Immersion(2)

What do we do, when we reflect on the past? Is there a multi-sensory video of our experiences we re-watch, like taking a personal trip back in time? In fact, memory experiences derive from the same pattern-recognition structures we use to see faces and use math; particular events aren't directly retrievable, but are rather derived from our knowledge of what should have happened, given what else we believe about reality and our lives. It is quite possible, for example, to observe a law of nature being broken and, not "block out" the experience, but rather have no place in our opinion of How Things Work from which to retrieve it later.

So what do we do, when we reflect on our experiences? As I recall the wind on my face, do I but indulge in an appropriate fantasy for what people tell me I was doing that day? The answer, I think, is: only mostly. This is the process of memory, the mechanism of it, but not its function or purpose, not what it accomplishes. After all, what is the purpose of remembering things? By far the lion's share of species on this planet make due with sensory-response patterns, never bothering with learned behaviours; if you're the kinda spider that doesn't know how to build a web effectively, you just die, you don't get better at it. The behaviours of most animals are physically-coded response-sets to the environmental contexts in which they evolved; only a few select species have evolved the capacity for revising, or at least complicating, these genetic imperatives.

(an aside for the anthropocentric: most animals on this planet are insects, microscopic, or both, and so this is a fair characterization of the living generally. "Few select species," is a relative designation, meant to include only birds, mammals, and reptiles.)

"Revision" is the key concept here, for this is what I believe to be the primary function of remembering, the achievement that keeps it in the gene pool. We remember, indulge in reflection and nostalgia, as a method of revising those very patterns from which we first derive our memories. I stood at the base of a tree, the wind dancing with my hair, and then a drop of white joins in: a bit of cynicism works its way into my outlook on life, or maybe I learn to expect irony, but unless I have very broadly-associated reasons for believing it would never be so, I come away with the understanding that no scene is so idyllic that a bird can't shit on it.

So what to we do, when we remember? We fiddle with our sense of reality, try to resolve it with our experiences as much as possible. If the experience is too strange for our sense of things to handle(wind in my hair, sun on my face, tree starts talking), we simply discount the validity of the experience. I was out there in the first place because of stress, after all; need more sleep, plus the sun was pretty hot that day, probably got to me is all. This isn't quite lying, just a novel application of the same creative process we engage in every waking moment.

This is the comfort of nostalgia, and the attraction of dwelling on misfortune: the former reinforces our sense of a world were pleasant memories are made, and the latter reflects our need to explain something we didn't expect. The sadness that comes of misfortune, then, amounts to the cognitive dissonance of believing in a world that exists relative to your own ego and trying to explain why it would do something so horrible to You, what You did to deserve this.