Memory overwhelmed? Stoic philosophy of mind on how we perceive, remember, and assent
It's hard to have perfect recall in this era of overload. As we take in the world around us, we can consider what deserves our assent and space in our memory... and be philosophical about it
I’ve been contemplating memory lately. My memories come to the surface in moments and flashes. To be honest, I’ve never had the world’s most complete recall for life’s passing moments. Even as a teen, I took a ton of photos to help me remember and re-live the things that I thought seemed memorable, and I loved documenting my life that way.
(A brief digression here: do you remember those ancient cameras with a circular disc of negatives? I had one, and the photos were awful, but I still loved it. Later on I got a much less clunky film camera, and then, digital cameras, and now, a smart phone camera. If you have teens, you may have noticed that the trend is retrograde: First they brought back instant/Polaroid cameras… And recently, my older daughter came home with a simple analog film camera and asked how to load the film!)
It’s not really a mystery what’s going on with my memory—these days, it’s overwhelmed! My effort to document everything via photos, iPhone notes, calendars, to-do lists, apps, etc., helps me stay afloat. But I’m sure other parents and care-givers can agree that there’s always so much to keep in mind, and the mental load is heavy. The disk drive of my brain is overflowing with things about my kids, family, friends, finances, taxes, household tasks, travel, and of course, work, my job, projects, colleagues, as well as personal projects, volunteering, and even beyond that, the news, politics, social media, books, films, series, podcasts, and cultural phenomena (I like to keep up with Gen Z, so my daughters won’t think I’m a fossil!)…
So is it any wonder it’s tough? It’s like that Super Bowl ad featuring Jennifer Aniston earlier this month. In the logic of the ad, to remember something new, she had to forget something old. So she deleted her Friends co-star David Schwimmer from her memory in order to remember the latest delivery service. Despite the silly humor of it, it struck a chord for me. (And as someone who once sported a Friends-inspired “Rachel” haircut back in the day, I can say that Jen and I are generational peers in a sense… The follow-up ad features an additional joke about it!)
My Stoic life philosophy tells me that a perfect memory does not equal a great person. A good character is where it’s at, and the act of consistently making choices based on the Stoic virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance is a far, far better thing that recalling any exact philosophical quote.
To get a sense for the bigger picture on perception, memory, and the philosophy of mind in Stoic thinking, let’s take a slightly deeper dive. For ancient Stoics, we perceive the world through “presentations,” or phantasiai in Greek. According to Scott Rubarth, writing in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the early Stoics thought that presentations were a sort of “imprints.” Stoicism founder Zeno theorized that “the soul is imprinted by the senses much in the same way as a signet ring imprints its shape in soft wax.” Zeno posited that we could take in presentations by experiencing a thing using our senses and by understanding its context.
How do we remember what we experience and understand? We are able to store these presentations in our mind. On top of that, we can also save patterns of presentations, which become conceptions, and we can store real and fictional objects: in other words, we can imagine.
Going further, it’s important to highlight how human minds respond to what we perceive, according to the Stoics. The key idea is assent. For a Stoic, the presentation of a thing invokes a next step: the judgment of whether or not to assent, or agree, to it. We could naturally perceive something or think something, but we do not have to accept that it’s true. Only real sages could accurately understand the difference between something “truly true” or not, in ancient Stoic thinking. That’s OK: for regular folks today, we can use this theory to reject what we can tell is not accurate, or going further, what doesn’t align with the virtues. I like this idea: “Don’t believe everything you think.”
This makes me wonder about trying out a thought experiment on memory. Maybe it’s possible to re-frame the limitations of recall by reminding myself that I have not necessarily given full assent to all of the information coming at me, and that I do not wish to store many of these phantasiai in my brain. In many ways, I am overwhelmed with things I don’t necessarily fully agree to, not just in a moral sense (as the Stoic assent often seems to imply) but in the informational, seal-on-wax imprint sense (Zeno’s analogy). Let’s be clear: I am not a computer; I am not an encyclopedia. I am human, and humans were not meant for complete overload. I do not need to assent to all of these perceptions or thoughts.
Perhaps this approach could be a way to de-clutter the brain and cut through to what matters in developing character and eudaimonia, a life worth living. That’s the real goal, after all. I will use my inner daimon—the internal voice that was common to many Greek philosophers’ concept of our interior lives, that for me, is another way of saying “intuition”—to figure out what in this chaotic world around me deserves asset.
What’s more, we can work on being even more intentional on what our minds are exposed to in the first place. And for me, that means more philosophy and less doomscrolling, for example. Seneca said as much: Philosophical study, he wrote, can broaden our minds and benefit us in ways nothing else can. He made the case that folks who study philosophy “alone really live” because they are able to capture the wisdom and ideas of all the years that have come before them (On the Shortness of Life, XIV). He wrote this around 49 CE. Just consider of how many more years of philosophical thinking we can now explore now in 2024, living our days in contemplation of what’s been written, absorbing it—even if we can’t manage to recall every word of it!
Don't believe everything you think- love this!
Thank you! That concept has helped me get a fresh perspective on some pretty tough cognitive distortions!