The anxiety provoked by the idea of “memory dampening” is so intriguing that even the President’s Council on Bioethics, convened by President George W. Bush in his first term, thought the issue important enough to reflect on it alongside discussions of cloning and stem-cell research. Editing memories could “disconnect people from reality or their true selves,” the council warned. While it did not give a definition of “selfhood,” it did give examples of how such techniques could warp us by “falsifying our perception and understanding of the world.” The potential technique “risks making shameful acts seem less shameful, or terrible acts less terrible, than they really are.”
But the mere possibility seems to have threatened an important convention for representing memory in relation to personal identity. These worries draw their force from a deep-seated attachment to two related beliefs: first, that we are, in some ambiguous but important way, the accretion of our life experiences; and second, that those life experiences are perfectly preserved even if our ability to remember them is far from perfect. When Alzheimer’s disease patients lose significant amounts of memory, dismayed friends often say that their very selves have crumbled or faded away and that in some literal way they are “no longer themselves.”
The thought here is not that people believe their memories are perfect — far from it. Common understandings of memory centrally involve the idea that memories are unreliable, fickle and capricious. But there is another belief about memory that has been articulated by many figures in memory research: that in some fundamental way, secreted within us are perfect records of past experiences, even if we might never access them consciously.
The concerns of the President’s Council naturally raised the question of how to distinguish psychic pain from physical pain, since it was this very distinction that the council failed to discuss explicitly. The council did not set itself against the use of physical anesthesia, even though there are well-known cases where pain is thought to serve a useful purpose. Yet physical anesthetics have some relevant common ground with the prospective memory technologies, and there is a long history of resistance to the idea of physical anesthesia on grounds similar to some of the arguments being mounted here. Skeptics argued that a loss of sensation would disconnect sufferers from a valuable experience (as in childbirth) and from information they needed to have. Before the advent of anesthesia, techniques that seemed to involve an intentional suspension of sensation could trigger alarm on a scale that now seems almost inconceivable.
via www.salon.com
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