Your Perfect Memories Of The Past: A Product of Our Time.

  "A Product of Our Time..."

Whenever people speculate about the future or indeed consider the past, we always do so knowingly and unknowingly through psychological and social filters. I find this fascinating. It means that unless a person is very careful, bias of one form or another always sneaks in. Maybe we do it subconsciously most of the time to make the topic more relatable, to bend it a little bit to our worldviews.

A few moments ago, I was speaking with someone who has a rather severe disability and they were complaining about our current government in Canada, saying things like "10 years ago it wasn't like this. We had more freedom." Their dialogue continued for a while, and I was struck by the fact that for this person everything appeared to be better in the past.

Now regardless of your political views, I do believe that we've moved considerably forward on most social fronts. I remember when wheelchair cutaways (ramps) and sidewalks were nonexistent in the lower mainland of British Columbia. My life is been long enough that I have met some of the people that started the political momentum to get ramps put into sidewalks. I accept that my own memories are biased as well, because things weren't as easy as they are now in many ways. You don't have to go back too far, and the very devices you are using now to read this post were not only nonexistent, they were impossible to implement. So when looking to the past we really are doing so from the point of view of the here and now.

So I have a hunch that if we could have perfect memories of the past, we would end up appreciating the present a lot more. I wonder how that would change people? Think about it, it would be a profound ability and I suspect it would be somewhat of a burden. Maybe technology in the not too distant future will give us the ability to one day start a recording device at birth which preserves a perfect record of one's life. Imagine being able to review any event in your life. Boy I'm sure that would change one's perspective on a lot of things.

Even though such a device wouldn't be a perfect record since it couldn't include the entire context of the experience and would definitely give us much more to go on. It is a really fascinating thought. Your own "History Archive".

When I ponder this whole idea three things come to mind, especially when considering, the profound impact the information might have.

1. Would you want to be able to delete information and memories? Presuming if you did this, if you then accidentally forgot the memory the information would be gone forever. So the question isn't as clear as it first seems
   .
2. What if you discovered that your biological recount of an event didn't at all match the perfect historical record? What effect would that have on you? Presuming that the historical record could only be deleted not modified.
   
   
3. Knowing everything is being recorded how would that affect your behaviour, or would you just get used to it and act naturally regardless?

It is likely to some degree at some point people and society will have to face some aspects of this. As a matter of fact we are there now to a small extent. The Internet collectively stores a great deal of information about you and I. Should it be preserved? For let's say, cultural historians?

Wow, these are questions that I don't believe the human race has ever really had to contend with up until now. I started this article off thinking about past and our perception. Now we have ended up talking about the future and considering the recorded record we are all making.

Food for thought, indeed.

Take care Patrick