Examining the Moral Meaning of Memory

The true moral significance of memory alteration is not a simple thing to understand, and cannot be inferred from basic observations about its reliability and potential manipulability. Jonah Lehrer, in his recent Wired magazine article on memory — which I earlier discussed here — does claim to be genuinely interested in the ethical questions raised by memory alteration:

Would the President’s Council [on Bioethics] have the same reaction to memory training? What about an more effective form of talk therapy? Or is it simply the idea of an amnesiac pill that we find so Orwellian and frightening? If so, why? We take pills to cheer us up. What’s wrong with taking a pill that might get at the root cause of the sadness? These aren’t rhetorical questions – I’m honestly interested in the answers.

But it’s hard to take Lehrer’s expressed interest seriously when this is the next thing he says: “In the meantime, progress continues apace. (What Feynman dismissively said about philosophers of science is also true of bioethicists, for better or worse: they are to scientists what ornithologists are to birds.)” So is Lehrer honestly interested in bioethics or isn’t he?

Unfortunately, it seems he isn’t. The questions he poses as apparently obvious rejoinders to the ethical inquiry in Beyond Therapy are all in fact addressed directly and plainly in the memory section of the report. To wit, here are four excerpts from the report:

We also know that individuals ‘naturally’ edit their memory of traumatic or significant events-both giving new meaning to the past in light of new experiences and in some cases distorting the past to make it more bearable. The question before us is how or whether new biotechnical interventions alter this inborn capacity to refine, reshape, and edit the way we remember the past.

What could be wrong with, or even just disquieting about, wanting to feel better about ourselves and our lives, and availing ourselves of the necessary assistance in doing so? If we may embrace psychotherapy for the same purpose, why should we not embrace mood-brighteners, especially if they are not only safe but also cheaper and more effective than ‘talk therapy’? Only a person utterly at peace with the world and content with himself would be beyond temptation at the prospect of having his troubles effortlessly eased.

...there are many people whose deep psychic distress precludes meeting obligations and forming close relationships, and for whom the proper use of mood-brighteners is the blessed gift that can restore to them the chance for a full and flourishing life.

...many Holocaust survivors managed, without pharmacological assistance, to live fulfilling lives while never forgetting what they lived through. At the same time, many survivors would almost certainly have benefited from pharmacological treatment.

And so forth. The Council’s entire report is characterized by this kind of effort to explore and present both the potential good and bad of biotechnological advancement, without firmly concluding in one direction or the other. Certainly there is reasonable room to argue with the analysis. But it’s hard to take seriously Lehrer’s “hey, I’m just asking some questions and I’m really interested in the answers” shtick when it seems based on a near-total lack of knowledge of the answers the ostensible opponents have already given, and is followed by a claim that those answers are actually irrelevant anyway.

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Of course, while Lehrer professes interest in the bioethical questions raised by memory alteration, he has clearly already staked out a position in the debate in favor of memory alteration. The heart of his argument seems to be that, as he puts it, “we already tweak our memories — we just do it badly.”

One can get a sense of what’s wrong with this argument by seeing how quickly it devolves into this: “there is no clear line between the tweaks of ‘biotechnology’ and the changes that unfold every time we remember anything.” This is perhaps the most common argument in the transhumanist playbook. It goes basically like this: X new biotechnical intervention will totally change everything, so it’s great and we should embrace it — and there’s no reason not to because it’s actually no different from what we’re doing already.

This line of argument is linked to another favorite theme of transhumanists and other pro-enhancement writers: who we are as human beings is the result of an unplanned, chaotic, and messy sequence of events — whether those events were in our evolutionary past, shaping our genetic heritage, or just things that happened to us during our own lifetimes that we would rather not remember. Sometimes, as with Allen Buchanan’s discussion of evolution and human nature, the arguments raise deeply important questions about the moral meaning of human nature. But Lehrer’s application of neuroscience to the ethics of memory alteration is just a misunderstanding of the ethically significant questions.

Real ethical reflection on these issues would not try to dismiss them with one or two stale tropes. The personal, moral, and emotional significance of memory does not depend on it representing past experiences with perfect factual accuracy. And just because there are natural processes for “re-constructing” our past experiences, it by no means follows that techniques for purposefully ablating memories are morally uncontroversial. If we already tweak our memories, it seems just as possible that we could already sometimes do it well as do it badly. One would hope that in any case the goal would be to better understand the personal and moral significance of memories, and to learn how to integrate them into the broader meaning of our lives.

Jonah Lehrer’s Errors on Memory and Forgetting

About a month ago, Wired magazine published a widely discussed article on a scientific breakthrough that will have huge implications for psychotherapy, bioethics, and human self-understanding: apparently, memory is not perfect.

The author — Jonah Lehrer, the popular writer on neuroscience — reports on some scientific findings regarding the reconsolidation theory of memory retrieval, which holds that every time a memory is recalled, the brain needs to recreate the memory, just as it did when the memory was originally formed. He quotes one of the researchers describing his work in terms of Thomas Kuhn, saying that he is overturning “a very stubborn paradigm.” And Lehrer seems to agree with this characterization:

Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.

None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.

Reconsolidation theory and the research behind it are potentially important contributions to the neuroscientific study of memory. But Lehrer grossly exaggerates the significance of these findings by repeatedly trying to characterize them as novel and revolutionary when they are not.

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The problem starts from Lehrer not making much effort to distinguish between the two big takeaways from this research, which are: (1) memory can be altered by the act of recollection; and therefore, (2) memory is fallible. The first part is reconsolidation theory itself. Lehrer presents some evidence that this idea has only recently entered the scientific mainstream, but as for its being revolutionary, well, he himself notes in a follow-up blog post that scientists have been conducting research in support of the idea for almost a hundred years. Moreover, as he also notes in the article, the idea has been basically assumed by psychotherapists for decades.

It’s the second point that’s really supposed to be revolutionary, though: Lehrer uses as a foil the supposedly naïve conventional and ancient philosophical wisdom that human memory works like a videotape, accurately recording and replaying events. But he does this mainly by misrepresenting or misunderstanding the way others have thought about memory in the past.

The first volley is fired at Plato, who, Lehrer says, “compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet.” But Plato, in the Theaetetus, discusses this model only to quickly reject it. More to the point, Plato does so precisely in an effort to explain why beliefs can be false and memories unreliable. The naïve assumption that memories are “inert packets of data” has certainly had its adherents over the years — most of them in the last century, really, when such metaphors came into vogue — but the idea that memories are fallible, and that they have a life of their own, is at least as old as philosophy and literature. Indeed, even without philosophical reflection there are certain self-evident aspects of memory that show us how it can be imperfect; memories are clearly less distinct than present experiences, and no one trusts their recollections to the same extent they trust their perception.

Lehrer suggests that these developments in neuroscience constitute a transgressive and exciting challenge to entrenched beliefs about human nature. But there’s no apparent reason in this case for why neuroscience should be fighting with ordinary human self-understanding — indeed, this seems like a perfect case of neuroscience coming around to realizing and providing some biological explanation for a phenomenon that’s already very familiar.

The fact that people have always known memory to be fallible still leaves unknown why this is so, and does not diminish the value of neuroscientific research that might help explain it. Moreover, this possible biological explanation for why memory can be inaccurate does not show that memory is arbitrary or always unreliable, or that memory cannot or does not have some strong relation to the truth.

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These problems with Lehrer’s account would not be so important if not for the highly flawed ethical arguments he uses them to support. You see, another implication of this research is the possibility of creating drug-based therapies to erase the painful aspect of particular memories, or even the memories themselves. By way of supporting this possibility, depicting as naïve the idea that memory always is truthful becomes the basis for depicting as naïve the idea that memory ought to be truthful.

In that blog post following up on his article, Lehrer gives the supposed ancient philosophical wisdom about memory a modern voice in the ethical analysis of this topic by the President’s Council on Bioethics in its 2003 report Beyond Therapy. As he describes it, the Council

declared the possibility of erasing traumatic memories deeply dangerous, and worried that it would lead to the unraveling of “moral responsibility” in society. After all, if we can choose to forget our pain, then what would prevent us from thoughtlessly inflicting pain on other people? “Without truthful memory, we could not hold others or ourselves to account for what we do and who we are,” the Council wrote. “Perhaps no one has a greater interest in blocking the painful memory of evil than the evildoer.”

This argument at first seems “perfectly reasonable” to Lehrer, since “even the worst memories serve an important purpose, allowing us to learn from the past.” But his agreement turns out to be rhetorical, for

the verdict of the Council, grounded in our ancient intuitions about memory, is also problematic. The main reason is straightforward: Although the Council repeatedly proclaims the importance of maintaining “authentic” memories, they failed to realize that such an ideal form of memory doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as immaculate recall....

But the word “authentic” does not even appear anywhere in the part of the Council’s report dealing with memory. Moreover, the Council itself acknowledges precisely the point about memory reconsolidation that Lehrer claims vitiates the Council’s analysis:

it is important to note that “stored memories” do not remain static. Every time we recall a memory, what gets stored after such acts of recollection is a different memory, altered on account of how we, in recollecting it, have “received” and reacted to it. Once encoded, memories can be altered by recall.

Lehrer is criticizing a straw man. Not only does the Council’s argument not presuppose some idealized notion of perfectly accurate memory, but there is no reason for it to. Would evildoers only have an interest in blocking painful memories, in themselves or their victims, if those memories were perfect? Does the fact that memories can change or be imperfect mean that they have absolutely no relation to the truth? Does it mean we have no ethical or emotional interest in them bearing some relation to the truth?

Questions like these are the ones that the scientific discoveries Lehrer mentions really seem to raise, but Lehrer seems more interested in making bold bioethical pronouncements on the basis of neuroscientific findings than examining these tough bioethical questions. I’ll turn to comparing the Council’s analysis of these questions about the ethics of memory alteration with Lehrer’s analysis in my next post.

Images: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind;
Photo Album (via Shutterstock);
Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past

Remembering, forgetting, and improving our minds

[Continuing coverage of the 2009 Singularity Summit in New York City.]

Gary Marcus, an NYU psychologist, is underway with the first of the afternoon talks, "The Fallibility and Improvability of the Human Mind." (Abstract and bio.)

Marcus starts off discussing natural language, and the common argument that it is highly imperfect. He says that many linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, have argued that natural language is in fact very close to an ideal system — that is, one that a set of super-engineers would design if they had built it from scratch. He says that he doesn't want to make the argument that necessarily "things that look like human bugs are actually features," but he says it's something we should keep in mind.

Next Marcus moves on to discuss aspects of "the human system" that are problematic (he mentions the spinal column), and asking about limitations of the human mind. He starts with basic things, like how easily we forget simple things like where we left our keys. Computers, he note, store all memory in specific locations; our brains don't. Minds are also susceptible to irrationality, like "framing effects" (where the same issue can yield very different opinions depending on how it's described).

Now he's launching into the selfsame systematic descriptions of the human mind that he seemed to be warning us against earlier: he says this last problem is due to something like "garbage in, garbage out" — that is, we remember best the last thing we have heard, and that's why we are susceptible to framing. Marcus doesn't seem to have considered his own advice of whether this apparent "bug" might actually be a "feature."

Marcus concludes by saying that the current state of human biology is an accident, and there is room for improvement, "if we dare." At least as far as this talk goes, that claim is short on evidence and long on opinion.

During the questions, an audience member asks about the case of those rare individuals who seem to remember everything. Marcus says this is more a disorder where people obsess about recording and documenting their lives, and that enhances their memory. He wrote a Wired article earlier this year about Jill Price, the most famous recent non-forgetter. Marcus says that while the media has focused on the sad parts of Price's story — she cannot forget bad things — he knows of another case where the unforgetter is a DJ who seems quite happy. (More data points, please!)