The American philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser (1921-2004) was an odd case. For decades he held the prestigious John Dewey chair in philosophy at Columbia University. Before that, he was mentor to Hilary Putnam. Yet he rarely wrote anything. Instead, like Socrates, he was known for his viva voce philosophising. He was also known for his 'zingers', the most famous of which was allegedly uttered during an address on the philosophy of language being given by J.L. Austin. "In some languages", Austin observed, "a double negative yields an affirmative. In others, a double negative yields a more emphatic negative. It is curious, though, that in no language known to me, whether natural or artificial, does a double affirmative yield a negative". At which point Morgenbesser piped up from the back of the audience: "Yeah, yeah."What would Morgenbesser make of Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (Penguin, 2009) by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell? The book - companion site here - appears to be one of those Kurzweil-style tracts that envisage people will shortly 'upload' their 'consciousness' to machines and live happily, albeit disembodiedly, ever after.
What if you could remember everything? Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell draw on their experience from the MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research to explain the benefits to come from an earth-shaking and inevitable increase in electronic memories. In 1998 they began using Bell, a luminary in the computer world, as a test case, attempting to digitally record as much of his life as possible. Photos, letters, and memorabilia were scanned. Everything he did on his computer was captured. He wore an automatic camera, an arm-strap that logged his bio-metrics, and began recording telephone calls. This experiment, and the system they created to support it, put them at the center of a movement studying the creation and enjoyment of e-memories. ...
Total Recall provides a glimpse of the near future. Imagine heart monitors woven into your clothes and tiny wearable audio and visual recorders automatically capturing what you see and hear. Imagine being able to summon up the e-memories of your great grandfather and his avatar giving you advice about whether or not to go to college, accept that job offer, or get married. The range of potential insights is truly awesome. But Bell and Gemmell also show how you can begin to take better advantage of this new technology right now. From how to navigate the serious question of privacy and serious problem of application compatibility to what kind of startups Bell is willing to invest in and which scanner he prefers, this is a book about a turning point in human knowledge as well as an immediate practical guide.Total Recall is modestly promoted as "a technological revolution that will accomplish nothing less than a transformation in the way humans think about the meaning of their lives". Ah well, wouldn't be much of a revolution if it didn't imply some sort of claim to higher consciousness. And of course -
The Total Recall Revolution is Inevitable. It will change what it means to be human. It has already begun.Inevitable just like Communism? "Digital Immortality" [PDF]. For a sceptic such as myself the Humanity 2.0 proclamation has echoes of product recall ... the revolution doesn't quite work as promoted, even putting aside the puffery, and arguably isn't needed. Josie Appleton deftly commented in 2004 that
inflated expectations are being invested in these technologies. There is an idea that they can provide people with a firmer sense of identity, at a time when people often find it difficult to see a coherent narrative to their lives, and experiences often seem insubstantial - not quite 'real'. According to Lindholm, this could be one of the attractions of the Lifeblog: 'You can see very clearly a narrative of your life; some sort of chronological sequence gives meaning to people. It really allows the user to go back and reflect on what a person's life looks like.' The idea is that this birthday or that holiday is photographed and ordered, month by month, and you can see it all before you. But this is a flimsy form of personal narrative. A Lifelog can't give you a life - it's just a way of storing data from your mobile phone. A photograph of every memorable event of your existence wouldn't give you a 'narrative' if you didn't have one already.A crueller writer dismissed the extropian nonsense as
a lot of young, pasty, lanky, awkward ... white males talking futuristic bullshit, terribly worried that we will take their toys awayI'm unpersuaded that we need or even want to be able to recall everything. As Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger argues in Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting In the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009) there is much to be said for elision and loss, irrespective of whether we want a camera in every buttonhole, brassiere, coffeepot or potplant. Some sorrows should be buried; some shopping lists consigned to the wastepaper bin. We might aspire to record everything; we would be better occupied making sense of what we have got.
Bell's notion of total recall (bigger and broader is better) collides with Strachey's notion of discernment -
row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.
