about every aspect of experience from moment to moment [1], not that this means past events occurred exactly as one remembers them if they occured at all; what it proves pertains to the correspondence between memories and sensory perceptions and between different memories themselves.  The occurrence of specific past events recalled by memory is still uncertain.

It remains true that recalling any personal deficiencies or epistemological limitations of one's memory is a mental act involving the very memory in question.  In other words, remembering the problems and epistemological boundaries of human memory brushes up against a paradoxical truth: memory is necessary to retain awareness of the problems one's memory has.  Thus, for this reason and others which I have addressed elsewhere (see [1]), it is utterly asinine and irrational to believe that memory tells one absolutely nothing about reality for sure beyond that one has certain memories at the present moment.

Now, arguing against memory is not self-defeating in the same way that arguing against logic is.  Since logic can only be false if it is true, rendering any charges or criticisms of its inherent veracity self-refuting in full, logic is true by inescapable necessity.  The accuracy of one's memory when it comes to recalling past events as they happened is at least partly verified if one remembers a severe memory problem, but even this cannot establish anything more than the paradoxically self-refuting nature of thinking that nothing about one's memory can be logically verified beyond its existence (and metaphysical subjection to reason, of course).

Memory's reliability is thus a more complex matter than even proving its internal consistency is.  Proving the epistemological disconnect between memory and past events and the lack of immediate confusion about almost all experiences can be relatively simple, but there is more to the issue that can be discovered.  The impossibility of arguing against memory without using it means that any total denial that any certain knowledge can come from memory is false.  Memory can, at the very least, illuminate several aspects of itself and the consistency of one's sensory perceptions with mental recollections.  This is no small thing.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-reliability-of-memory.html