From the leavings of memory and forgetfulness we could create a nearly complete map, I think, of a person’s values. What you don’t even see—the subtle sadness in a colleague’s face? -- and what you might briefly see but don’t react to or retain, is in some sense not part of the world shaped for you by your interests and values. Others with different values will remember a very different series of events.
Michelangelo is widely quoted as having said that to make David he simply removed from the stone everything that was not David. Remove from your life everything you forget; what is left is you.
I resent this attitude. People often assume that I don’t care about the things that I forget. Really, I am tired of a whole host of prejudices against people with poor memories. People assume that I am just like them, and that if I fail to remember something they would have remembered, it was deliberate.
Remove from your life everything you forget; what is left is you.
Can we just agree that English doesn’t have a working definition for “self”, and that different definitions are helpful in different contexts? I don’t think there’s anything profound in proposing definitions for words that fuzzy.
Eric Schwitzgebel
what is left are the data points that align with your narrative about yourself.
Indeed, which together with the quote implies “you” = “your narrative about yourself”. See also Dennett’s “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity”.
I resent this attitude. People often assume that I don’t care about the things that I forget. Really, I am tired of a whole host of prejudices against people with poor memories. People assume that I am just like them, and that if I fail to remember something they would have remembered, it was deliberate.
Nevertheless; for any given person, the more he cares about something, the less likely he is to forget about it.
Can we just agree that English doesn’t have a working definition for “self”, and that different definitions are helpful in different contexts? I don’t think there’s anything profound in proposing definitions for words that fuzzy.