I Edit - rewriting my 'history of ideas'

I change my mind, quite frequently when it comes to small details, but only twice have I changed my entire world view.

It is sometimes held up as a virtue that someone has stuck to their principals throughout life, I find such assertions somewhat suspicious. To feel you got it all right in your twenties, would seem to indicate a mind lacking in self-awareness and oblivious to the changes occurring around us every day. And of course there is the constant danger of those two psychological elephant traps, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.

The ways in which we rewrite history individually and collectively has been much on my mind in recent years - well the last ten to be precise! It could just be an age thing, I turned sixty this year, and I know that what I remember of the past, and the way I remember it is changing. But aligned to this is an awareness of the emerging insights of neuroscience on memory and aging. Equally, the ever-expanding Web increases my knowledge of the context in which my memories were formed - it’s legacy would seem to be not so much how it tells us with ever increasing speed about the present, but how it tells us more and more about the past.

Every era rewrites history, but there is something qualitatively different this time. The technology of recording has changed rapidly, so too the way previous methods can be converted into digital form and turned into big data. We share more, and more widely, our current experience. However, as millions pass their tenth anniversary on social media, it becomes only too obvious that we will be remembering in novel ways.

'I know you can share, but can you edit and delete?' Many would reply; 'Why bother!' Well I sometimes suspect sheer laziness or horror at the prospect of confronting the past. But if you can bring yourself to review your past posts and shares in a systematic way you soon find yourself asking - do I want this as my legacy? Some posts I delete because they seem so trivial in retrospect, a diversion which undervalues my other contributions. Some I remove because they were so context specific at the time that they have already becoming almost incomprehensible! But the majority stay, and where opportunity arises I often add an update. All of this requires time and energy, I do it because I care about my legacy, the impression I leave behind. And of course the less my online signature, fist or character looks like anybody else’s, the more likely it is to be noticed in the future! There are only two kinds of immortality, the genetic carried in the bodies of our relatives and descendants, and the memetic transmitted vertically or horizontally via the brains of others.

'But you’re altering the facts, the truth!' There are two essential responses to that, one is a scholarly assertion of the scientific method to include doubt, uncertainty, critical thinking and scepticism; the other, is an equally strong assertion of the evidence that human memory is always a filtering and updating process equivalent to that which I’ve already described - that every time we remember, it is our current version which gets saved, overwriting previous versions.

It appears we all use a 'method of loci' (memory palace) whether we are conscious of it or not; and even when we are, it is the unconscious brain that has selected the data that needs to be remembered. Whether we are aware of what we are doing with our memories, seems to turn on our method of retrieval. It seems to me, that our chosen space/ location works best when we follow our natural inclination to observe in order to navigate, a journey method of visualising spatial relationships as we walk through a landscape. So both the form in which a new memory is encoded and recalled are dictated by body movement - the form in which we learn naturally anyway.

An unexamined life is no kind of life at all. Indeed, but rewriting one’s own history, particularly in light of the knowledge one has acquired and from whom, may well be a practical necessity too, we need an organised mind to survive. Presumably it is an evolutionary process, following from our nature as a social species living out our lives in groups. Our brains have a limited capacity, we are limited in the number of people we can come to know and care about. We need to dump information continuously.

Since all knowledge is online these days, even as I draft this Microsoft is trying to make sense of it and make connections, but to be of use to the algorithm my behaviour, feelings and thoughts have to be regular and habitual - otherwise they predict nothing. Indeed what apps really hate is when you start following them, rather than them following you - when you start tweaking and tinkering. Their first reaction is one of security, they assume your device has been hacked by someone else! Most apps assume the user is preoccupied with what the thinking machine can tell them about the present and future, but I doubt this is so when your entire life is online and more and more of the past is there to be seen on film and video. The technology that wins will be the one that offers a ‘calm’ experience. Forms of digital curation at present offer a largely disembodied understanding, those that do best in the future will be those that mimic their user’s messy and sticky experience of the mix between the real and digital worlds.

One of the major questions about the online future is whether the thinking machine will be willing or able to collude with humans, accept the ways in which we learn, lie and cheat our way through life, when it, the machine, can keep it’s cool, remain rational and remorselessly point out the truth - insisting we follow! Ever since my days in the school room, it seems a lot of my learning has been a process of cheating, of learning by directly observing others and reconstructing their knowledge. In so far as I don’t reproduce directly the words of others and claim them as my own, then it’s not plagiarism, but the social process of learning has led me to believe originality to be absurd. Education, like many spheres of life is hung-up on the idea of individuality, implying freewill and autonomy. Sitting in the audience of a lecture I’m often thinking not whether this speaker is good or bad, rather; who told you that? Or worse, you’re reinventing the wheel - I could give you a better reference for that from as little as fifty years ago!

But most of the time I’m thinking, what I’m absorbing is not the knowledge the presenter is intending to impart at all. Out of fifty minutes, that which appears on black or whiteboard, on PowerPoint or video, can be accounted ten minutes at most. From school days onwards what I learnt about most were the teachers themselves and my fellow members of the audience. And all that, was mostly nonverbal. This social learning is not an individual process at all, and as such must include much that others would wish to label cheating. But what is possibly much more individual is the capacity and or willingness to learn new things, and what preoccupies me now is does age matter?

A large part of what I have learnt, and a key technique for learning, appears to be avoidance. How to get out of, or get around problems, seems key to the knowledge I’ve acquired - a sort of lateral thinking by default! Avoidance seems to be a solution if you do eventually return and solve, but in many situations it is advocated as a solution in and of itself. A large part of modern medicine seems to be about providing alternatives to changes in lifestyle which would actually solve the original problem. And in politics, well the pressure always seems to be to be seen to be doing something, anything, whether the original problem is addressed or not.

Well, that’s about as far as I want to go, this time. As always I seem to be lying by omission, nine tenths of what I really feel never gets online! I censor myself, so as not to give too greater offence and lose the few friends I still have. Oh! I almost forgot; I was going to mention those two fundamental changes in world view. Well the first occurred when I studied sociology at university - I went from an individualistic to a socially determined view of how people act. The second occurred in the new millennium when I fully adopted an evolutionary perspective on everything – biological, cultural and social.

(see also, The Story We Tell Ourselves)