TWO HUNDRED AND FIVE

From Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox, via Farnam Street.

When an expert remembers a patient, he doesn’t remember a mere list of words. He remembers an experience, a whole galaxy of related perceptions. No doubt he remembers certain words—perhaps a name, a diagnosis, maybe some others. But he also remembers what the patient looked like, sounded like; how the encounter made him feel (confident, confused?) … Clearly these unrecorded perceptions have tremendous information content. People can revisit their experiences, examine their stored perceptions in retrospect. In reducing a “memory” to mere words, and a quick-march parade step of attribute, value, attribute, value at that, we are giving up a great deal. We are reducing a vast mountaintop panorama to a grainy little black-and-white photograph.

There is, too, a huge distance between simulated remembering—pulling cases out of the database—and the real thing. To a human being, an experience means a set of coherent sensations, which are wrapped up and sent back to the storeroom for later recollection. Remembering is the reverse: A set of coherent sensations is trundled out of storage and replayed—those archived sensations are re-experienced. The experience is less vivid on tape (so to speak) than it was in person, and portions of the original may be smudged or completely missing, but nonetheless—the Rememberer gets, in essence, another dose of the original experience. For human beings, in other words, remembering isn’t merely retrieving, it is re-experiencing.

And this fact is important, because it obviously impinges (probably in a large way) on how people do their remembering. Why do you “choose” to recall something? Well for one thing, certain memories
make you feel good. The original experience included a “feeling good” sensation, and so the tape has “feel good” recorded on it, and when you recall the memory—you feel good. And likewise, one reason you choose (or unconsciously decide) not to recall certain memories is that they have “feel bad” recorded on them, and so remembering them makes you feel bad. (If you don’t believe me check with Freud, who based the better part of a profoundly significant career on this observation, more or less.) It’s obvious that the emotions recorded in a memory have at least something to do with steering your solitary rambles through Memory Woods.

But obviously, the software version of remembering has no emotional compass. To some extent, that’s good: Software won’t suppress, repress or forget some illuminating case because (say) it made a complete fool of itself when the case was first presented. Objectivity is powerful.

On the other hand, we are brushing up here against a limitation that has a distinctly fundamental look. We want our Mirror Worlds to “remember” intelligently—to draw just the right precedent or two from a huge database. But human beings draw on reason and emotion when they perform all acts of remembering. An emotion can be a concise, nuanced shorthand for a whole tangle of facts and perceptions that you never bothered to sort out. How did you feel on your first day at work or school, your child’s second birthday, last year’s first snowfall? Later you might remember that scene; you might be reminded merely by the fact that you now feel the same as you did then. Why do you feel the same? If you think carefully, perhaps you can trace down the objective similarities between the two experiences. But their emotional resemblance was your original clue. And it’s quite plausible that “expertise” works this way also, at least occasionally: I’m reminded of a past case not because of any objective similarity, but rather because I now feel the same as I did then.