Identity. The word strikes fear into the heart of anyone going through a crisis of identity. Most people have experienced identity confusion at some point, because different stages of life give rise to a need to redefine one's personhood. Personally, identity is a consuming passion. One can not seem to keep on living a life without knowing who is living that life.
In the movie Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan, and starring Guy Pearce as a sufferer of anterograde amnesia, the protagonist, or antagonist, depending on one's views, is flummoxed by his very existence. He is unsure if any of his knowledge correlates with reality, because his memory is limited; he has difficulty with moral responsibility because he doesn't understand who he is at his core; and his culpability for his actions is debatable because his morals and memory don't align, giving him a smaller foundation of life experience for ethical considerations.
Lenoard is puzzled by his lack of connection to reality. He is living in the same world that everyone else is living in and yet he does not have a continuous stream-of-consciousness to keep track of all that is happening around him. His external and internal worlds collide because every fifteen minutes, if he loses focus, he forgets everything that happened in the previous precious moments. People are able to lie, steal, cheat and destroy his life because he is not able to keep track of reality in a coherent fashion.
Limited memory is a problem not only for humans, but for computers also, shedding light on the struggles that Leonard undergoes. A computer has to have a certain amount of RAM (Random Access Memory) in order to execute programs. The computer stores the needed information in RAM to allow the program to function. If data is not available to the system from this location, the application freezes or does not open. In the same way, Leonard's life is constantly reset, frozen, bogged down, or rebooted. The application of reality in Leonard’s life never fully boots up.
René Descartes also suffered from a vastly different, but similar problem. He searched for any knowledge that he could know for certain; that knowledge had to be clear and distinct, and beyond doubt. The only certain truth that he could grab hold of was that he existed. In a comparable manner, Leonard knows that he exists, but struggles as to why he exists and what to do with his existence. Not having a complete memory of his past life, namely all events that happened since the incident, he is unable to clearly move forward in his reality.
His reality is limited to cycles of fifteen minutes and this produces major problems involving knowledge. Leonard moves physically forward in time, doing actions for good or ill, but not remembering what he has done other than by the markings he has tattooed to his body.
The fullest extent of his epistemological problem is seen in the absolute trust that he has to put in his writings. He learns by habit to trust his own handwriting, even though a part of Leonard tells him that these notes could be planted by an evil genius.
Leonard is faced squarely with the question of how do we know what we know. Do we know anything? Can we know anything? How do we know anything? These unique questions are forced to be left unanswered because Leonard can't even remember questions long enough to figure out any answers. Furthermore, even if he does find suitable responses, the knowledge will vanish away into neural dust.
Any healthy, mature adult has more moral culpability than a toddler. No arguments there. One problem arises when an otherwise fully-functional, cognitive being looses all touch with who she really is in life. Leonard knows there is some driving reason he lives his life, but has to remind himself of this every time he \"wakes up.\" At any time, Leonard could choose to abandon his path of ill-fated revenge, but instead chooses anew each time to follow in the footsteps of an arm for an arm and a life for a life. This would seem to make him completely responsible for his actions. He freely chooses his actions.
Or does he? One could argue that an incomplete being is not fully responsible for his choices. Plenty of cases of ‘innocence by insanity’ have been passed through the court systems of America. Few people argue that if a mentally handicapped person handles a gun and shoots someone not knowing what they are doing, that they are fully responsible. If a schizophrenic pushes someone off of a bridge because they have a delusion that that person is trying to kill them, they should probably be escorted to a hospital, and not forced into prison.
Some psychologists argue that sexually abused children who go on to commit the same crimes, are not as fully responsible as someone who molests, but was never molested. The very connections of the brain are hard-wired by events that happened in childhood over which the current perpetrator has no control. This person is in some way acting out something they feel incapable of not acting out. They are still responsible, but an equal punishment as someone without a history of abuse seems unfair.
In some interpretations of ‘Momento’, Leonard is the Sammy Jankis who murdered his wife. His quest to kill the killer is doomed, because he, himself, could be the killer. The only solution to his overriding drive is suicide. This option seems unrealistic, because suicide is mostly looked at as an unethical practice. Some argue that everyone has the right to take their own life, but others contend that because a person is responsible to other people who have invested in their life, that person should not be able to take that presence away from them. A parent's right to keep their child alive is higher than the child's right to eliminate himself from existence.
In the same way that a librarian who forgets that they are a librarian might allow a book burning, so does otherwise benevolent Leonard go on a quest of murder. If only Leonard was able to recall his positive past, he would leave his journey of destruction. If the book reader read a book from childhood, and awakened the memory of their love of books, that person would haul out the fire hose and quench the fire of ignorance. Leonard needs to find a way to look deep into his soul, past his problems of knowledge, and find a part of himself that can forgive and completely forget. His very curse of forgetting prevents him from forgetting what is most important: his wife would want him to be happy, and not filled with rage.
Even though Leonard can remember the moral training of his youth, he is unable to recall his morals surrounding the incident. At the time of the catastrophe, his ethical system came tumbling to pieces, leaving him groping at low-level actions to feed his feelings. His need for solving a problem by violence is seen by high society as uncivilized. Leonard has regressed back to being like an animal that hunts a creature who bothered the animal's young. The very order of behavior is convoluted. If only Leonard stopped himself from reliving the same memory over and over again, he could be happy and free from pain, guilt and fear.
Memory is so fundamental to identity and ethics that the absence of a healthy memory leads to a fragmentation of morals and self-understanding at the same time. Experiments on the complete removal of memory should be completed to fully elaborate on this situation. If no recollection exists, does a benevolent, complete person ever remain?
In the movie Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan, and starring Guy Pearce as a sufferer of anterograde amnesia, the protagonist, or antagonist, depending on one's views, is flummoxed by his very existence. He is unsure if any of his knowledge correlates with reality, because his memory is limited; he has difficulty with moral responsibility because he doesn't understand who he is at his core; and his culpability for his actions is debatable because his morals and memory don't align, giving him a smaller foundation of life experience for ethical considerations.
Lenoard is puzzled by his lack of connection to reality. He is living in the same world that everyone else is living in and yet he does not have a continuous stream-of-consciousness to keep track of all that is happening around him. His external and internal worlds collide because every fifteen minutes, if he loses focus, he forgets everything that happened in the previous precious moments. People are able to lie, steal, cheat and destroy his life because he is not able to keep track of reality in a coherent fashion.
Limited memory is a problem not only for humans, but for computers also, shedding light on the struggles that Leonard undergoes. A computer has to have a certain amount of RAM (Random Access Memory) in order to execute programs. The computer stores the needed information in RAM to allow the program to function. If data is not available to the system from this location, the application freezes or does not open. In the same way, Leonard's life is constantly reset, frozen, bogged down, or rebooted. The application of reality in Leonard’s life never fully boots up.
René Descartes also suffered from a vastly different, but similar problem. He searched for any knowledge that he could know for certain; that knowledge had to be clear and distinct, and beyond doubt. The only certain truth that he could grab hold of was that he existed. In a comparable manner, Leonard knows that he exists, but struggles as to why he exists and what to do with his existence. Not having a complete memory of his past life, namely all events that happened since the incident, he is unable to clearly move forward in his reality.
His reality is limited to cycles of fifteen minutes and this produces major problems involving knowledge. Leonard moves physically forward in time, doing actions for good or ill, but not remembering what he has done other than by the markings he has tattooed to his body.
The fullest extent of his epistemological problem is seen in the absolute trust that he has to put in his writings. He learns by habit to trust his own handwriting, even though a part of Leonard tells him that these notes could be planted by an evil genius.
Leonard is faced squarely with the question of how do we know what we know. Do we know anything? Can we know anything? How do we know anything? These unique questions are forced to be left unanswered because Leonard can't even remember questions long enough to figure out any answers. Furthermore, even if he does find suitable responses, the knowledge will vanish away into neural dust.
Any healthy, mature adult has more moral culpability than a toddler. No arguments there. One problem arises when an otherwise fully-functional, cognitive being looses all touch with who she really is in life. Leonard knows there is some driving reason he lives his life, but has to remind himself of this every time he \"wakes up.\" At any time, Leonard could choose to abandon his path of ill-fated revenge, but instead chooses anew each time to follow in the footsteps of an arm for an arm and a life for a life. This would seem to make him completely responsible for his actions. He freely chooses his actions.
Or does he? One could argue that an incomplete being is not fully responsible for his choices. Plenty of cases of ‘innocence by insanity’ have been passed through the court systems of America. Few people argue that if a mentally handicapped person handles a gun and shoots someone not knowing what they are doing, that they are fully responsible. If a schizophrenic pushes someone off of a bridge because they have a delusion that that person is trying to kill them, they should probably be escorted to a hospital, and not forced into prison.
Some psychologists argue that sexually abused children who go on to commit the same crimes, are not as fully responsible as someone who molests, but was never molested. The very connections of the brain are hard-wired by events that happened in childhood over which the current perpetrator has no control. This person is in some way acting out something they feel incapable of not acting out. They are still responsible, but an equal punishment as someone without a history of abuse seems unfair.
In some interpretations of ‘Momento’, Leonard is the Sammy Jankis who murdered his wife. His quest to kill the killer is doomed, because he, himself, could be the killer. The only solution to his overriding drive is suicide. This option seems unrealistic, because suicide is mostly looked at as an unethical practice. Some argue that everyone has the right to take their own life, but others contend that because a person is responsible to other people who have invested in their life, that person should not be able to take that presence away from them. A parent's right to keep their child alive is higher than the child's right to eliminate himself from existence.
In the same way that a librarian who forgets that they are a librarian might allow a book burning, so does otherwise benevolent Leonard go on a quest of murder. If only Leonard was able to recall his positive past, he would leave his journey of destruction. If the book reader read a book from childhood, and awakened the memory of their love of books, that person would haul out the fire hose and quench the fire of ignorance. Leonard needs to find a way to look deep into his soul, past his problems of knowledge, and find a part of himself that can forgive and completely forget. His very curse of forgetting prevents him from forgetting what is most important: his wife would want him to be happy, and not filled with rage.
Even though Leonard can remember the moral training of his youth, he is unable to recall his morals surrounding the incident. At the time of the catastrophe, his ethical system came tumbling to pieces, leaving him groping at low-level actions to feed his feelings. His need for solving a problem by violence is seen by high society as uncivilized. Leonard has regressed back to being like an animal that hunts a creature who bothered the animal's young. The very order of behavior is convoluted. If only Leonard stopped himself from reliving the same memory over and over again, he could be happy and free from pain, guilt and fear.
Memory is so fundamental to identity and ethics that the absence of a healthy memory leads to a fragmentation of morals and self-understanding at the same time. Experiments on the complete removal of memory should be completed to fully elaborate on this situation. If no recollection exists, does a benevolent, complete person ever remain?
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