Memory is our sense of where we belong, and how we relate and connect to others. We worry that ageing makes us forgetful, because at its worst, forgetting collapses the entire basis of personal and social life. But as technology for computer data storage improves, it seems that whatever anxieties we might have about forgetting particular information, the latest technological fix will allow us to leap into a new future where human limits on remembering become increasingly irrelevant. Why worry about memory, if all that remains is to find robust means of retrieving and reading its data?
This book explores how we have come to live with and within memory. It shows how for some philosophers the identity of the self resides in a set of overlapping memories and one might argue that to be human is to remember to see oneself as a being in time, with a past and a future.
