The Problem of Memory

The feeling of radical amazement at the miraculous nature of reality is the beginning of all happiness—to stand in surprise and being overtaken by awe. Why then do we slip into routine and take life for granted?

Insensitivity and indifference are brought about through our ability to remember. When something becomes routine, our capacity to be astonished is compromised. We lose the ability to be amazed and stand in awe.

When I make a decision, I can only rely on past experiences. For example, to sit down on a chair, I must have fore-knowledge that the chair will hold my weight. This means that I am relying on the laws of nature. If I were to doubt or deny the certainty of these laws, I would be paralyzed. After all, should the laws of gravity or quantum mechanics suddenly change, then the chair could disintegrate. I would be left in a state of total confusion.

How would I dare to eat or drink if I didn’t know whether the food would be properly absorbed by my body? Maybe I would explode or die? When I step into my car or enter an airplane I rely on the laws of nature according to which these means of transportation work.

If we lacked the faculty of memory, and could only live in the “Now”, without any recollection of the past, we would be completely paralyzed by fear, having no idea what will happen next. It would be a scary and impossible world.

The uncertainty of knowledge

Even more disturbing is that the laws of nature are themselves a problem. How do I know that tomorrow the sun will rise, and that the earth will continue to orbit the sun? I know these facts only on the basis of my recollection of the past. It is the repetition of phenomena which establishes the laws of nature. But even though we rely on what has been in the past that is no guarantee of what will happen in the future. After all, we know that the sun is already half-way through its long—but not immortal—lifespan. The truth is that even the gradual decline of the sun is not for certain. The sun may all at once cease existence once there is a breakdown in its physical properties.  

Another example, a person may think he is immortal. Every day he gets up in the morning, and is still alive in the evening. On the basis of this experience, he starts to contemplate whether there is a law that when one is alive in the morning, one is still alive in the evening. As far as he is concerned there is clearly a logical link between the two. The longer he lives, the more the basis for this assumption. After ten, twenty, thirty years, the evidence is overwhelming. Finally, he decides that he must be immortal. By the time he is one hundred years old, nothing in the world will convince him that he is not immortal. Until one day he doesn’t awake in the morning because he died during the night. All his evidence that he is immortal has retroactively been proven to be false.

And so it is with the sun. It looks that the sun will always be there, but the more time passes, the closer it is to the day when the sun ceases to shine.

All what I can claim is that I believe that the sun will rise and set tomorrow based on my experience. But my belief is conditional upon on the frequency of this occurrence in the past. And since this regularity could fail at any time in the future, we are left with “probability”; not with certainty.

There is no conclusive evidence for anything around us. Who can say that the laws of physics truly represent reality? Perhaps they are only approximations. Perhaps they are the result of repetitious miracles. Perhaps the seeming consistency in nature is merely wishful thinking. If I didn’t know that for millions of years, the sun has risen, I would be anxious to go to bed in the evening, since I can’t really be certain that tomorrow the sun will rise again. It is memory alone that makes it possible for me to go to bed without such worries. But memory is not completely reliable. What if everything were suddenly to change? Frequency does not prove anything concerning the future.

The famous Austrian British Philosopher of Science, Karl Popper (1902 – 1994) expressed this concept:

Science is not a system of certain, or well-established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality. Our science is not knowledge (episteme): it can never claim to have attained truth, or even a substitute for it, such as probability. … We do not know; we can only guess. And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover—discover. … The old scientific ideal of episteme—of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge—has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative forever.[1]

The scientist is a person of faith; not of certainty. He is a believer.

All of this sharpens our problem. Not only does memory lead to a decline in the faculty of surprise, but the laws of nature are themselves mere approximations. Although they are more reliable than mere guesswork, they do not offer absolute certainty.

Reasons for Awe

However, there is another reason to stand in radical awe whenever we see the sun rising in the morning.

The sense of awe reminds us that we really do not know anything with certainty. It reminds us that while we may have answers to the questions of what and how, we are dumfounded about the questions of why.

In fact, to live without doubt should be embarrassing and uncomfortable. We try to evade doubt by using our memory to convince ourselves that we do know and thus have certainty. What we really do is to turn belief into certainty. And since we need memory to make decisions, we convince ourselves that memory is providing us with absolute certainty. This is what makes life possible.

Doubt is disturbing and frightening.

Oh, let us never, never doubt / What nobody is sure about! said Hilaire Belloc. The truth is that we draw sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

The certainty we rely upon is a comfortable smoke screen behind which we hide. To admit that we do not know is too much to bear.

Thus, memory is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. We are caught in the maze of this paradox. In denying our uncertainty, we deny the undeniable. It is the refusal to entertain the possibility of doubt that leads us to neglect the greatest of gifts; the beauty of awe.

Notes;

[1] The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London, Routledge, 1992, p.278-280.