False Memory Syndrome

This is something of grave concern; this man lost the greater part of his later adult life because of false memories and testimony in court. Now I'm not in any way saying that there isn't any such thing as abuse; but I am only too aware of the reality of human memory in certain circumstances. Now that we know a bit more about the way memory works we can work out why false memory is possible and guidelines are being put into place to safeguard against FMS. We now know that memories are part imaginitive reconstruction on our part -a filling in of more basic remembrances [if I've understood aright] by imagination. It's a kind of organic compression technique, perhaps; a non-digital algorithm.

Certainly I can recall, as a child, manufacturing a false memory so that I could lie about something more convincingly -I went over the 'new' version of events in my head until they felt like I was remembering them and the felt like a memory, and then I simply allowed that new 'memory' to take precedence. The only downside was, of course, that I knew that I had done this. I can easily believe though that if this conscious knowing of the making of a memory can be sidestepped, then it would appear that a memory had been invoked.

There is a religious angle to this too: many popular views of reincarnation rest on 'recovered memories' .... There' s a whole world of exploration in that one. But it seems to me that the weakness of most reincarnation claims is precisely the naive acceptance of 'apparent' memory as memory and as the memory of the person relaying or apparently 'experiencing' the memory. What if something else is going on -FMS or even some kind of 'passing on' of memory from one person to another through media as yet unknown?

As belief in reincarnation is riding high in western culture, we should be aware of this, as Christians. There is also a fairly fundamental philosophical issue here about anthropology and dualism: do we believe that there really is a soul in the kind of way that such an entity could transmigrate to another body? And if so what kind of entity would it be that virtually never affects the 'host' with previous material or even learning? It certainly presents a different view of humanity from one which believes [as I think I do] that soul is an emergent 'quality' of soma [body]. Without body there is no soul unless there is some means of 'recording' it -I think that God's knowing of us is just such and that resurrection would be a kind of re-incarnation but one that is actually designed to allow 'us' to be expressed rather than a passing on of 'karma' [which is what Buddhism actually teaches as opposed to what many westerners would like it to teach]. There is an issue here about whether personality is in some way ultimate. If personality is not passed on [the clear implication of reincarnation] then something else is and personality is ephemeral. The Christian hope is much fuller: personality is valuable because, in some way, it is based in the person-hood of The Ultimate Reality.

And of course this is all of a piece with views of what Ultimate Reality might be: if it's just an impersonal force, then our posturings about personhood etc are a kind of whistling in the dark of an uncaring universe....

These are the kind of thing that interest an ex-NewAger, I guess....