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The mere possibility of tampering with memory is indeed the most dangerous thing that could happen to humanity. Imagine not being able to believe your own memor

• aloknnikhil 7y ago
  It also complicates the legal system as it exists today. The fact that artificial memory can be induced in someone's brain makes believing a witness a lot harder. So in addition to social and ethical concerns, it also upends the legal system.
  • dclowd9901 7y ago
    To be honest, witness testimony should never be or have been the sole basis for convictions. Peoples’ memory is so fraught with error that it’s basically useless on its own merits.
    • raxxorrax 7y ago
      I think this is an exaggeration. Witnesses often try to be as helpful as possible and in doing so may supply too much information they themselves aren't able to verify. Of course that can prove to undermine their statements in the first place, but I don't believe attesting memory failures addresses the core of the problem with witness reports.
      • beobab 7y ago
        And yet, direct witness statements from two helpful people standing next to each other, made immediately after the event can vary so wildly that you would wonder if they are describing the same event. paraphrased from "The Invisible Gorilla: and other ways our intuition deceives us" (Chabris and Simons) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003P9XE56/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003P9XE56/
  • Kaiyou 7y ago
    No, witnesses should never be believed. Especially not if you have a bunch of witnesses that tell you the same story. Sounds unintuitive, but it's true. And we know this for at least a hundred years, already. If anyone is interested in further reading on this, I recommend "Mass Psychology" by Gustave Le Bon.
• bsder 7y ago
  I could swear this happened with the errant USB-C configuration that the latest Raspberry Pi 4 screwed up. At least 4 other projects I know of configured their USB-C the same exact incorrect way. Three of them absolutely swear that a Google search gave an online application note that told them to do this, but they can't find it anymore--it presumably got yanked as soon as the RPi error came to light and then dropped off the Google rankings. POOF Gone.
  • phs318u 7y ago
    I'm guessing from your post that it was gone before archive.org could crawl it? You can force archive.org to save specific sites immediately so that you can use their (permanent) link as a future-proof citation [0]. Alternatively, something like WebSatchel [1]. I have no experience with it, so can't tell you if it's any good, or whether there's other software that does a similar thing. [0] https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360001513491-Save-Pages-in-the-Wayback-Machine https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360001513491-Save... [1] https://websatchel.com/a1/#/ https://websatchel.com/a1/#/
• joe_the_user 7y ago
  Unfortunately, I've got news for you, fallible and manipulable memories have been around for a long time. For example, see the research of Elizabeth Loftus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus
  • itronitron 7y ago
    Here is another useful reference >> http://creativethinking.net/how-easily-false-memories-are-created/ http://creativethinking.net/how-easily-false-memories-are-cr... The really interesting part is that you can create a false memory for someone even while telling them that you are doing it.
  • Chathamization 7y ago
    Yeah. The widespread belief that memory is reliable - a false belief that this article propogates - is probably a lot more problematic than any of the research being discussed. It's not uncommon to see people presented with facts suggesting that their memories are false, and respond by dismissing the facts ("That can't be true, I remember it, I was there").
• hos234 7y ago
  Whats preventing the gaslighters from being gaslighted? It's not a bad thing if we can change Putin or the Saudi Head Looneys memory and behavior. These kind of Debates always get won by the Edward Teller's in the room.
  • coldtea 7y ago
    >Whats preventing the gaslighters from being gaslighted? That they have the power... >It's not a bad thing if we can change Putin or the Saudi Head Looneys memory and behavior. LOL, if only the problem with gaslighters was just Putin or the Saudi Head Looneys... How about your own government, mass media, big corporations, and so on?
    • hos234 7y ago
      Ofcourse them too. They are more of less programmed as it is to chase likes/clicks/views of their respective fan clubs. Tweaking the counts of what their fan club likes automatically changes their behavior. They just don't know they are all deeply trapped.
      • coldtea 7y ago
        Well, how are we gonna gaslight them? Especially since they have all the power, and regularly gaslight us!
        • hos234 7y ago
          It's easy if they are on social media everyday. You just have to encourage them to believe whatever bullshit they already do. Compliment them. Encourage their fan clubs. Give them stories about how their opponents are lying/cheating/dening their brilliance etc etc. The more it happens, the higher their social media counts climb, the further and faster they get disconnected from reality. It's what happened to Obama. Which is why he is in hiding unable to influence shit.
          • 7y ago
• taneq 7y ago
  Is it possible that you're experiencing the Mandela Effect? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect)
• wruza 7y ago
  But imagine having much better memories than you have now. It is much better to wake up and go to work knowing that you spent a good vacation last three month, than having boring eternal life of a regular worker with low wage. Forget that your SO cheated on you. Believe that all people are good. If you’d sell memory tampering devices, are you sure that most of them would be used against someone other instead of on buyers themselves? What if we had special devices that could sneakily push preferences or suggestions to unaware person? It would be a very dangerous tech! (Oh, nevermind, I use one of them to write this comment)
  • bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    imagine starting every day of your working life thinking you just got done with a wonderful two weeks vacation, energized and ready to continue on with your employment tasks! in fact with our new happy memory management service your employees will never need to take a vacation, weekend, or fake sick day again - because they will think they just did!
    • phs318u 7y ago
      "For the memory of a lifetime, Recall, Recall, Recall" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYRVMeAwVKk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYRVMeAwVKk "Don't fuck with your brain pal!"
    • antisemiotic 7y ago
      Plot twist: you're actually a moderator for Facebook looking at child porn and beheadings all day. Further plot twist: that FB gig was another fake memory to cover up your involvement in a secret government project involving lots of enhanced interrogation, to provide plausible cause for the psychological damage that wasn't entirely fixed by memory replacement.
    • jlawson 7y ago
      Remind me of Robin Hanson's Age of Em. Ems are human minds copied into computers and executable there. Being easy to copy, you can spin up as many Elon Musks as you need. And if you have the brain state stored, every day you can have those Elons on the best, most work ready, focused day of their lives. All digitally, of course.
• weinzierl 7y ago
  In "Ghost in the Shell" there is a sub plot with a man who talks all day about his family until it is revealed to him that it is all false memories. I always found this one of the most horrifying scenes in the movie.
  • justinjlynn 7y ago
    Indeed. For me, the worst bit is that they explicitly, for no reason other than to inform us, say they won't be able to repair the damage.
  • tzs 7y ago
    ST:TNG, season 5, episode 25, "The Inner Light" broadly could be described similarly, except whether it is horrifying or wonderful is hard to decide. One of the best TNG episodes.
  • pmoriarty 7y ago
    This was already in Blade Runner (which Ghost in the Shell was doubtlessly influenced by), where the replicants have photographs of their families, who never existed, as they were implanted memories. Ironically, I don't remember if this was in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which Blade Runner was loosely based on), but even if it's not, it's a very common theme in Philip K Dick's work. A similar thing happens in Total Recall, which was also loosely based on PKD's We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, where memories of the protagonist's family and prevois life have been implanted. In this case, the protagonist does not rely on photographs, as he has a wife in the present, but (spoiler) it turns out she's not really his wife. Oliver Sacks is also worth reading on these themes, as he tells of many real-life cases of people misremembering, misrecognizing, and disbelieving things most everyone else takes for granted, from faces to family to their own body parts to language.
• dilyevsky 7y ago
  > Imagine not being able to believe your own memory. Done. Memories are notoriously unreliable and you shouldn’t treat as ultimate source of truth.
  • slampig 7y ago
    That's true, but not being able to believe no one has tampered with your memories is on another level.
    • okr 7y ago
      Is believing not also memory related? Can you trust your beliefs? And what is memory anyways?
• lostjohnny 7y ago
  > "right to be forgotten" type of policy The right to be forgotten is a right, as the name suggests. It always existed, if I want to be fogotten IRL I can, why shouldn't it be possible online? What's the difference between deleting my social timeline and burning my pictures or my diary? One of my favourite books is "The Late Mattia Pascal" (Il fu Mattia Pascal) from Luigi Pirandello, it was written in 1904 and it's the story of a man who's unhappy and one day discovers that his wife and mother in law found a body and declared it to be his own, so he becomes officialy a dead person. He takes advantage of the fact to escape his true identity and create a new one, settling in Rome, far from were he was born. The story is fascinating and a masterpiece about what's really "identity", how we all wear masks and how we all are different (sometimes very) people depending on who you ask.
  • jpttsn 7y ago
    It’s not possible IRL. If I want my picture gone from the high school yearbook, nobody will help me track down every copy and mask the image. If I want the local grocery cashier not to greet me by name, I can’t make them forget me.
    • lostjohnny 7y ago
      > If I want the local grocery cashier not to greet me by name, I can’t make them forget me. You can go to another grocery store. It's your right. Sometimes solutions are simple. Rest assured that in a few months nobody will remember you at the old store.
    • Kbelicius 7y ago
      > It’s not possible IRL. > If I want my picture gone from the high school yearbook AFAIK right to be forgotten, at least in EU, is the right to request that search engines do not display information about an individual that is factually incorrect, obsolete.... it has nothing to do with deleting actual information.
      • lostjohnny 7y ago
        This! The right to be forgotten (or to oblivion) is just the right to have your private informations deleted and the guarantee that what you delete online is really deleted and nobody can recover it. It's not the right to be removed from other's people memory.
• paganel 7y ago
  > tampering with memory is indeed the most dangerous thing that could happen to humanity. For almost two decades now I believed that "Total Recall" was mostly science fiction, that almost none of it will happen in real life anytime soon. Looks like I was wrong. [1] Philip K. Dick was a genius, with Paul Verhoeven not too far behind. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIzFuycHn_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIzFuycHn_0
  • p410n3 7y ago
    Amazing. Video is blocked. The irony
  • lr4444lr 7y ago
    Upvote for referencing "Total Recall". My favorite line in the film was actually a clever aside, when Quaid is being solicited by one of the mutant clairvoyants with an offer to tell him his future, his sardonic rejoinder is, "how about the past?".
  • sn41 7y ago
    "We can remember it for you wholesale" is the original short story, I think. Philip K. Dick's works taken as a whole, are mind-boggling. At some point, I want to work through Ubik. Stanislaw Lem, the great Polish sci-fi author of works like Solaris, called Western sci-fi "A Hopeless Case with exceptions" - one of the very very few exceptions was Philip K. Dick. There's also a nice essay on Philip K. Dick specifically. [1], [2] [1] https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm [2] http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?253191 http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?253191
    • pmoriarty 7y ago
      "At some point, I want to work through Ubik." I consider Ubik PKD's greatest and most accessible work. It's a really quick, easy read. Do yourself a favor and pick it up now!
      • sn41 7y ago
• short_sells_poo 7y ago
  > The mere possibility of tampering with memory is indeed the most dangerous thing that could happen to humanity. Imagine not being able to believe your own memory. We've been doing it for a while with drugs. Some of them can cause a temporary loss of your short term memory. It's a really bizarre sensation. You suddenly lose the ability to comprehend the chronology of recent events and can make no connection between real events and your own memory. There is no "now", you only have memories, and because you lost the causal link, you can't tell the difference between an authentic memory and your own imagination. I can only imagine how terrifying it would be to live like that constantly.
  • namibj 7y ago
    No need for drugs. You can train to use it against traumatic events, though the side-effects seem to be severe (inability to actually process what happened is only the beginning). You want temporarily accessible episodic memory, just so you can think about recent past.
• roenxi 7y ago
  > Imagine not being able to believe your own memory. I'm not aware of any evidence that we can believe our own memories. Memory is much like eyesight. There is a very complex process going on to give you the illusion of a clear and consistent picture that is at odds with what the messy and biological process we rely on can actually achieve. The basic problem is that people don't by and large scientifically assess their memories for accuracy, so they are reliant on other people alerting them to problems. The feedback process there doesn't encourage correctness, it encourages conformance.
  • altcognito 7y ago
    This is what rationalization looks like. "Oh, well, memories are kinda inaccurate, so, it really doesn't matter if we modify them wholesale." Fairly dangerous rationalization.
    • bilbo0s 7y ago
      Just Devil's Advocate, but I think it's fairly well established that human memories are not "kinda inaccurate", they are woefully inaccurate. Most of the time a human can get some of the big stuff right, but the neuro-psychological underpinnings of "attention" and "memory" pretty much guarantee we will miss a lot of what's going on. (And if we can put the human under enough stress, s/he will not even get the big stuff right.) The fact is, humans rarely even "see" what's actually in front of them, let alone have any "memory" of what was actually in front of them. (For us, reality is not reality, rather our perception is our reality.) Now the memory being inaccurate to start with does not make manipulating that already inaccurate memory "ok". There's no question about that. Though having said that, it's important to note that because memories are so malleable and inaccurate, we've actually been manipulating them for a long time. It's actually a pretty well researched area. I mean, this is not really new.
    • ergothus 7y ago
      I agree that it is bad to embrace/shrug off memory manipulation with the rationalization that memory has always been reliable. [Edit: Unreliable] It is also bad to ignore the evidence that memories are unreliable with or without memory manipulation. We can acknowledge the weakness without using it as justification.
• russdill 7y ago
  Nearly every time you recall an event, you are modifying your memory of the event. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-09-memory-gameeach-recall-event-brain.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-09-memory-gameeach-recal...
• hammock 7y ago
  Well, info on the internet is different than a memory. And perhaps books, speech recording etc are the antidote anyway to tampered memories - making an argument to strengthen First Amendment protections. More powerful than personal memory, though, might be common knowledge. As they said at Epsilon Theory (using Harvey Weinstein as an example), Even if everyone in the world believes a certain piece of private information, no one will alter their behavior. Behavior changes ONLY when we believe that everyone else believes the information.
• WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Memories are already highly infallible, we have numerous examples from eyewitness testimony to Trump's fabrication of Muslims cheering to any time someone else's story became your story because "its a good story". So, I don't think memories being changed is radical, it's par for the course IMO. You think mouse scent memory being tampered with is more dangerous than mass nuclear weaponry or bio-engineered pathogens?
• js2 7y ago
  We’ve got these small pottery bowls I really like. One day, I noticed there only seemed to be two of them. I asked my spouse what happened to the other two. She replied that we only ever owned two. I said, no that can’t be right, I’m certain we had four. She insisted only two. A while later I found a third. I went to her and said, ah ha, see, three bowls! Where did the fourth go? And do you know what she says? “We’ve only ever had three.” It’s been many months now, maybe a year, and there’s still only three, but hand to god, I’m going to find that fourth bowl. I still can’t get a straight answer out of her why she’s so certain there were only ever three when she was just as certain there were only ever two until confronted with the physical reality of three bowls. Now she thinks this is about being right, but I insist it isn’t. It’s the unsettling idea that my memory isn’t correct. I may just have to let this one go... :-)
  • Swizec 7y ago
    3 is an awkward number of bowls so there definitely used to be 4. Dishware usually comes in multiples of 2
    • js2 7y ago
      I’ve argued that point. We think we got them at a pottery tent at the state fair where they may have been in bulk and we just purchased three, but I don’t know why we would have bought an odd number.
      • mortenjorck 7y ago
        I have fun from time to time attempting to reconcile divergent memories, so allow me to hypothesize one possible scenario: There were only three available at the fair. You would normally only buy bowls in a set of four. However, as you mention, you really like this particular style. Perhaps you liked it so much that you made an exception in this case and bought the three because that was the maximum available. But then you lost the third, and so the memories you were triangulating from were "there are two in the cupboard," "that's not the full set," and "four is a full set." Now onto your spouse's memory. They remembered two at first, because they were triangulating between "we normally buy four," "there are fewer than four of these," and "we always buy an even number." Confronted with the existence of a third, the other memory, "there are fewer than four" remains in effect.
• root_axis 7y ago
  How is content disappearing from the internet "gas lighting"? Internet content are not "memories" and if you didn't post the content yourself and didn't even bother to store a local copy of it, why should you be entitled to that information in the future?
• hyperpallium 7y ago
  Seeing a webpage/story/comment be changed used to unsettle me - I couldn't understand what had happened, since books don't change. Especially subtle wording changes. Why did I remember it differently than it was...? But I don't seem to notice it any more. There once was kind of nasty piece on Laurene Jobs, with lots of authentic-seeming detail. It's been completely gone for years now. Maybe this comment too will discover where it went.
• SkyBelow 7y ago
  The honest truth is that you shouldn't. People treat memory like a video recording. It is more like a play that is reenacted every time you remember it, where props are pulled out of storage but sometimes the wrong prop is pulled out and yet nothing feels wrong. For example, maybe you remember the day you lost your keys and found them between the pottery. What exactly did that pottery look like? Pull the pottery prop out of storage, which is based off of the most recent memory of there being only two pots. You now have a memory of finding the keys between your two pots. Happen to find a third pot that went missing and place it back on the stand? Next time you remember the incident with the keys, the pottery prop pulled out is the one involving 3 pots. So you clearly remember finding your keys between three plots. Well what about the old memory? You pull up the memory of a memory, but each memory is generated with props and there is a chance you end up remembering your original memory had 3 pots as well. The more trivial the detail, the more likely you'll only keep around the most recent prop only and thus have a false memory. There is a lot of psychological research into people watching cars driving where the psychologist then falsify memories of the vehicles (something that is never called out as being worth remembering at the start of the experiment). It works decently well in adults. It works horrifyingly well in kids.
  • ssully 7y ago
    In Ted Chiang's latest short story collection "Exhalation" there is a story called "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling"[1] that kind of touches on what you are talking about. In the story, one of the characters is writing up a critique about a new technology that constantly records video from a persons perspective and the video can be recalled at will (like memory). In his critique, he uses a memory (traditional - not using this new technology) he has of a large argument him and his daughter had. This moment/memory was a crucial part in his life and really defined how he viewed himself and his relationship with his daughter. I won't go into it, but the reality of the event and how he remembers it is very similar to your point - specifically, that memory is more like an imperfect play, replay and biased by your recall. I highly recommend the book, but that story in general. As with most of his stories, he takes a premise that seems generic on it's face and twists it in ways that you wouldn't expect. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
• wahern 7y ago
  In the 1980s and 1990s there was a nationwide (and apparently worldwide) hysteria about satanic cults abusing children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse As I child I regularly heard the debates on various talk shows (I watched alot of TV). What was happening was that child psychologists were effectively implanting memories into these children. I found that idea fascinating. At some point I came up with a game that I would play on the bus ride home from school. There was an undeveloped, partially wooded lot that the bus passed by every day. People would leave things there, especially kids. But the important thing is that week-to-week and even day-to-day the lot would change. Kids might build a fort; somebody might leave or take away some trash; the neighbor might cut the grass or clear some dead wood. The game consisted of 1) noticing something that had changed and 2) inventing something that changed. The next day I would try to pick, before passing the lot, which was the real change and which was the one I invented, and then confirm as I passed. I very quickly realized how incredibly easy it was to create false memories. Even though I was the one deliberately picking the false memories, I regularly fooled myself. In fact, I got really good at fooling myself. If you visualize an imagined scene and mentally interact with it--imagine walking through it, imagine fake relationships between elements--then for all intents & purposes your memory of it will be little different than if you had been looking at and interacting with something real. Even more scary, I learned that I could consistently misremember things; that is, for a good fake memory I'd consistently pick it day-after-day, even though each prior day I would have realized it was the fake one. Another thing I learned with my game is that memories are largely about associations, especially plausible associations. We filter particular memories by how well they fit together and how well they comport with the larger narrative. (Which is I think why visualizations are so powerful, as they make it easy to create many elements that fit well together.) If a memory doesn't fit into other memories, like you rationally know you couldn't possibly have been somewhere on some particular day, we tend to discard it. For innocuous memories (e.g. maybe some thought of doing something at the time, but which you didn't actually perform) we filter these out almost imperceptibly. OTOH, sometimes it's difficult to rule out memories, particular innocuous ones, which is why we misremember small stuff so often. One small thing I've avoided ever since then is looking at photographs. I've found that the mere act of looking at a photograph can almost instantly replace your own memory of an event. That doesn't mean my original memory was any more truthful. But the original is often imbued with certain emotional artifacts that, in my experience, can get washed away by the visual fidelity of a photograph.