Computer memory and forgetting
A question I would enjoy discussing with theists is: Does God forget? God is supposed to be all powerful and all virtuous, and we’re always being watched for our actions, and these actions determine our fate in heaven or hell. God may choose to forgive us for sin, but does he forget? Is more memory always better? Or is forgetting actually a virtuous thing.
Is forgetting only practical? That is, forgetting is only a virtue in limited, finite beings. For humans, forgetting makes space for new things to be learnt, and it allows us to move on from that which has past. Maybe God as such an infinite being doesn’t need to forget.
Computer memory is very large and efficient compared to writing. LLM-powered AI agents have a surprisingly large amount of memory. Computers automatically make records of our actions such as our communications and engagement. Should we be purposely deleting things? Or should we hoard data? Is forgetting only practical or does God also forget?
Socrates was concerned that writing things down would make us forgetful.
But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe the more we write and record in computers, the more we can forget in our more important brain memories.
Steelman-ing his argument a few ways:
- Externalising memory will mean our memories are not exercised and challenged
- Externalising memory will mean we don’t try to synthesise information to make it easier to remember which is key to understanding
- Externalising memory will mean we lose the “index” of information, we won’t even make effort to remember what kinds of knowledge is out there.
Externalising memory in any case is not bad, but merely dangerous.
Theuth, the proponent of writing in the relevant dialogue, describes writing as ‘pharmakon’ (like pharmacy), which interestingly translates to both poison and remedy. Many drugs act as either depending on how they are administered.
Memory is built through attention. Attending to information well creates the conditions for the brain to form connections between the new information and all other information in the brain.
What we attend to is what ends up in our memories. There is selective attention, and there is selective memory. What we don’t attend to, we disregard and certainly we forget.
From Derrida in Archive Fever, we are reminded to look past the petabytes of data we do store, to pay a moment of remembrance to the exabytes we don’t. The reality that we choose to record is a product of power, of ideologies and narratives that want to be perpetuated, of our selective attention to the world.
Thus even the act of hoarding information is focussing on something at the opportunity cost of forgetting everything else.
Forgetting is not just deleting data once you have collected it. Forgetting happens when saying Yes to some data is saying No to other data.
I think this more complete account of forgetting is productive in helping us to focus on the world and not on the world as it is represented in our data centres. What do we want to be recording and how will we do it? Let’s not worry about remixing and editing our current data storage, but going out there to meet reality anew and record a new track.