The Cruciality Of Memory

I do not hear enough people talk about the vital nature of memory regarding knowledge and how to critically assess the epistemology of memory to lead me to think that people truly take the issue as seriously as it demands we do.  If our memories are not reliable, then almost all of our alleged knowledge is in jeopardy, either totally uncertain or lost in a fog.  All knowledge derived from sense experience, empirical observation, and education is entirely unstable and elusive if our memories do not retain it adequately.  The significance of this cannot be overstated.  Of course, it is logically possible that I have never subconsciously forgotten anything in my entire life but I am unable to consciously perceive and unlock all of these memories--but I can neither verify nor falsify such a possibility.

While the specific line between short term or long term memory is perhaps only arbitrarily defined, I can identify key differences between certain memories of mine.  Although some of my words to follow here will indeed assess the difference between memories of mine having to do with relatively recently events and things in the more distant past, what I mean by "recent" and "old" memories may not totally align with the current consensus on how to classify short term and long term memories.  For instance, short term memory is believed to only hold around 5-9 things at once and to hold them for several seconds to around a minute, but when I talk about "recent" memories in this post I am sometimes referring to any memories in the past 24-48 hours, which would involve far more than just 5-9 bits of information.  Anyway, here I will show how both recent and old memories are indispensably crucial to my ability to live and function on both a practical and an intellectual level.

Recent memories, or memories from the past 1-2 days, allow me to do things like effectively continue conversations in the present without constantly asking "What are we talking about?", remember where I am walking to, what I might want to cook for dinner this evening, and to recall what I ate earlier in the day.  Without these memories I would be lost amid confusion about my plans for the immediate future.  Because of its newness, though, such things stored in my memory--like information for a hypothetical exam tomorrow that I only studied last night--are more vulnerable to being forgotten than older memories cemented in my mind.

My older memories are, at the very least, far less susceptible to memory purges due to forgetfulness, more permanent, more expansive, and easier to access than some information in my recent memories.  I can recall with exact clarity what I remember doing years ago in 2015 with my best friend on my birthday, but I cannot remember what I ate for lunch exactly two days ago.  I can remember intellectual matters like the specific subjects of particular verses in Exodus 21 or how to prove that I cannot know if alien life exists and I can recite these facts without conscious effort, yet I cannot recall what I said when I had an informal conversation with a sibling yesterday.  I can easily recall the main plots of my favorite video games, but I cannot recite the function of every button on a controller for a game I played yesterday.  These are some ways that the differences between recent and older memories manifest themselves in my own life.

If either my recent or old memories did not work correctly, it is very possible that I would die within 24 hours depending on what I did next.  The cruciality of my memory to my everyday survival is something of immense significance.  Did my old memories not work, I might not remember that I have seen alligators in a body of water near my house and proceed to swim in that water and get eaten; I might haplessly run into freeway traffic on foot and get hit by oncoming vehicles because I don't know what vehicles are; I might forget what food is and slowly die of starvation.  Did my recent memories not work, if I was in a room I knew was filling with invisible but deadly gas, I could not react properly in order to escape because I might forget I was in danger.  In other words, a very dangerous situation might spontaneously arise that I could not handle if my memory of very recent events did not correctly function.  It is memory that keeps me alive on a day to day basis in these regards.

In matters other than survival, things like the very integrity of my worldview hinge on the quality and reliability of my memory.  What do I believe and why do I hold to it?  My memory preserves my knowledge of both.  Thankfully, a wealth of information about logic, philosophy, and Christian theology is stored in my old memories (in this case, my old memories are synonymous with what others call long term memories).  I do not have to struggle to recall this information for longer than a few minutes to a few days; I can remember many of these things perfectly and distinctly.

It is mostly my older memories that are especially crucial to my survival and worldview.  Recent memories may survive long enough for my mind to cement them in itself, carrying them over into what is often called long term memory, and thus they can still serve as stepping stones into the deeper recesses of my mind.  Both types, though, are necessary to either the formation of preservation of knowledge.  In other posts, of course, I have defined memory and proven that the faculty itself is reliable as a mechanism even if not every individual memory corresponds to objective reality [1].  But in relation to survival and epistemology, the cruciality of each of the two types of memory that I explored here is immense, and yet I recall few conversations where people have brought up the great significance of them.


[1].  I have memories--recollections of past events; all I need to do to prove this to myself is think, and to have memories I must by necessity have a memory to hold them.  My mind is constantly cycling through a wide variety of specific information.  It is not empty, and I know this with absolute certainty by constant and immediate experience.  I would be clueless about a great many things--almost everything around me--if my memory did not retain a large amount of information consistently.  I am not clueless about almost everything around me.  Therefore my memory retains a large amount of information consistently.  For more, see http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-reliability-of-memory.html.