On Memory

Entries with "memory/memories/remembering" and/or "war", "history", "hero", "ancient/antiquity"

2088. The bad thing about books, as opposed to other media, is that you live with them longer while you're reading them, but they don't necessarily stay with you longer. Even one sentence--or even one word--can stay with you your entire life. Books can sometimes merely be a way of strengthening already powerful memory.

2045. Excessive memorabilia indicate that the present moments weren't fully appreciated and require a manufactured experience ('echoes' of experience). One doesn't relish in the memory of having memories and ruminations; It's better to have vivid fully-lived present moments that enhance all future present moments.

2006. Photos are confection for memory; You can't avoid being seduced by them. You want to forget, but the beautiful photo haunts you forever. If you lost a great city, you should destroy all the old photos as well. [Anything can be reconstructed from memory, and gives room for innovation that wouldn't have been there in the first version]. (9/12/2001)

1852. Ultimately, information is always freed from its medium. You might not remember if the information was in a book, on a TV show, or on social media. Memories don't come with footnotes that everyone can cite; Information just floats around in consciousness, sometimes moored as facts.

1833. The Enlightenment would have eventually created a Hippies movement and its aftermath. The United States wasn't yet ready for it in the 1960s, and perhaps that is why it faded so quickly. This was covered in the book the Fourth Turning and is coined the "Awakening" (Second Turning). If history repeats symmetrically, the 1960s will repeat in the 2040s. But were the 1960s a continuation of the 1880s?

1826. History sometimes just rolls off and at some point it sinks in. (9/11/2019)

1825. There are more people that don't remember major events. For those with a memory, you never forget. (9/11/2019)

1818. Reading 500 books over 10 years has a different result than in 50 years: The forgetting-remembering ratios are different.

1772. Every time history repeats, it repeats with new technologies that can distort it. This process keeps happening. If you didn't have new technologies, perhaps history wouldn't repeat or get misinterpreted. But the mind itself is a technology of reinvention--and perhaps invents technologies for that purpose.

1747. Always take advantage of opportunities to divine wisdom directly from older generations because once you don't have the opportunities the future is only a painting made from memory. It is best if it is autobiographical.

1743. As the generations shift, the memories of those that saw the cultural shifts eventually fade, and repeat the same mistakes. It could have never been the end of history.

1727. Rather than going to places to form distant memories, stay longer in places where memory is continually remade rather than continually fading out.

1710. If we had been able to take TV everywhere in the 1970s, consider how history would have unraveled. "Taking TV everywhere" combined with social media, is where VR is going. (5/2019)

1687. With the advent of the internet in the late 1990s there was a surge in interest in documenting history. Many of us became highly motivated amateur archivists. This becomes clearer now a full generation into the future. (4/2019)

1658. Saying "there are no words to describe it", is actually not true because the mind is continually ascribing language over thoughts. The fact that one is "speechless" doesn't mean language wasn't involved. The primary place where words matter is when people have no memory or any words to describe the memory, then the thoughts begin to create possible descriptions.

1631. It's so ironic that in today's online tribal divisions, we like to play on both sides of the wall, i.e. using the progress we've made to even construct the internet in the spirit of globalism in the first place (Facebook's idea of a "zeitgeist"), and then entertain the idea to recede to our ancient past we thought we had transcended. Even after the fall of the wall in 1989, "mauer im kopf" or "wall in the head" remains.

1595. All art fills a void (or memory field). It can be removed from view, but that field will always be filled. Even if the object has been destroyed, it remains in some kind of memory, and might have a use or function.

1559. Obsessions about the future can be worse than obsessions with the past. There is no such thing as a 'pastist' (as in 'futurist'), mostly because it is devoid of optimism, yet contains many of the things one could realistically be optimistic about. Perhaps dystopias wouldn't exist if we focused on the parts of history that were best for humanity as a whole.

1495. ...Our experience of the world is spatiotemporal; there are 'place' cells mapped in the hippocampus, and are associated with memory. (I know this is true because listening to music or other sounds while moving, encodes the memory of the place when played again. Audio books will do this, whereas paper books, even though they invoke place in the imagination, don't get replayed in the brain when read again.) Virtual environments are like books read while traveling; it doesn't imprint your memory of the place where you were reading it. If stationary, a virtual experience probably will not invoke place memory. It will be interesting to see the effects of VR and VR audio on 'brain places.'(12/2017)

1442. The one thing that can't be replaced by technology is the place where artists go to create that don't involve tools at all except thought, feeling, and memory. Automation completely replaces those things.

1409. Film, TV, video, and now the internet, have made our current reality possible. More and more we have been saying "It was like something I saw in a movie". Some also believe the universe is film made by God and is all an illusion. In the future, when the underlying metaphors change, memory will be something associated with whatever that metaphor is at the moment. The Universe will be a ___ made by God.

1408. TV gives us a worldview, but is as crude as those in ancient cultures, which didn't have science and technology to inform and recontextualize worldviews based on empirical evidence. TV itself is the result of empirical practice: mere beliefs would not have made the TV Set possible.

1384. World Wars might be over as we have known them, as both the world and war are now redefined. (6/2017)

1287. It's interesting that Millennials and their children will grow up in a time when the 1960s will be subject to intense revisionism, to the point of being unrecognizable. All that will remain is the recorded history and that's a good thing. If ancient history could have been recorded with today's technology where would we be?

1271. There's a danger in giving too much power to history, perhaps even a moral hazard. History is full of darkness, and to blindly follow it doesn't always lead to anything useful other than what was understood as 'darkness.'

1263. ...In the haste to move on to whatever is new, we are discarding what has been enriching to us thus far. Nostalgia can revive it somewhat in younger generations, but the original essences are lost, as no one has a direct memory of them, and consequently get subsumed into whatever the new technology is.

1214. If you make things based on miscellaneous bits of nostalgia you run the risk of being remembered for pillaging the more superior talents of other people. Homage can be a tricky thing to prove.

1204. Ultimately when the rectilinearity of machine intelligence is compared with the curvilinearity of history, the two will look very different, and always be diametrical. (8/2016)

1202. The internet is actually stronger than stone because of its potential for redundancy, and having the capacity to make exact copies of itself. Stone can exist seemingly forever, but can be blunted by time and disconnected with its history. Data is a diamond; data is the new 'interplanetary dust', or self-replicating, panspermiating organism, as it could survive travel through deep space infinitely, and plant itself on another planet. But data isn't going to self-replicate in the same way in other worlds, any more than we could survive in its environment.

1185. Presidents probably appear when history is ready to show the episode where they are a central character. It is assumed that a president will be a reflection of the society, as opposed to the person that projects onto the society. Obama touched on it in his speech at the 2016 convention: "Our power doesn't come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order. We don't look to be ruled". But we like to be directed as if acting in a film, and then see the result projected on a screen. We are all primed for celebrity; it's a new human Universal, and we expect presidents to embrace it, even before having the core skills and talents for the job. (7/2016)

1147. Just knowing the history of something incorporates it into what you're doing.

1130. Hillary Clinton makes history. Doesn't everyone make History? (6/2016)

1125. Digital memory is at the mercy of the mercurial nature of the operating system, hardware, software, and energy sources. But organic memory can be even more fragile. The sum of both is the best of both worlds.

1119. Every time you try to remember something, something potentially memorable is potentially forgotten.

1072. Reverence for art of youth is not symmetrical in history. The art of youth is generally only for one's own generation.

1013. For some people, history only supports ideology.

0996. When you don't have a direct memory of something, and that memory is only in photographs, you don't have an immediate visceral response. Photographs and films before one's time don't activate direct memories, as they don't project on the screen of consciousness in the present moment.

0966. If the internet existed fifty years earlier, just think how much of history would have been archived and accessible. Is this a good thing for history, or is a better history made up of things lost and forgotten and then reconstructed? (7/2015)

0916. Very often I discover what a piece is about after it's done. Knowledge is in the doing and finishing. When things take a long time to resolve, a kind of 'amnesia' occurs, and you just go with a mix of short term memory, the wisdom inherent in the original idea, and the deadline to make a finished work.

0873. The problem with digital media is that it does not automatically display itself and consequently loses the power of the object to bind to memory. When you don't see the spines of books and records you won't remember the power they have in your life. They merely appear in a list on a screen, tethered to their own ability to have enough power to display themselves.

0830. You need modernity to contemplate antiquity. The ancients probably were only concerned about the present and future. There may have not even been a word for 'nostalgia.' (10/2014)

0814. Forgetting to remember, remembering to forget, forgetting to forget and remembering to remember are all mutually exclusive. When I go back and review my collection of axioms I realize it wasn't always 'me' that was both writing them and heeding them. (I can't even preach to my own choir.) We must all have these 'circuit breakers' that function to keep feedback loops from heating up, simply for the sake of 'system stability.' It's causal determinism at work; surrender but don't capitulate. Get your choir to believe everything you say.

0782. All great movements in world history all had a large intellectual element to them. To be anti-intellect would mean the world would never change, or that we would never understand it or see it in different ways. The future as we are now building it, is powered by large universities, with students, alumni (and even dropouts), laying the new roads.

0771. Forgetting is the 'heat sink' of memory.

0733. The internet has changed us in the same way that the building of the pyramids did for the ancient Egyptians, and will create just as many mysteries in 4,000 years.

0731. No matter how much information you give people, they will reduce it to the point of remembering almost nothing. If there's no effort involved, the brain won't encode memories.

0719. The internet gives us the sense that we had a direct experience of history from a cacophony of opinions and unsubstantiated assertions. In certain respects we are still operating under the ancient model of the imprimatur of fixed, printed texts sanctioned ex-cathedra.

0707. If war is to become a thing of the past, all the professions documenting it will suffer: art, photography, and journalism.

0704. The internet has made us all gleaners of history. (11/2013)

0703. Music is one of the adhesives that bonds experience and memory.

0694. Essentially a book is a group of thoughts. Every time you sit down to read anything for any length of time it may not seem to have immediate relevance, but it is still in the linear sequence of your life. They may all seem disconnected and unrelated, but are bound together in memory. (5/2012)

0678. A memory is an interpretation of a point in time, not a record of it.

0677. Dreams are really an automatic mnemonic device, continually making associations and connections to support memory integrity.

0666. When you look at ancient art and artifacts you realize that there may have been a point in time when people stopped caring about it and perhaps even discarded it in favor of The New. Later generations didn't necessarily have detailed histories that explained their intention or purpose beyond the art itself. As anthropologist Edward Hall posited, they were 'high context' societies that didn't require explanations, as opposed to modern cultures that compile encyclopedic understanding. It is ironic now in the 21st century that we are actually becoming more high-context, as encyclopedic information does not have to be methodically codified, and now grows a mind of its own in cyberspace, accessed at will without any commitment to organic memory. Caring about the past is now easier because of this, but at the same time is always being reinterpreted.

0642. Give history the benefit of the doubt.

0636. All the intelligence at the grassroots level--the ideas, the optimism, and hope for the future will be challenged by the freight of history. Not everyone will want to settle for the same kind of change or pace of change. (11/2012)

0622. We walk through our daily lives, seemingly unhinged from history, but the door is always fully open.

0611. Art is said to die sometimes. But it is not the series of marks or gestures displayed on a surface; it is the ideas behind the marks that die. Painting is alive in the caves of Lascaux, but the stories of impaling a bison are long dead. All art eventually becomes residue in the absence of context. This is partly the reason that ancient artifacts are under-appreciated by the general public. You have to be beaten over the head to realize the context.

0600. All history (not just selected parts of it) winds up in the same room, with you to think about and process.

0605. We're always dealing with the person that thinks they know you, or are operating under an old memory. It's like looking at a distant galaxy and think it represents the present state.

0577. Every moment in history is before and after something happened.

0550. On heroes: some are born, some are reluctant. The effect on the rescued is the same; whereas the effect on the hero is different: the former readily embrace heroism, the latter are conflicted. Many conflicted heroes grow to accept the conflict, but never completely reconcile it. They do it only in honor of the rescued--all the while they themselves feel vulnerable and abandoned, awaiting their own hero to rescue them. It won't matter if the hero was born or made.

0554. When we think of history, we always relate it with the past, but we're stuck right in the middle of it.

0544. If history is in fact symmetrical, we can assume that generations can be eponymously described. But that's turning out to be a false assumption. Media changes so quickly that one generation can now have a multiplicity of mediums and platforms. (8/2012)

0522. One of the most compelling moments of the moon landing in 1969 was the earthrise: when we contemplate this point-of-view, history becomes clear--from prehistoric, to world wars, to global warming--it all happened on something virtually invisible.

0511. When characters are pictorialized, they also get fictionalized, idealized or stylized to the point where people think that's the way they really looked (consensus memory). Documentary photography did away with it.

0468(05). If a creative process is creative and unique, it won't necessarily become Art. In music, until something is recorded and played it is inert, except when one knows the creative process that was involved. We like musical artists for the creative processes we are familiar with, encapsulated in scores, live performances, or recordings. The processes preexist in memory, which are reactivated through performances. Sometimes all you like are the processes because the recordings or performances didn't have time to resolve completely. Masterpieces are masterpieces because that process was completed.

0430. If all the hosts for a meme die off or are killed, does the meme stop replicating? If Beethoven's works were never played again, and erased from collective memory, would Beethoven cease to exist? Ergo, the West cannot stop Islamic militancy as the ideas are embedded in the cultural code just as much as the opening theme in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

0424. The way we listen to songs from another era is the same way we look at a photograph from another era: it stimulates a node in our memory and the whole circuit lights up.

0419. Collective memory either fades out completely or fades in and out in different versions over time. The term 'collective memory' does not assume that it's absolute, only that a majority of people have agreed that it is. It should be called 'consensus memory.'

0417. ...Once memory is encoded, it doesn't take much to reactivate it. (It becomes 'exformation') The brain naturally does this to optimize memory (headroom) for situations that would require more brain power (survival). The brain is discarding information, but not necessarily to make us smarter, just more agile.

0411. Memories are like clay, pliable to the hands of perception, and to the endless feedback loop of the oral tradition and what is established as the consensus memory.

0344. Everywhere you look there's a history.

0302(05). Collective memory is about 80 years, and then gets progressively more 'fake', as there's less corroboration. In the 23rd century perhaps Paul McCartney will be known as William Shears Campbell because all the fake memories will seem real. (The Mandela Effect)

0301. Remember for a while, forget for a while. Keep things in balance.

0293. Empathy requires contemplation. (This came to mind when I was reading about the shooting down of the Reuters photographer in Iraq in 2007, the video of which was recently released on Wikileaks.) These brave artists will never get enough credit for taking extreme risks to capture the realities of war to the comfort of our computer screens. And we can be sure that they are not concerned about the lack of empathy (or humanity for that matter) of a trigger-happy cowboy not taking the split second to think of his fate. Do they feel remorse? Probably not, as remorse is a part of the contemplative process. Thinking fast, not slow. (4/2010)

0229. The artist connects what you see with what you already know and stores it in your memory as an experience that informs your overall appreciation of art.

0166. The power of music is not so much in the rhythm and melody, but rather in its 'outside' elements, cultural connotation and the context and era in which it is created and/or performed. When you hear a piece of music, it activates all types of knowledge. Music is the adhesive that bonds experience and memory.

0161. Poetry is in the 'ear' of the beholder. The most successful lyricists understand that while music on its own can be powerful, music fused to emotionally charged images and/or words can have a more lasting impact. But more often it is the trialectic with milestone events in your life that informs music, as those events encode more indelibly in memory (i.e. being 'haunted' by memory.)

0130. It's okay that people are guided by religious dogma. (History has shown that sometimes it's the only solution.)

0123. America is always building on what it already is, and if you deleted a whole chapter of American history, how would you also erase the collective memory of it? After the internet, isn't cyberspace a constant shadow of what we are? (11/2004)

0102. Five years of American history is equal to about five minutes or less of antiquity. What seems like a paradigm shift in modernity amounts to no perceptible difference in antiquity. Ergo, nothing has really changed since the events of 9/11, or even Pearl Harbor or World War I.

0084. Computer memory will more closely resemble human memory. In effect, the boundary between man and machine will be virtually transparent, as will lots of other boundaries such as good/evil.

0082. TV makes war entertainment. Coverage of war will eventually be an amalgam of cinema, video games, and pornography. [2017: The end of the Iraq occupation has pushed these aspects to the background, but they are in the foreground of politics.]

0079. Prediction: software will obviate memories. Organic memory will atrophy, then devolve. If there's no need for memory, or if it is in software, there's no need to remember something, except to remember to archive memories. [2017: Now social media is the de facto Memory Archive.]

0065. The war on terrorism is sort of like the Disco Demolition: The blowing up of a pile of records is only symbolic, and does nothing to the idea itself. (7/2004)

0046. There's a whole generation that grew up thinking Oliver Stone films are factual recounts of history, when in fact they manufactured controversy, including the belief in UFOs. Film has more power than we think: We tend to think that since something has been written and produced, and appears in media, that is the vetted truth. In many cases it is, but you can never really know, unless you do the vetting yourself. But who would go through the trouble? It defeats the purpose of entertainment. (The moral: don't go too far to make facts (or fact-checking) seem entertaining, as it just perpetuates the inclination to make everything entertainment at whatever cost.)

0040(05). We don't remember parts of history because it's usually too complicated. Forgetting might be built-in as a natural process of adaptation, that might not have any useful purpose in a modern society.

0025. You won't remember something if your brain hasn't encoded it. But how does one know if the memory is from encoding, or if it's just manufactured by imagination? Who could prove to have or not have a false memory?

0023. Sometimes history books (and films) say more about history than history itself. Recording history is like remembering a dream--with fragments stitched together into a narrative that develops a life of their own.