Remembering as a process in the present

I want to persuade you that when you have a memory, you don’t retrieve something that already exists, fully formed—you create something new. Memory is about the present as much as it is about the past. A memory is made in the moment, and collapses back into its constituent elements as soon as it is no longer required. Remembering happens in the present tense. It requires the precise coordination of a suite of cognitive processes, shared among many other mental functions and distributed across different regions of the brain. This is how Schacter, one of the pioneers of the approach, sums it up:

We now know that we do not record our experiences the way a camera records them. Our memories work differently. We extract key elements from our experiences and store them. We then re-create or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them. Sometimes, in the process of reconstructing we add on feelings, beliefs, or even knowledge we obtained after the experience. In other words, we bias our memories of the past by attributing them emotions or knowledge we acquired after the event.

Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light. HarperCollins, 2012. p. 7

Memory and consiousness

Without our memories, we would be lost to ourselves, amnesiacs flailing around in a constant, unrelenting present. It is hard to imagine being able to hang on to your personal identity without a store of autobiographical memories. To attain the kind of consciousness we all enjoy, we probably rely on a capacity to make links between our past, present, and future selves. Memory shapes everything that our minds do. Our perceptions are funneled by information that we laid down in the past. Our thinking relies on short-term and long-term storage of information. Creating new artistic and intellectual works depends critically on reshaping what has gone before.

Fernyhough, Charles. Pieces of Light. HarperCollins, 2012. p. 4–5

Fry on the brain and memory

It may not be easily accessible to non-Audible subscribes, but Stephen Fry’s 12-part series “Inside Your Mind” is thought-provoking, informative, and excellent. He does a great job as a science popularizer and communicator, sharing experimental research without jargon and in a consistently accessible and engaging way.

So far, I have found the episode on memory to be especially intriguing, with the idea that memories aren’t records stored in static form like journal entries but rather ephemeral in-the-moment creations arising from the work of many parts of the brain, and neurologically very similar to imagining a future situation.

Fry associates the idea with Charles Fernyhough’s “Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts”, which I have added to my non-dissertation reading list.

The antivax insurrection

For weeks or months last January, my ability to focus and be productive was sharply impaired by constant fear about what would happen in the United States.

Now it’s the less frightening but far more personal anguish about what will come of the ongoing alt right insurrection in Ottawa.

It’s painful because of what it implies about the future of Canadian politics, and because I know friends in Ottawa are being harmed. Even more, it demonstrates human beings’ deeply maladaptive tendency to amplify societal disruption through radicalization into conspiracy theories and sociopathic behaviour.

The only solution to our global challenges is to respond to disruption with cooperation while continually updating our understanding of the world on the basis of solid scientific knowledge. The path from here is there is not visible.

Rogue waves

The sea presents no end of dangers to ships and mariners, and surely one of the most frightening and unavoidable are rogue waves at least twice the height of the significant waves around them. The first to be detected was the 1995 Draupner wave, recorded from a North Sea oil platform off the coast of Norway with a maximum wave height of 25.6 metres.

A 17.6 metre wave, which was even more aberrant in comparison to the waves around it, was detected off Vancouver Island in 2020.

Canada’s climate change record

I have rarely seen such a concise and numerically-backed summary of Canada’s climate change policy outcomes than this one from Steve Easterbrook’s blog in 2016:

Several things jump out at me from this chart. First, the complete failure to implement policies that would have allowed us to meet any of these targets. The dip in emissions from 2008-2010, which looked promising for a while, was due to the financial crisis and economic downturn, rather than any actual climate policy. Second, the similar slope of the line to each target, which represents the expected rate of decline from when the target was proposed to when it ought to be attained. At no point has there been any attempt to make up lost ground after each failed target. Finally, in terms of absolute greenhouse gas emissions, each target is worse than the previous ones. Shifting the baseline from 1990 to 2005 masks much of this, and shows that successive governments are more interested in optics than serious action on climate change.

At no point has Canada ever adopted science-based targets capable of delivering on its commitment to keep warming below 2°C.

In my July 2021 letter to Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson I defined the term “gapology” as: “the process going back to the Chrétien era of setting a GHG reduction target for political reasons and then performing economic analyses to compare potential mitigation measures and the GHG reductions expected to accompany them against the political target, always finding a gap in which some further action would be required.”

Trudeau’s net zero promise is an extension and reiteration of the gapology strategy: safely pushing accountability for meeting the target to long beyond his own time in office.

Related:

Framing chapter hand edit complete

Today I continued making progress with finishing the shortened and reorganized versions of my four core dissertation chapters. Specifically, I finished my hand edit of the framing chapter, chiefly intended to split out my own prescriptive normative conclusions from analysis of the divestment movement and scholarship about it.

This is a particularly challenging task because as initially written this chapter was meant to be the normative culmination of the text, with the conclusion largely given over to wrapping up and the niceties of academic writing such as identifying areas for further work.

While it has been labourious and often dispiriting to try to re-sequence the document at this stage, I am growing confident that in the end I will be able to do it in a way that not only meets the requirements set by my committee members but which actually lays things out in a clearer and more organized way for ordinary readers.

Tomorrow I will move on to making the edits to the Word version of the framing chapter, pulling out chunks that belong in the new prescriptive conclusions chapter. It will take another effort to sequence and connect the normative chunks that have been pulled from the political opportunities, mobilizing structures, repertoires, and framing chapters, but at least that can happen after I have sent the four core analytical chapters back to the committee for their re-examination.