I love this quote from the brilliant writer/philosopher Bill McKibben. He says, “Our minds are the largest libraries of books we’ve ever known. It seems absurd, but we’re so good at making up new ideas we don’t even notice how much we already know.
This really is the most important question we have. It’s the question of whether to use the Internet to find out who’s there and what to do. So if you’re going to find or know someone who is going to get you a link to a page, this is the question.
The same is true for books. We can only find out so much about the actual books we are reading. We can only learn so much about what is in them unless we have actual conversations with the author. So we spend a lot of time reading. I have no idea what a book is, but I know that I spend a good amount of time reading. Books are great at expanding our awareness of what we have forgotten.
I have been reading a lot of books in my life. I started out with some romance and mystery books and moved to fantasy and sci-fi when I was in college. I think we are more likely to remember things we have forgotten about these things.
And it’s not just books. We keep forgetting what we don’t like, we don’t like our parents, or whatever. Books are great at taking our memories and turning them into something we can actually remember. The internet is great at that. It’s easier to remember all of these things from an archive than from a book.
So we are more likely to forget about these things we dont like, or have memories of, because its easier to remember what we dont like than what we have.
The problem is with something we dont like, we forget how to act on it. The difference between forgetting and forgetting to act is that we can’t act on it until we’re ready. For example, if we feel like we are about to go up to someone and say what we really think because we have a bad memory of something, than we have to be prepared.
The problem with having bad memories is that these memories are like a muscle memory. It can be very hard for us to exercise meta-cognition (or self-awareness) in these situations because we feel like we have no control over our actions, so we just act out whatever it is we dont want to be doing. This is why people who are “brain dead” often say they do not want to be on a computer.
Now you can argue that this is still kind of an amnesia thing, but I think it’s more like a lack of self-awareness. A person with good self-awareness would know that they are engaging in amnesia, because they would be able to recognize the difference between having a bad memory and being on autopilot.
The whole point of being on autopilot is that you have no control over your actions. At least not in the way you think you have. When you’re on autopilot, you are unaware that you are on autopilot. You are just doing what you think you should be doing without the ability to stop.