That is: we don’t—we can’t—remember everything. Humans are at least as lossy as AI is, but the details we keep matter. Two people can attend a party and leave with entirely different impressions; 300 million can witness the same election and debate whether a fraud or landslide has occurred. A photograph says more about its creator than its subject. It’s tempting to seek an oracle to bust through all this postmodern bullshit, but I’m sorry to inform that truth has always been a prism and not a looking-glass. Train on what data? Clip which quote? These decisions—call them taste, discernment, subjectivity—these are the reasons we still turn to human work.
Saved by sari and
The world is otherwise. You may believe in what you see or trust the verity of what you remember, but the world is none but a psychological scrim overlayed onto the otherwise. This is less a grim tautology and more a call to some sort of action — no decent mind believes what it sees nor accepts less than three ideas at any given time.
Our sense of who we are depends, in significant part, on our memories. And yet they’re not to be trusted. ‘What is selected as a personal memory,’ writes Professor of psychology and neuroscience Giuliana Mazzoni, ‘needs to fit the current idea that we have of ourselves.’