I.D. Greeks 0019

And that observation brings up one of the most significant aspects of memory systems: Why do we forget in the first place? If pain supposedly reinforces memory, how can we possibly forget pain or continue to live in a culture that continuously gives extreme pain? Freud, and this is possibly his greatest accomplishment, has definitively demonstrated that neurosis is the deliberate forgetting (but deliberate by whom?) of painful contradictions. “But I loved my father! How can you say those horrible things!” The obvious needs explanation because the obvious, like context, is not at all obvious. The “obvious” says one forgets things because A) they are trivial; B) they were once important but now they are not (they have lost their relevance, relational ties); C)  those memories are not put in use enough to retain easy availability without refreshing; D) distance in time dulls or wears out memory; E) memory cells are worn out or destroyed or written over (palimpsest); F) one learns new values that counter old values. Any physiological basis claimed for any of these is questionable at best and at worst completely false. It is a neurophysiological fact that not the slightest detail of any memory is ever erased from the brain. If the rights cells are stimulated absolutely complete segments of long past days can be relived down to the temperature of the air, the force of the wind, the brightness of the light, the smells in the air ad inifinitum.

Once again the realistic factual process of science as Hume thought it out has become a victim of the arrogance of the personalities of scientists. Just as we know 99.9% absolutely nothing about the gene and about the same for any other organ of the body, so also far, far too much is assumed about our knowledge of the brain overall, as context! We know this fact, and that fact, and this other fact, etc. We only speculate on their interconnections, their actual relations. We only speculate that there are factual relations! It is one thing to see the stomach functioning in the body and to study the chemical reactions that go on and see things happen when new elements are introduced, but it is another thing to suppose relation which is simply an abstraction. When h. pylori is introduced to the stomach gastritis may happen. There are chemical and biological reasons for this. But the h. pylori just happens. The gastritis just happens. The chemical and biological effects, though, are the products of a living process. Actually, of several living processes. It seems obvious the h. pylori has found a good place to live. But that is only in that individual stomach. It does not survive well in every stomach automatically when it is introduced. The ‘relation’ is NOT mechanical. There are far too many mechanical models for biological processes. They do not work. They do not fit. The machine does not exist as an entity that has any claim to having any sort of unity of identity, no unity of purpose all of its own. A stomach does. An h. pylori does. That an organ or a germ cannot function outside of their proper context is no argument whatsoever against their individual identity or demonstrable purpose and action. They will persist in their function when taken out of there context until they die. A human being derived of air will persist in its function until it dies. A gene taken away from its cell will persist in its function until it dies – or it becomes a virus and can live independently. They have purpose. They have scientifically demonstrable intent. But these are NOT statements of total comprehension! They are purely superficial! Organs do things for an end and have reactions. What this ‘means’ is out of our reach because we are “always already” absolutely encased in meanings, the vast majority of which we do not understand nor are even conscious off. We can see what is, and we can see what happens when this is done to that, but neither of these ‘insights’ can ever be total, can ever take into accounts all the effects of a cause or even all the causes of an effect. David Hume had a very solid reason for saying what he did. There is absolutely no certainty in the relation of cause and effect although we very well know there is something real to the idea but its whole context is always beyond our grasp! And if its whole context is beyond our grasp then there can be no certainty to it.

Then to speak with any certainty about what the brain is, how it functions, and what actually happens when certain effects are applied as if you are making real statements about its essence are nonsense. It is reasonable, but still a mere assumption, to say it is the most complex organ in the body. It is reasonable to say there are real relations between all the different brains – and they are all separate brains, each with their own purpose, and yet reflecting a similarity in their individual total structure to the other brains – but it is only reasonable to say about those relations that at a specific observation such and such happened or that most but not all of the time if a specific cause is inserted into the situation, for instance surgery, an effect of sorts is achieved that may or may not accomplish certain ends but also effect numerous other chains of effects that may come to the surface immediately or never ever be known – at least to the surgeon.

Freud has proven we can deliberately forget. Sartre has demonstrated a rational mechanism whereby this negating intent can be maintained intentionally while being deliberately ‘mislabeled’ so that the verbal intent never seems to actually be what it really is. The memory is there. You ‘know’ it is there. But instead of calling it “incest,” it is named as something seemingly completely and deliberately disconnected and neutral! Neurophysiology has proven we never forget anything whatsoever. Even when portions of the brain are destroyed, not only functions but memories of sorts can seep over to some undamaged portion and re-emerge. That this is an extremely difficult, awkward, and painful process again demonstrates the brain is in no way whatsoever a machine of any sort. This is a personal event! And is it complete ‘recovery’? How the hell would you ever really know – even if you were the person effected?

And what complicates things beyond any measure whatsoever is that each brain has its own personality. So that physiology is piled on top of the factual existence of the personalities of ‘Others’ maintained in the traditional expressions of language (which includes values, intents, emotions, base ‘animal’ lusts [a fiction of language]). And also it must be remembered that Aristotle demonstrated in his confusing and equivocal way that, when what he actually said has been sifted down to logical fact, animals must have language of some sort, in the most profound sense of talking to oneself, because animals possess logical judgment, not to speak of the ability to communicate to other animals (Heidegger has analyzed this down to bedrock in ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS THETA 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, trans. Brogan & Warnek, Indiana University Press, 1995. I have written about this extensively else where, and Richard Sorabji has clearly delineated not only the many equivocations of Aristotle about animals but also the same in many other Greek philosophers, many of them Neo-Platonic.). Memory is the essential component of language as human beings use it. The conception of “vocal chords” actually puts the cart before the horse because most animals have a great variety of sounds they can make, so “vocal chords” as exclusively homo sapient and exclusively bestowing language thereby is logical nonsense.

Why, then, are animals reluctant to remember as we do? Is part of the answer that, as Freud has shown, we have so many memories we want to forget?   First, one must realize what we are actually talking about. That is “intelligence.” We are morally suppose to be more intelligent than animals. “Intelligence” is how we use language. But “intelligence” can also be how we do not use language. Every person knows it is common sense that one should not say everything related to an issue, mainly because one may say things one does not even consciously realize and that could be highly compromising. This is a fundamental motive and formational power, limitation of the field of expression, in conversation. You only say what needs to be said. Anything else “slips out.” There is a good example of traditional inheritance. What “slips out”? How does it “slip out”? Who lets it “slip out”? It is obviously something that escapes and has the intent of escaping. Another identity is involved here. That the unconscious is a mind of its own, as Freud said, is physiologically demonstrable when, in severe epileptics when death will result in the next attack, the corpus callosum that connects the right and left lobes of the brain is sundered. Many times two personalities become evident. Is that merely a result of the lobes being separated, an aftereffect? Not at all necessarily. The two personalities can hate each other to the point the one tries to kill the other. This is fact. My mere supposition is it would seem that, for such a drastic conflict to occur, there must already been at hand within the ‘unified’ person an inexplicit conflict. It is a common supposition that everyone has conflicts generally of that sort as in the expression “their better halves.” But how could one ever of dreamed that the conflict was physiologically based? But, again, that is just a fact we know. What it ‘means’ is certainly beyond me. Except it definitely tells me we really do not understand a damn thing about the brain or how memory really functions since the very need for mnemotechiques demonstrates precisely this drastic conflict of intent within the personal mind.

It also demonstrates that any mnemotechnique is motivated by a powerful passion that must over-ride forgetfulness. This may simply be the re-affirmation of popular tradition as with an ancient rhetorician using the symbols of his inherited religion (which he may even publicly belittle as superstitious) to fix in a systematic order in his mind the parts of his speech he is to deliver in court. After all, the jury and/or the judge is probably going to be emotionally swayed by the emotional context of the speech even if the traditional beliefs are only undertones. In other words, it is going to be the lares and penates, his family gods, that are underpinning his speech and therefore the memories of his whole family. Of course it will carry conviction, the conviction of a child’s memory used for ulterior purposes in the present. And of course the rhetorician does not explicitly realize this. But none the less it is unavoidably true. These things are not cut out of his brain, and if he is using anything related to them, all the ghosts rise up even if unseen. And with someone like Pico della Mirandola, it is the very explicit and implicit rebellion against precisely those same values that causes him to pin his mnemotechniques precisely on those things the traditional family and the Pope abhor, not only the pagan gods but the Jewish God of Kaballah magic.