The Truth About Us
In the sea of faces, only those that have impacted our lives are those that we remembered.
I came across a chain mail sometime back mentioning that awards and everything else doesn’t matter as much except for the people that truly made a difference in our lives. It went on asking if we can remember the last 10 winners of the Ms. Universe pageant and the Nobel Science awardees. We can barely remember them, if at all, can we? The letter then proceeded to ask if we can name the 10 most influential people about our lives. It’s so much easier, according to the letter.
But in the wider picture of it all, isn’t it that our own memory – this biological repository of abstractions from reality such as events, items, etc. –holds nothing different than your common hard drive? That is, it holds nothing more than information.
I once talked to a philosopher teacher online. Prior to meeting her again, we have had some interesting exchange of ideas. Upon bumping into her online again, she could barely remember me; although I can remember her fully. I questioned, curiously, as to how that can be; only to be replied coldly that “People online come and go after they talk to me.”
That was quite striking. My identity has been one of the faceless ones in the sea; information so useless I wasn’t even stored.
