My brother sent me a link to an outstanding podcast with biologist Michael Levin, whom I consider one of the most groundbreaking scientists of our time. I first encountered him on a podcast with Lex Fridman, talking about planaria worms (which de facto live forever); you can cut these in half and both halves will grow back into perfect versions of their former selves. And you can continue doing this over and over again, each half will grow back. Levin is studying the implication of this for life in general, of particular interest are the applications for human longevity. [Incidentally, which half of the planaria work retains its personhood, identity, memories and consciousness? Are the two worms duplicates of one another? Or does each bisection result in one new creature and the other half continuing as a version of its former self? Which half?]
Now, in a more recent paper, Levin has turned his attention to memory, considering it from the point of view of agency; the idea that memories – and the thoughts that convey them – have a will, have intentionality. He suggests that just like biological organisms, memories by their very nature want to survive and replicate. And as with evolution, it is survival of the fittest; it is our best memories that survive, through the narratives that we structure around them to carry them forward. "All good agents are good storytellers," he says.
Does the butterfly remember being a caterpillar, asks Levin. Does its consciousness retain memories of the taste of specific leaves, vestigial muscle memory of how to move as a caterpillar? Within the butterfly's brain, are memories from its former caterpillar-self even necessary? Are they experienced in the form of qualia flashbacks, no longer relevant but still very real?
Levin likens our reality as being bow-tie shaped, with a funnel to the left representing our past experiences, the narrow part in the middle being the present moment, ever sliding forward at the rate of one second per second, and the other funnel to the right of that representing all future possibilities. Over on the left we have our memories, which, being biological rather than digital, are imperfect. Much detail is lost as we try to retrieve them for use in the present. And when we do bring out those memories into the present, what we can't remember with certainty, we confabulate. We create narratives.
And we define ourselves on the basis of those narratives. We construct narratives about our past – our childhood ("idyllic"/"troubled"), our careers ("wise moves", "bastard bosses") etc. And as we tell these stories, we note the reaction of our listeners; versions of the stories that go down best get reinforced in our memory, some details get dropped as irrelevant, new details get confabulated into the narrative, morphing them into more memorable stories. [Ancient flood myths across multiple civilisations that persist to this day – Noah's Ark. Repeat, simplify, add new bits on, turn it into a didactic story.]
Memories, says Levin, are like DNA in that they 'want' to strive to replicate, to survive in their environment, to remain relevant and to persist into the future.
The notion of a thought or a memory having agency brings me to consider this theory in the context of memetics; the survival of the fittest when it comes to ideas. The notion of the meme, devised by Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, is that of an idea, behaviour, fashion, joke or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture. The more resonant the idea within that culture at that time, the more likely it is to spread, like a virus. We can see this in today's online culture, the idea of an internet meme going viral.
Levin mentions research which suggests that thought affects the thinker – persistent obsessive thoughts, for example, can actually change the structure of the thinker's brain.
The stories we tell ourselves. We are "self-justifying apes." Levin mentions a woman with a brain disorder that causes her to start laughing uncontrollably for no reason. When asked why she was laughing, she would say "I had just remembered something funny."
On to dreams. I watched a couple of podcasts on dreams by David Eagleman (he of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife]. He talks of the ephemeral nature of dreams, the way our memories of them evaporate after we wake, and likens this experience to what it's like to have Alzheimer's; victims' waking memories evaporate the same way as dreams do for everyone. Keeping a dream diary (only for the most salient ones), I notice that while memory of the dream narrative fades on waking, the qualia memory of the atmosphere or klimat of the dream tends to spontaneously resurface in a flashback in the first hours of being awake.
These are fascinating areas of scientific endeavour. I intend to cease watching any and all current affairs and news programmes on YouTube for fear of going off into a Trump-inspired rage. Science, history, the arts, anthropology, archaeology, UFOlogy, ancient mysteries, religion and spirituality – enough to be getting on with for the time being.
This time last year:
Fully automatic – intuitive intelligence
This time three years ago:
A deeply spiritual experience
This time four years ago:
[Since then Tesco has left Poland and I'm still boycotting Auchan – let its owners choke on their fucking roubles. It's Lidl for me today!]
This time 17 years ago:
My father's house
