The first entry in a series of articles exploring epistemology, technology, and politics.

In June 1942, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published the first person, fictional short story “Funes the Memorious.” It recounts Borges’ meeting with Ireneo Funes, who, as a teenager, suffered a blow to the head after falling from his horse. When he woke, he had gained the ability to recall everything, perfectly. A miracle at first glance. Funes, however, was paralyzed. Details invaded him. It was as if he were a panoramic camera stationed, all at once, inside the infinite slivers of time spanning his past.

“We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the fonus of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. These memories were not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half~dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day.”

The physical world contains an infinite amount of information, while our capacity to collect and store that information is finite. We are acutely aware of this conflict; it is evinced by each and every one of our disagreements over how to “accurately” or “properly” describe the world. Naturally, we want to resolve this tension between reality and our perceptual capacities. Wouldn’t the world be a better place without such disagreement? And how could it be resolved? The solution comes in two forms: to perceive and remember everything, or to perceive and remember nothing at all. The former we call impossible; the latter, as good as dead. Given that knowing less is, in general, undesirable (particularly the logical conclusion noted above), we have chosen to pursue the impossible. Namely, by proliferating information technologies. Yet we now understand that there are enormous implications to the creation and adoption of such technologies—implications we have hitherto neglected. If we continue along our current path, we risk destabilizing the very core of selfhood, because it is precisely in the tension between perceiving and remembering that the human experience develops. 

To be sure, we develop a perspective when we allow certain memories and their contents to fade into the background of experience, thus bringing the rest into relief. This is precisely like a topographic map, where memories that persist form ridges and mountains, while memories that fade form flat expanses. But we can only understand a ridge to be a ridge if it rises above its surroundings. Funes is constantly transported from the present to the boundlessness of pure sensory information. In such a place, nothing may rise above anything else; nothing can shape his perspective. As a result, Funes’ “map” is perfectly flat because perfect remembrance causes all experience to remain immediately present. 

Unlike Funes, you and I don’t get to remember everything. For us, the present is broken down into incompleteness. I remember very little about my childhood home. Yet, to this day, I recall the sweet smell of freshly dried linen and how it delicately played with the morning Tennessee petrichor. Neither the linen’s texture nor its color remains. Only the scent persists—my token of lost time. 

If I were to relive that day—to reexamine every one of its details and feel each sensation—the linen scent would no longer be a token. In an instant, I’d become the boy I was, while the ability to conceive “I,” or “myself,” would vanish. In such a state, no longer could I discover the depth of that fragment’s tenderness, or let it contour the future I wish to pursue. No, a memory becomes a token only when we require that it represent gaps in our past—the moments lost to time. When we forget we suffer an irreplicable loss that screams madly at our mind: “make sense of it all!” On the other hand, when we never forget, we demand nothing of the mind; it eliminates the fundamentally human ability to bestow meaning. 

Yet the consequences of a Funesian existence extend beyond our capacity to confer sentimental meaning. When ordinary humans draw connections, identify similarities, or conceptualize phenomena, we accept imperfection. Think for a moment about how remarkable the category “bird” is. The fact that you and I can, in the same breath, understand, label, and recognize both the shoebill and the pigeon as birds shows that humans have a keen ability to judge what matters. Let me illustrate:

Exit apartment 8am Tuesday plump grey feathered biped smattering of green on neck shines slightly in morning light, pink feet, pecking scraps of 7/11 sandwich, beady eyes 3mm diameter 

Now imagine there were fifty of those feathered bipeds and I paid just as much attention to each, and never forgot their details. Each of the pigeons rendered with such fidelity! Every single one would require a unique name. The persistence of their dissimilarities simply wouldn’t allow me to group them together. Further consider this: every one of the concepts I used in that “sentence” requires some level of generalization for a human to understand. Ultimately, the human intellect collapses when forced to carry the weight of undue specificity. For Funes, this is every moment. As Borges puts it: 

“He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them.”

Just as a clock perpetually divides up time into manageable bits, Funes labors to make sense of his memories’ interminable details by labeling and organizing them into endless, trivial configurations. 

Tick, divide, tock, into manageable bits—the heart of Funes’ curse lies in the destruction of time. In his theory of durée (literally translated as “duration”), Henri Bergson, asserted that time really is a unified whole, but that our tools for understanding time cannot and do not describe our experience of it. When we watch the hand of a clock tick down, the implication is that moments in time are discrete things that can be added up to form a real whole. In reality, clock-time is just a practical tool; it takes something qualitatively human and treats it as a material thing that can be divided and delimited in order that humans can work together more efficiently and effectively. But it doesn’t describe how humans experience time. Put simply, time cannot be understood as unified if we treat it as a series of infinite slivers. Instead, Bergson’s Durée argues that humans perceive time as constantly flowing past—where the flow, the current, is driven by our tendency to forget, misremember, superimpose, alter, etc. In other words, for humans, time is perpetually changing because we impose change on it, because we are dynamic beings by nature. Thus it is not hyperbole to say that all human experience begins with our imperfect capacity to remember. The moment Funes woke up, he perceived time as it is and will always be: a disturbed stillness, a gleaming darkness, a Stygian brightness, a deafening quietude, a sensational numbness. We cannot conceive of a state of consciousness more viciously inhuman than one which embodies the conception of time as a “unified,” neatly ordered, succession of discrete units. Thus, Borges’ story is unbelievable only in the sense that Funes is able to form coherent thoughts at all. With neither a self to generate the forward-movement of time nor a perspective to abstract from discrete details, Funes’ can never communicate any aspect of his experience. 

Funes’ predicament is incredible but familiar. As humans we will never overcome our tendency to forget. But we don’t need to perfectly remember to inflict the same kind of damage done to Funes. We are all, on some level, aware that confronting large volumes of discrete information spreads our sense of self thin—that it obscures our ability to bestow meaning and assert purpose. To be sure, technologies augment our perception of the world by magnifying that which would otherwise go unnoticed. When we, for example, place a drop of pond water under a microscope, we reveal to ourselves an ecosystem within an ecosystem, which itself contains organisms which themselves contain unique organs, cells, and biological processes. Insofar as technologies bring forth the world’s details, they in equal measure obscure our relationship to it. Though new advancements like Large Language Models (LLM) help us navigate the incessant (and now banal) bombardment of information, LLMs’ collective survival ultimately depends on the assault’s continuation. As we build technologies that assume our reality consists of simple successions of discrete moments and connections between bits of information, and as we offload our perceptions onto these technologies and supplement our experience with their outputs, we are transforming human experience into something distinctly inhuman. To relate, we need a perspective, and to have a perspective, we must remember ourselves—to remember ourselves, we must be able to forget.