The Memory Manifesto: How Memory in SF Explores the Concept of Personal Identity
One of the most debated philosophical questions is what makes up your personal identity or your understanding of the self. While your morals and ethics– as well as culture, hobbies, and interests– are all valid components of your identity, I would argue that your memories are at the core of your identity. This is because identity is essentially the accumulation of all your past experiences, which we can recall as memories. In this manifesto we will discuss how the exploration of memory in SF has helped shape the understanding of the self and personal identity.
The brain-computer analogy describes the medium of memory.
The advent of the computer in the 20th century has allowed comparisons to be made between a computer’s processing system and the human brain. Like how information in a computer travels through its wires as electrical signals, the information in our brains is transmitted through our neurons as electrical impulses. Some memory retrieval models postulate that recalling a memory is just activating a certain pattern of electrical impulses in a particular set of neurons, which is similar to how a computer performs a specific action by activating a certain set of electrical signals. The pervasive connection between the brain and computers is even evident in how we describe the act of creating a new memory as “encoding”, which is a word taken from computer terminology. In the short story “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang (2008), Chiang similarly portrays memory as a form of energy moving through the wetware of his alien species. He describes how the wetware consists of a collection of golden leaves pieced together and consciousness is “encoded in the ever-shifting pattern of air driving these leaves” (750)[1]. Thus, while “air is the energy of [the aliens’] thoughts” (750), electricity is ours.
Memory is plastic and, therefore, fallible.
While we would like to believe our memories are reliable recordings of past events that we can recall at will, memory is much more fluid than rigid documentation of our past.
With the contrivance of neural selection and Hebbian plasticity in 1949 by Donald Hebb, our understanding of memory is that it is dynamic and changes throughout our lifetime; The connections between neurons are constantly growing and shrinking depending on the level activity at each juncture between two neurons. As a consequence, memory can be fallible. In study down in 2012 by Northwestern University, psychologists found that a memory is not a perfect recall of the actual event but is rather the recall of the last time the memory was retrieved (Paul, 2012). Furthermore, with each new recall, the memory is placed back with small tweaks to the details of the event. Thus, they describe how recalling a memory is like a game of telephone because, with every instance of memory recall, the memory evolves slightly until it may completely change. The fallibility memory allows it to be manipulated or lost, yet many visions of human immortality involve the transference of memory. The exploration of memory manipulation, loss, and transference in the SF genre reveals the core of your personal identity is reliant on your memories.
Memory manipulation, loss, and transference in SF reveals the core of human identity.
Memory Manipulation
In the spyfi short story, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick and the movie Inception, the characters’ personal beliefs and perception of themselves are fundamentally altered when their memories are manipulated, which shows how memory and personal identity are intrinsically connected. In “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, the company Rekcal—which is a play on the word recall– uses a futuristic drug called narkidrine to insert false memories into clients to fulfill their dreams that are too hard or expensive to accomplish in actuality. The false memories are undisguisable from real memories, so the clients come to believe they have carried out their aspirations. The protagonist Quail is an average office worker who dreams of going to Mars but is too poor to go. As a compromise, Quail goes to Rekal to have a false memory of a Mars trip implanted. However, during the implantation process, he discovers that he in fact had been to Mars before as a secret agent but had a false memory of being an office worker implanted to hide his identity after an assassination mission. As the action unfolds in the story, Quail discovers another buried memory of saving the human race from an alien invasion. Overall, the perception that the reader has of Quail and that Quail has of himself changes with each new memory revelation, which shows how memory defines the identity of individuals. Thus, the story portrays how the ability to manipulate memories has the danger of destroying the integrity of personal identity. As a result, identities can be fabricated as easily as the memories themselves.
In Inception, people can use new technology to manipulate the subconscious of others by changing and implementing false memories in a shared dreamscape. The protagonists use the dream technology to convince their target, Fischer, to dissolve his father’s global company. Throughout the movie, it is shown that Fischer is emotionally stunted by his strained relationship with his father. Thus, the protagonists take advantage of the strained father-son relationship by implanting a false memory of Fischer sharing a rare bonding moment with his father, who tells him to create his own path rather than falling his father’s footsteps of running his company. Overall, the protagonists can use a false memory to redefine Fischer’s relationship with his father and, in turn, Fischer’s own emotional capacity and ambitions. The fact that Fischer dissolves a multi-billion-dollar company based on a single happy memory with his father is a testament to how much memory defines personal identity. However, if memory is intrinsically tied to personal identity, then memory loss can lead to the loss of your identity.
Memory Loss
In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the short story “Max’s Black Box”, the ability to selectively delete memories allow individual to selectively delete aspects of their identities. The protagonists, Joel and Clementine, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind seek out an experimental technology that allows them to delete painful memories with each other after their recent break up in the name of healing and closure. However, they both eventually realize that the technology not only deletes the bad memories, but also all the happy moments they spent together. Since our relationships and interactions with other people in our lives contribute to our understanding of ourselves and identity, erasing the memories we experience with these people can fundamentally alter our identities. For instance, Clementine proclaims “I don’t know. I’m lost. I’m scared. I feel like I’m disappearing . . . nothing makes sense to me,” in the days after her memory erasure. Thus, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, shows how erasing memories can lead to gaping voids in our personal identities. While Clementine feels an intense sense of loss after her memory erasure, Max’s wife Sadie in “Max’s Black Box” embraces the loss of identity that comes with erasing the majority of her memories every year. For Sadie, she enjoys not having an identity tying her down and finds delight in rediscovering who she is and the life she has built. Thus, she is deeply disappointed when she discovers she has retained all her memories from the previous year because she is unable to rediscover her identity.
In “Exhalation”, Chiang explores the mortality of individual identity (and the soul) through memory loss. It is established that alien memory is encoded in the flow of air threw golden leaves, much like how human memory is encoded in the electric impulses moving through neurons. In “Exhalation”, the alien narrator explains that when the airflow ceases, “the leaves all collapse into identical pendent states, erasing the patterns and the consciousness they represent” (750). Thus, even if the air supply is restored to a dead alien individual, the individual cannot regain his memories and becomes “mindless” (746) and is considered “evanesced” (750). Thus, Chiang implies that the loss of memory is the death of the personal identity; The physical body may be revived, but the revival cannot be considered a true resurrection unless memory is also recovered to restore the personality inhabiting the body. SF stories have also played with the idea of memory transference as a means to escape the death of the physical body while maintaining the identity and consciousness of the individual.
Memory Transference
The short story “Think Like a Dinosaur” by James Patrick Kelly and Don Hertzfeldt’s short film World of Tomorrow both propose the idea of transferring memory to clones to preserve the consciousness and identity of individuals in the face of the deaths of their physical bodies. Thus, Kelly and Hertzfeldt imagine a future where deep space travel and immortality may be achieved through transferring memory between bodies much like how data can be transferred between computers and phones. The emphasis on memory transferal depicts how memory is the essence of each individual while our physical bodies are simply vessels to house that essence. This harks back to a popular question in psychology that postulates whether we are bodies with brains or brains with bodies? Imagining memory transference in SF media answers that we are brains with bodies.
With the possibility of transferring memories comes the danger of identity theft. In the short story, “Cheap Sale” by Vladen Bakhnov, a man listens to the life story of a traveler who has lost his businesses and livelihood to his business competitors. However, the listener realizes that the recounted story is actually his own life memories that his competitors stole and sold to others. Thus, the story shows how our memories have the danger of being stolen and used by others. Since our identities are based on our memories, our identities are stolen right alongside our memories. However, stolen memories may not be as authentic as the organic memories of an individual because memory has a “human component” that is difficult to transfer or replicate.
Memory has a “human component”, which is difficult to replicate.
The short story “Zime Blue” by Alastair Reynolds and Don Hertzfeldt’s short film World of Tomorrow illustrates how memory is not simply a recollection of all our experience because there is a “human component” of memory. In “Zima Blue”, the titular character Zima argues how the emotions of a perfect afternoon can imprint itself on the memory of drinking white wine, so the protagonist Carrie would associate the happy emotions with the idea of white wine. Thus, Carrie would be more inclined to drink white wine, rather than her normally preferred red wine, the next time she wanted to drink alcohol. According to the renowned neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux—who discovered neural Darwinism in 1973— beauty is elicited with the association of emotions and memories (Leigh, 2015). Thus, “Zima Blue” pinpoints how the “human component” of memories is the emotional attachments.
In World of Tomorrow, the protagonist Emily from the future has trouble experiencing human emotions; She falls in love with a rock and then a gas pump and she does not know why. When her husband dies, she watches one of his memories on repeat, 6000 times to be exact, and does not comprehend that her behavior is our grief and that she misses him. Emily’s inability to fully feel emotions stems from the fact that she is a third-generation clone that has had the memories of all the past Emily’s transferred into her. Although she identifies herself as Emily, she lacks the emotional depth as Emily prime. I believe that the “human component” or emotions of memories are difficult to transfer so with each successive memory transferal, some of that “human component” is not fully transferred. Thus, each Emily clone is not fully endowed with all emotions of her predecessors, so she must relearn what it means to feel emotion and be human.
Concluding Thoughts
Overall, the exploration of memory in SF has opened up new discussions about how memory defines our understandings of ourselves and our personal identities. Thus, novel technologies portrayed in SF media also shows us the potential consequences of memory manipulation, loss, and transference on self-identity. Yet, memory transference may be the key to solving one of humanity’s most desired and sought-after conditions, immortality. However, SF stories also demonstrate how the emotional component of memories is what makes memories complex and is essential to the state of being human, but it may be difficult to transfer alongside memories. Ultimately, SF shows how the relationship between memory and identity is complex and it cannot be ignored when considering the use of new technology to influence memory.
Work Cited
Bakhnov, Vladen, and Helen Saltz Jacobson. “Cheap Sale.” New Soviet Science Fiction, New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1979. 97–104.
Bridges, Grace. “Max’s Black Box”. Regeneration, New Zealand Speculative Fiction II. Ed. Anna Caro and Juliet Buchanan. Wellongton, New Zealand: Random Static Ltd., 2013. 53-56.
Chiang, Ted “Exhalation” (2008). The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur B. Evans, et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. 742-756.
Dick, Philip K. “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (1966). The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur B. Evans, et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. 385-404.
Hertzfeldt, Don. World of Tomorrow. 2015.
Kaufman, Charlie. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: the Shooting Script. New York :Newmarket Press, 2004.
Kelly, James Patrick. “Think Like a Dinosaur” (1992). The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur B. Evans, et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. 385-404.
Leigh, Egbert Giles. “Jean-Pierre Changeux on how and why our brains enable us to make judgments about what is good, true or beautiful.” (2015): 18.
Nolan, Christopher, Emma Thomas, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Michael Caine, Lukas Haas, Talulah Riley, Pete Postlethwaite, Wally Pfister, and Hans Zimmer. Inception. 2010.
Paul, Marla. “Your Memory Is like the Telephone Game.” Your Memory Is like the Telephone Game, Northwestern University, 19 Sept. 2012, news.northwestern.edu/stories/2012/09/your-memory-is-like-the-telephone-game.
Reynolds, Alastair “Zima Blue” (2006). Zima Blue and Other Stories. London, UK: Orion Publishing Group, 2006. 429-450.
[1] Cognitive Theory of reading literature