No, because other people hold many of those memories for you. And while memories and conditioning play a role in personality they aren’t the end all on who we are. We are still us, even if a bit “different” from before.
If a close relative/friend lose their memories, are they still “your relative/friend”?
Absafuckinglootly, because I carry that friendship and _I _ owe that loyalty. Just because they can’t remember us, I don’t get to abandon them. Loyalty. People need to learn it.
What the hell even is memory? How sentimental are you about memories?
Memory to me is often jarring and annoying. I suffer from unrequested flashbacks frequently.
But, memory is kind of amazing because you can have a shared memory with someone and it be completely different from their experience. Memory is so malleable, and often a coping mechanism, both natural and taught, for dealing with traumas is literally rewriting your memory to something you can live with. Shaving off the pieces you can’t or making them more “dull”.
I had night terrors after a bad accident until my brain literally rewrote the visuals of some of it and while I could verbalize it to you, I couldn’t “relive” that piece anymore which was a huge physical and emotional relief when it finally happened. And I didn’t do it, my brain did it on its own. Memory is weird.
Memory is often deceitful anyway, so relying on it as heavily as we do is actually kind of odd. Our perceived memory is stronger than the real event. We catalog all kinds of other information on top of what is actually the “present”. Think about when you wake up and commit a dream to memory. The retelling of the dream to yourself is actually stronger than the dream itself. Our “story” is the memory not the “present”.
Neat question. I could ramble on this topic for a long time…
No, because other people hold many of those memories for you. And while memories and conditioning play a role in personality they aren’t the end all on who we are. We are still us, even if a bit “different” from before.
Absafuckinglootly, because I carry that friendship and _I _ owe that loyalty. Just because they can’t remember us, I don’t get to abandon them. Loyalty. People need to learn it.
Memory to me is often jarring and annoying. I suffer from unrequested flashbacks frequently.
But, memory is kind of amazing because you can have a shared memory with someone and it be completely different from their experience. Memory is so malleable, and often a coping mechanism, both natural and taught, for dealing with traumas is literally rewriting your memory to something you can live with. Shaving off the pieces you can’t or making them more “dull”.
I had night terrors after a bad accident until my brain literally rewrote the visuals of some of it and while I could verbalize it to you, I couldn’t “relive” that piece anymore which was a huge physical and emotional relief when it finally happened. And I didn’t do it, my brain did it on its own. Memory is weird.
Memory is often deceitful anyway, so relying on it as heavily as we do is actually kind of odd. Our perceived memory is stronger than the real event. We catalog all kinds of other information on top of what is actually the “present”. Think about when you wake up and commit a dream to memory. The retelling of the dream to yourself is actually stronger than the dream itself. Our “story” is the memory not the “present”.
Neat question. I could ramble on this topic for a long time…