LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING.

1. Forgetting.

Is the value of a happy experience diminished by the fact that it will be forgotten?

Imagine I offered you the chance to go on a fabulous holiday with a few of your very best friends. This is an event guaranteed to be full of happiness and laughter and enjoyment and fun. But! what if I said that on your return I would immediately wipe your memory of the whole thing. You would have no memory of it at all! Would you agree to go on the holiday?

This is the opposite of the situation in the movie(s) ‘Total Recall’ where people can have the memory of a holiday without that holiday ever really having happened.

(A variation is if I threatened you with a painful experience but assured you that I would wipe your memory of it immediately afterwards. Would that make the thought of the impending painful experience more bearable?)

The question is all about the relative value of (a) an experience while you are experiencing it and (b) your memory of the experience later.

The memory of an event is often most of its value. For example people climb mountains so they can look back and feel proud of their achievements afterwards. (The actual process of climbing a mountain as it is happening isn’t desirable in itself so much.) And people keep photographs and diaries to prolong their memory of events in their lives.

2. Some digressions.

I find something similar going on when I am talking to someone. I’ll say something and then I will think: “are you going to remember this? if not then why am I bothering to say it?” Or I will think about something they say: “that was an interesting thing you just said but I’m not going to remember so you needn’t have bothered”.

Or when reading a novel I will think: I’m not going to remember all of this! For example I’m pretty sure I’ve read the novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (from which I have stolen the title for this blog!) by Milan Kundera because I remember his exposition of the concept of ‘litost’. But, apart from that, I remember nothing at all about it. If somebody asks me if I have read it should I say yes or no? I think I should say “yes” but then when they (inevitably) start talking about some particular episode I should say: “Why are you asking about that? I don’t remember anything about that novel, I read it for the experience it gave me while I was reading it. I don’t expect anything more.”

Or even just walking around I might see something worthy of my attention. Nothing really important, maybe the affecting way a couple greet each other. And I think: I have this incident in my mind now but it will soon be forgotten.

The only solution to all of this is to be constantly obsessively recording things, writing them down. But that’s just crazy.

3. Remembering.

The idea is that without an enduring memory of an event it loses its value. This has an affinity with the religious view (Matthew 6:19-20) that earthly pleasures are worthless because they are transient and mutable. And that we should instead pursue heavenly afterlife pleasures which are permanent. ... In fact this point could be extended to apply to your life as a whole. Your earthly life has no value because it is not permanent: you will cease to exist eventually.

But it seems rather excessive to expect an experience (and/or the memory of it) to be permanent before you consider it as worth having. In the case of memory in practice I’m sure most people would be happy with their memories of events being of a certain (finite) length. What if you regularly and consistently forgot everything about everything that happened that was earlier than, say, four years ago. (So for example if you used to be friendly with some person six years ago but hadn’t been in touch with them since that time then your memory would contain nothing about them.) Would this be acceptable? Possibly. It would seem like a fair compromise between immediately forgetting and permanently remembering. I mean: nobody has any problem with the fact that most of their childhood memories are gone.

(If you remembered everything that happened to you so perfectly that it all seemed like it happened just yesterday then you will always feel like that you have lived only one day. When you come to die you’ll think that you’ve not lived at all. Conversely if you forgot everything all the time you’d feel immortal.)

But if it is acceptable then what does that mean for people’s desire to live longer? Because your memories are a major factor in determining your identity, ie who you are. What I mean is: imagine I knew someone and then lost touch and then met them again after four years and in the meantime they had lost all their memories of our time together and got new memories instead. I would say they are not the same person that I used to know. They may as well be a stranger to me. Or: imagine that they had committed a crime 5 years ago of which they had no memory at all. It would seem odd (especially to them!) to insist on punishing them for that.

If the memories of you as you are now will only last four years. Then in some sense it’s impossible for you to survive more than those four years.

4. Other things.

Suppose you found out about some ice cream flavour which came out last year. And then you say: I wish I had know about this last year. Then I would have had the pleasure of eating it then. But surely it doesn’t matter to you now whether or not you had the pleasure in the past.

Would you rather have a short increase burst, couple of weeks, of pleasure now. Or a slight pleasure increase over decades. Where the ‘quantity of pleasure’ in each case is the same. For example if you had a large quantity of money to spend would you spend it on an exciting two week holiday or would you spend it on slightly improving the quality of your everyday life, like maybe making your house more pleasant to live in.

According to ideas which say “we only have the present moment” you should avoid intense short-term pleasures and prefer longer lasting milder pleasures.

In section one I said: the question is all about the relative value of (a) an experience while you are experiencing it and (b) your memory of the experience later. But there is a third thing which is you anticipation of a future pleasure. We can consider the relative value of this too. We could ask: if you had the choice between a pleasure lasting, say 20 minutes, or the anticipation such a pleasure over a period of a week, which pleasure never actually materialises then which would you choose?

[7 January 2014]

[amended afterwards]