There Is No Antimemetics Division

What is the relationship between who we are, and what we remember? And is there power in what we cannot remember, or perhaps cannot even consider?

There feels a trap either way. If you could clear my memory and find me doing similar things, then does it imply some deeper, more essential identity?

Equally if we are just the sum of our history, how do we account for the fallibility of human memory? Are we just sat here forgetting ourselves?

Don’t we spend years building memories as knowledge to help underpin our skills? Or more even our moral sense of right and wrong? Doesn’t that require an ability to hold an idea continuously over a long period as knowledge?

I think of Amia Srinivasan’s recent lecture:

…philosophers tend to operate on the assumption, one inherited from Plato, that knowledge of the good is not just necessary but more or less sufficient for virtuous action. In other words, that most wrongdoing comes from moral ignorance 27:55

This would put a lot of faith in human retention. How troubled should we be accessing my knowledge or memories seems to degrade and mutate them?

Moral failure as emerging from the replacement of my thoughts like Trigger’s Broom?

I’m more convinced by the alternative tradition she discusses in the lecture:

if however you take a different view of things, say a more psychoanalytic view on which mechanisms of defense and disavowal often get between people’s beliefs and their actions, then the philosopher’s quest to change the world by morally enlightening it will seem foolhardy. 28:25

It opens up an entirely new domain to be troubled by here. What we might do is not just limited by what we know. But by what we are unaware or unable to picture we know. An unconscious of things we “know not what we do”, yet do them anyway.

A realm of structures that constitute action outside of accessible thought, into a world of silhouette negatives of the unthinkable. Or the shaping of the river banks of thought that bound their possibility.

For Srinivasan psychoanalysis as a diagnostic tool, looking to give a descriptive account, to unearth neurotic symptoms. The aim is to provide more freedom for manoeuvre to decide how we might handle the previously unthinkable.

I particularly like her suggestion that this field doesn’t need to be clinically true, to be a useful analogy for diagnosing the political world.

We might look to this as an interesting tool to shed light on the neuroses of our current world, or its politics. Or perhaps look to see if we find resonance in unexpected places as others encounter similar thoughts from different positions.

An Overton Window of conceivable action.

Douglas Adams’s book Life, the Universe and Everything with the “Somebody Else’s Problem” (SEP) Field. Nothing is hidden, but the brain refuses to register it. It makes you think it’s somebody else’s problem, and move on to other thoughts.

What I like about all of these is the glimpse into something that seems quite essential and troubling to a modern understanding of being human. Less of a continuous rational thing. But of thinking passing through a world full of things it cannot reason about, it refuses to register, it cannot perceive.

At base, there’s too much to take in, so we need to construct a set of simpler, less data dense, narratives to string meaning together around us. These abilities are themselves built out of prior thought and action, which gives a trajectory it seems difficult, or at least tiring, to escape.

I don’t think it’s a question of reality. So much as if the narratives prove useful. Descriptive. Or if they lead us astray.

What is the toolkit to tell the difference? It must be broad?

I don’t think this can just be me, there’s something, perturbing, about this stack of thoughts.

Among the toolkit, we’ve always turned to myth and folklore to try and make sense of things. Sometimes just for a good resonant yarn. Other times to try and pin down contemporary concerns and convey stories of what we might do with them.

For a generation where flickering screens of the internet have been their childhood campfires, we can see a new and oddly globalised attempts to tackle these questions.

I find the results interesting, thought provoking in the context of other links - though with a texture of writing that retains something of a forum post. I feel like you can always tell what escaped from the internet into books, and what went the other way. There’s something slightly deep fried. The idea bigger than the stories ability to carry it. Grand reveals that show old narratives garbed in the latest fashion.

Anyway, I’ve somewhat lost myself now. These things were on my mind, but I couldn’t really say why. Just a flurry of links from the net I guess.

Because there is There Is No Antimemetics Division and I’ve certainly never read a book by that name.