Eternal Sunshine of the Rational Mind

Cyan

What if you could choose which memories and associations to retain and which to discard? Using that capability rationally (whatever that word means to you) would be a significant challenge -- and that challenge has just come one step closer to being a reality.

Dr. Fenton had already devised a clever way to teach animals strong memories for where things are located. He teaches them to move around a small chamber to avoid a mild electric shock to their feet. Once the animals learn, they do not forget. Placed back in the chamber a day later, even a month later, they quickly remember how to avoid the shock and do so.

But when injected — directly into their brain — with a drug called ZIP that interferes with PKMzeta, they are back to square one, almost immediately. “When we first saw this happen, I had grad students throwing their hands up in the air, yelling,” Dr. Fenton said. “Well, we needed a lot more than that” one study.

They now have it. Dr. Fenton’s lab repeated the experiment, in various ways...

I resolve to not erase any memories. I want to never have to face the dilemma of wondering if something happened in my past that I had redacted. The only way to protect myself from this possible stressful situation is to believe I am not the kind of person who would ever tamper with my memories. (The "Golden Age" novels have a good depiction of the possible problems associated with discovering that you are the kind of person who has his/her memories redacted.)

Maybe I'm reaching here, but there also seems to be a parallel between the process of resolving to one-box in Newcomb's problem and that of resolving to not redact in an Eternal Sunshine scenario. It is the act of resolving, of making oneself the kind of person who one-boxes, or non-redacts, that generates the benefits, not taking the one box or actually refusing to redact memories.

You already erase most of the memories of a normal uneventful day, and only retain lossy-compressed cues of what you do remember.

2rufford17y

How would you know that you didn't both erase the memory of some event and erase the memory of erasing the memory of that event? The more you commit yourself to not tampering with your memories, the stronger the cognitive dissonance will be at having tampered with your memory.

2Cyan17y

So you're saying that you cannot imagine having memories so traumatic that you would prefer to erase them from your head (and, say, give yourself a written record so that you aren't tormented by the missing information). I'm not talking about a painful breakup here -- consider the most inconvenient possible world, e.g., one in which you have memories of being tortured for months or years on end.

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