Memories and truth
Published 2025-12-24
tag(s): #link-post #random-thoughts #failures
This is another case of "a second thing I read pushes me to write what I thought I wouldn’t". Just like it happened yesterday. Sometimes I think of writing a "reply post", but then a couple days go by and I lose the impetus. That happened with the first of these.
Did it really happen?
In a post from a couple weeks ago, Tadaima wonders, If no one remembers, then did it really happen? and shares a good story about how she remembers her grandma’s dogs, but no one else in the family does. And none of the other people who might have shared these memories are around.
I sat at the table feeling like I w…
Memories and truth
Published 2025-12-24
tag(s): #link-post #random-thoughts #failures
This is another case of "a second thing I read pushes me to write what I thought I wouldn’t". Just like it happened yesterday. Sometimes I think of writing a "reply post", but then a couple days go by and I lose the impetus. That happened with the first of these.
Did it really happen?
In a post from a couple weeks ago, Tadaima wonders, If no one remembers, then did it really happen? and shares a good story about how she remembers her grandma’s dogs, but no one else in the family does. And none of the other people who might have shared these memories are around.
I sat at the table feeling like I was going crazy. I remembered the dogs. I remembered how they used to yip and bite at my ankles and how one was nicer than the other. [...] [...] If I’m the only person alive who remembers a memory, then did it really happen? [...] Because, if no one can corroborate a memory, then there really is no difference between a memory and a dream, which is a weird thought. Spiritually, it puts a lot of power in your hand because you can rewrite the past if you want to. You can tell yourself new narratives and shape your future the way you want.
As far as I know, there’s no way to contact her, but if I could, I would tell her that indeed memories are extremely unreliable.
As a preteen/teen I was really into Carl Sagan books, and one of them[1] was the first time (but no the last) I read about an experiment that goes more or less like this: You show a bunch of people some footage of cars going down a street. Then ask them if they noticed the red car. Most of them will say no, because there was no red car in the footage.
Then talk to the same group a few days later. More people will say they remember the red car. And many of them, if slightly pressed, will provide details about this red car they say them remember, but never existed: it is a memory created by the very question about it.
This experiment and its consequences really stuck with me. As Tadaima says, you can create your own narratives about what happened. And the scary thing is, you might not even be consciously lying to yourself! This is you honestly feeling/believing what your mind made up. Going back to Sagan, he wrote a lot about human fallibility, staying humble and open to the possibility that you are wrong or there are things that you don’t know. Putting that together with the knowledge that our memories are imperfect[2], means that we need to treat anything we remember with some degree of mistrust.
But you can’t go through life wondering if you really had coffee this morning. It would be unsustainable. So, we mostly accept our memories as an undeniable truth...but we really shouldn’t.
A false history
I read this post by Jack Baty last night: A false history.
My daughter has been sending me adorable AI-generated images of her and my grandson[...] It makes me wonder, though, what happens 20 years from now when she’s scrolling back through her photos and sees these. Will she remember that they’re faked? How will she know what’s real and what’s not? How will my grandson?
That’s a great question. Based on the previous section, I would say there’s a big chance that they will have a hard time separating the generated memories from the real ones. I am not saying they will believe all of them are real. But I am saying that it will be harder than we would like to think it is.
And because I am really fun at parties, ever since the AI-generated images and videos started popping up I’ve been wondering what will happen to our collective perception of what’s true, and of past events.
For most of the 20th century, having a photo of something meant having proof. As time went by, this proof had more and more caveats. But at least a video was still definitive proof, right? If anything because even if CGI can make anything look real, it took tremendous amounts of effort and money.
But nowadays anyone can create a photo or video by asking for what they want to see, and the output of these tools ranges from "pretty convincing" to "I couldn’t tell it was fake until I noticed this small detail".
Brace yourselves for the next few election cycles, when a lot of people who still believe anything in print is "the truth" will get inundated by generated videos and photos of random crap...except that, this isn’t the right approach. Human fallibility, remember? That means you, dear reader, and me, and everyone else...even if we are tech savvy, even if we think we can quickly differentiate a generated image from a real one, we are as vulnerable as everyone else is to being influenced by fake imagery, generated videos, and who knows what else is coming our way.
Think of this: a US president resigned because of audio tapes. Nowadays we would need a lot more evidence than audio, or photos, or videos. But how much more evidence? What can’t really be falsified or doctored?
The future
We are now in a world were everyone accepts what they see as real, and looks the other side when they see something they don’t like. How is that going to affect future history books? All history books show things through the author’s lens. Are the lens of future history books going to be horrible deformed?
But even deeper, there are big events that a society collectively remembers a certain way, like for example the 2001 Cacerolazo in Argentina. What will happen when future "group events" like these are immediately revisited via fake content that changes the culprits or outcomes of them?
All of these things happen today to a degree. But with images, videos, and audio, our minds are even more vulnerable to influence than with writing or a talking head on TV. Sometimes I think our only hope is that future generations don’t believe anything, but that is the equivalent of doubting your own memories all the time.
Like I said, I am really fun at parties.
Footnotes
- I suspect "The demon-haunted world".
- Easily influenced, and heavily impacted by our emotions, too.