AN ABBREVIATED ARGUMENT FOR MEMORY/AWARENESS AS IT RELATES TO EXISTENCE


1. This is part of a larger document originally written for someone else.

2. The conversational style and small number of citations is because this was intended (and is intended) as a short explanation of my view toward this dynamic. Were this rigorous, this would be book-length.

I have yet to see a good argument against valuing memory and human-experienced permanence as the defining aspects of existence. (By "human-experienced" I mean e.g. we don't have free will, but we experience the perception of free will through a reality filter and so on. By "permanence" I mean "in the way we consider a medical disability permanent" not "this will literally outlast the human species.")

It's difficult for someone to even say they *exist* without memory. Experiences and emotions are processed as units of experience. This does not, for many, readily form a mental image in the brain, so think about it unit-by-unit: your experiences are emotions over blips of time. You've probably had moments of veering in and out of awareness at some point in your life -- maybe you were half asleep, maybe you were shitfaced drunk, whatever -- and from here you can imagine just collecting random vignettes of your life in third-second intervals. When many of these are combined, when they are a gestalt, they become "experience."

The downside to this is that experiences themselves can combine on a macro scale. In other words, the part of your brain that recognizes patterns of awareness to combine doesn't just stop at vignettes, it will combine events at the macro-level. This is how memories can "become a blur", and I am strongly against memories becoming a blur. Utilitarianism is absolutely bullshit if your constructed memory is blah; forget "utility", the extent to which life is enjoyed at all is strongly pegged to how we remember things period.

Rationalists and utilitarians often speak in terms of "utility" but your utility is not my utility is not their utility. You experience events insofar as you are aware of them and remember them. If I am barely aware of an event and another person is hyper-aware of an event and we experience similar emotions then the person who is hyper-aware is experiencing vastly more of whatever that is.

Animal ethicists and *especially* animal ethics people who lean rationalist prefer to measure consciousness in terms of neuronal density. So if [insert animal] has [insert density of neurons] then, the facile reasoning so goes, consciousness is just obvious from there. This colossally does not cut it for me. To what extent do you (1) remember and (2) are aware of these memories?

Put differently: I was circumcised. I'm guessing it hurt a lot. I don't remember an ounce of it, and I don't give a shit about what happened to me then. From my perspective -- the person who has been conscious since roughly age two, when I awoke into existence looking down at my blue shorts -- it might as well have not existed. So when we say animals are conscious, is this conscious in the way I'm conscious of stuff when I'm a four year old? Is conscious in the way I'm conscious during my circumcision? Because, certainly, doctors would say I'm "conscious" then, but I'm not by the standards of personhood.

Put differently: if you could prove to me conclusively that animals are as conscious of their suffering as I was at age 4 -- if animals are that conscious -- then I will stop eating meat tomorrow. Instantly. However, I don't think that's possible to prove with current science. Does a cow know death in the way that I know death as even a teenager, or is it more like me as a baby when I'm getting my foreskin chopped off? Mother cows will literally shit on the heads of their children. They are intensely stupid. I'm not convinced. (Plus, if vegans had an answer to this, I'd probably have heard it by now.)

So to be clear, I don't care about experiences if they're forgotten unconscious ones, like my circumcision. Why do I care if they're dysphoric if I'm not aware and will never be aware of them? I'm against circumcision not because it was painful for me ever, but because it takes away my access to something as a conscious adult. I can't regrow foreskin, and circumcision takes away my adult foreskin access. Dysphoric experiences might cause me some kind of negative wiring later that I'm aware of, but that could easily be false too, and I think if circumcision did this we'd know by now. So if I never have my adult-aware access affected and I'm never aware of it, who cares? It doesn't matter.

Going back to the state where I didn't know I existed -- like age 1.25 or whatever -- that's not distinguishable to me from anesthesia. You exist potentially and legally; external events can affect you and form memories, to an extent, but being under anesthesia for the rest your life until the very moment you died and then dying would feel like just dying in your sleep, probably.

Put differently: most people would regard being under anesthesia until they die as equivalent to killing them right away. I think we all recognize that there's something about being aware of yourself that's essential to existing, in the way we experience existence. If it's not equivalent, it's a very similar thing.

I think the scenario where you don't have any memories or documentation or lasting effects is very similar to the anesthesia scenario.

Yes, all of life is in some sense pointless. All existence is slow dying, yes. But doing pointless work or dumb-telos work at a company -- doordash for example -- feels like dying on a faster youtube playback speed.

Very few forms of utilitarianism distinguish between conscious pleasurable experiences and unconscious pleasurable experiences. Most don't even distinguish between satisfaction and pleasure. This is something plato did in the republic, so that's a very widely read 2300 year old thought they failed to account for. Maximizing pleasure under the anesthesia-until-I-die scenario (or a scenario where I'd be as conscious as if under anesthesia) seems like you're essentially killing me. If that's acceptable pleasure maximization, I want nothing to do with it.

Reliving a memory is in some sense reliving the experience. And memories affect other memories, and so on.

But to take the dumb utilitarian argument head on, consider this dichotomy of scenarios that contain supposedly equal suffering:

Scenario A: I am molested but extremely drunk and half aware.

Scenario B: I am molested but extremely aware; dead-sober, fluorescent lights, interrogation-room aware.

Obviously no one wants to get molested, but you have a lot of work to do to show that Scenario B is not worse. And in case Scenario B is too far off, there is the all-too-common crime/thriller/horror trope: "Okay, kill me, but not in front of my kids." (This was a foundational plot element of the TV show Dexter.)

Awareness is very clearly important to our concept of suffering. Saying a being is suffering based purely on physiological indicators or neuronal density ignores this. So if we can say that Scenario B is worse (and we can) then we can extrapolate to say that scenario a is not as worse. And if we can say that Scenario A is not as worse because we're less aware, then we can say that cows could potentially be dumb enough that boltgunning their brains in at a slaughterhouse (or whatever it is we do to get meat) is not actually aware enough to count as suffering.

Awareness usually correlates with memory. Consider that it'd be unusual for someone to experience something with Scenario B dead-sober awareness and then forget all of it. Also consider that scenario a would be more likely to be forgotten. Awareness, and vividness, and novelty of experience usually lead to a stronger memory of the experience.

(This is one of many reasons why I make such a big deal about lying, by the way; lying interferes with an accurate construction of experience and therefore impedes the realness of experience, corrupting entire blocks or networks of memories. With enough deception, you undermine the foundation of your existence. Truth is foundational to living.)

Here is how memory intersects with values: because awareness and memory is so integral to the idea of anything existing at all, this means that collective memory is even more important, ideas like a historical record and collectively shared memories across all time are *the most* important. You should place a premium on publicly/openly verifiable memories and experiences.

Put differently, private works you can't show to anyone might as well not exist. Suppose you did create a lot of writing, but it was entirely under an NDA and unlike most NDAs the company actually enforces it, and/or the work is hidden under some backend shit that you can't ever prove you made. If you were to die and someone wanted to say you made it they couldn't demonstrate that justifiably. You are required to just trust their word -- but many people, by this same word, could easily lie. Many do.

People's memory, btw: https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/why-straight-a-students-havent-learned-as-much-as-you-think/

and: "how reliable is your memory?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB2OegI6wvI

And this isn't exactly convincing to everyone, but it bears mentioning: there's no argument for pursuing temporary enjoyment that isn't also an argument for drugs, the only difference is in how much of a pussy you are and how much you think you can negotiate the side-effects of those drugs. (and drugs are cheaper and easier and more effective than whatever expensive bullshit people use to get temporary enjoyments.)

I often to almost-always take pictures of food when I go out to eat. Not for instagram; I never post them. It's for me and my brain, so that I remember what the food looked and tasted like. Sometimes I will record a video and describe the food (to me) as I'm eating it.

But I'm not sure if there's much of a difference between an experience that:

1. No one has any memory of

2. No one is still experiencing the effects of

and 3. an event that never happened.

(1) -- we can still count blackout drunk experiences as such because they can be reconstructed from the memories of others.

(2) -- suppose no one had any memory of an experience where I got hit in the balls with a cheese grater but I still had testicular scarring from the grater and all evidence suggests I had to be hit with a particular grater because it's a custom grater that grates out a particular grater-pattern (not the best example, but)

something like the above would indicate *an experience happened.*

But an event where we are not experiencing any effects, nor do we have any lasting evidence of it happening, nor do we have any memory of it -- it's not clear to me that this is different than something that didn't happen.

Without memory or documentation or corroboration you wouldn't know if you died anyway. You'd be essentially a vegetable unable to form consistent thoughts, you'd have no cognitive agency, and I don't think people who are casual about this understand how total death is.

Yes, you can exist in other ways besides the aware-way, but how many people remember anything before the time where you were aware of yourself? You can debate the definition of consciousness, but they seem pretty fucking correlated. There's a sense where we can say we exist in a way that's incomparable to the way we existed before we were aware we existed.

I think you exist to the extent you're aware of yourself. If there is a good argument against this I don't know of it.
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