Depression struggled with me for several years, I lost my ability to recall events which happened in my life. I had knowledge of my life’s events, but I wasn’t able to actually recall any of them. My son’s birth, my parents’ faces, etc. I felt dead inside and considered myself already dead, even if my mortal coil still churned on like some kind of pale imitation of life.

Anyway, one day, a traumatic event from my past resurfaced itself, and I was forced to confront it. After that, I slowly began regaining my memories which had been locked away. I made the choice to leave an abusive relationship, I reconnected with my loved ones from my earlier life. I still sometimes hear the whisper in my ear to end it all, but it’s not as persistent, not as loud. I can touch the memory of the trauma without feeling like a pit just opened within me.

I guess what I’m saying is, I was dead when I lost my memories, and when I got them back, I am alive again.

I’m personally of the belief that you are largely the sum of your experiences, so yeah a total loss of memories would mean I am by some definition “dead”. That said, you could easily argue by that same logic that the “me” of a year, month, or even minute ago is also “dead”, since she lacks the experiences that makes me who I am now. I don’t even dispute that that much tbh.

People with amnesia are usually considered still alive, I expect.

Years ago a friend was in a horrible car wreck and came out mostly paralyzed and with no memory of the last few years. She didn’t remember her college friends and clung to her newly found relgious support group. She was never religious before. Her personality was completely different in numerous ways. She was effectively a different person and we no longer had anything in common. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but I mourned the loss of a friend.

The Apple TV show “Severance” is mind fucking presented as entertainment.

It imagines a process whereby you can be made to forget all your personal history. Employers use it so they can have workers who don’t care about anything except the company and their jobs. At the end of the day the ‘original you’ comes back for 16 hours.

I can think of some other science fiction that deals with the same idea.

You are a delusion, a narrative device conjured up by your unconscious mind to try to make sense of your actions.

Everybody loses their memories all the time.

You are not your memories, it’s not your memories which define you.

If you lose your memories, are “you” dead?

No, because other people hold many of those memories for you. And while memories and conditioning play a role in personality they aren’t the end all on who we are. We are still us, even if a bit “different” from before.

If a close relative/friend lose their memories, are they still “your relative/friend”?

Absafuckinglootly, because I carry that friendship and _I _ owe that loyalty. Just because they can’t remember us, I don’t get to abandon them. Loyalty. People need to learn it.

What the hell even is memory? How sentimental are you about memories?

Memory to me is often jarring and annoying. I suffer from unrequested flashbacks frequently.

But, memory is kind of amazing because you can have a shared memory with someone and it be completely different from their experience. Memory is so malleable, and often a coping mechanism, both natural and taught, for dealing with traumas is literally rewriting your memory to something you can live with. Shaving off the pieces you can’t or making them more “dull”.

I had night terrors after a bad accident until my brain literally rewrote the visuals of some of it and while I could verbalize it to you, I couldn’t “relive” that piece anymore which was a huge physical and emotional relief when it finally happened. And I didn’t do it, my brain did it on its own. Memory is weird.

Memory is often deceitful anyway, so relying on it as heavily as we do is actually kind of odd. Our perceived memory is stronger than the real event. We catalog all kinds of other information on top of what is actually the “present”. Think about when you wake up and commit a dream to memory. The retelling of the dream to yourself is actually stronger than the dream itself. Our “story” is the memory not the “present”.

Neat question. I could ramble on this topic for a long time…

It depends on how you define yourself

I am me. Not my memories, not my body, not my knowledge, not even my mind

At the very center of my being, there’s a driving spark. My most fundamental self. It’s the desire for understanding in a very specific flavor, and the form of it is reaching out to touch something with your fingertips. It’s like a fractal that has endless meaning the closer you look at it, it contains many understandings of the truth of the nature of things and how things fit together. And within those truths is everything that I am

That’s me. I am not the animal I inhabit, I act through the animal. I freely share my understandings with the animal, and so the animal can see clearly and know truth to find new understandings in all things.

One day the animal will die, and everything but the understandings will be burnt away, because the animal is afraid of being left behind.

I’ll have understandings of people, but memories are a physical thing. I’ll have understandings of how the world works, but knowledge is in my mind. I’ll have understandings of beauty and emotion and the full spectrum of the human experience, but my nature is not human

So it all depends, who are you? Are you a person who acts a certain way? Are you your relationship with others? Are you your memories, skills, and experiences? Are you your physical body?

Have you awakened your spark? Have you looked deep inside yourself to learn from it and add to it? Is it you, or is it something that whispers to you? Are you the combination of the spark and the animal?

Or do you walk another path? Are you your blood? Your legacy? Will you die when your name is last spoken? Will you live on for the rest of time through the ripples you made on the world?

It’s a question you have to decide for yourself. I think maybe the most important question

But that doesn’t have the truth of understandings, so I guess it’s just my opinion

I’m an amnesiac and one of the first things I learned is that memories don’t really matter. The past is over, what matters is what you choose to do and not what you did. Obviously people do terrible and sometimes unforgivable things. I can sympathize with people who can’t let stuff go, but I personally just can’t be bothered by it anymore though. I have and will offer support to even my abusers.

To me, a person is how they act and what they want in the present. Lived experience affects everything a person does, the parts of a person’s past that are relevant reveal themselves in the present through how a person is.

whether a bunch of images are separate, or are they a part of a movie is a matter of whether you can spot images being switched

Same goes for personality and “sameness” of pourself.

After all, we remember and forget all the time, our bodies physically change. I’d dare to suggest that most people still consider you to be you even if you’d lose a limb in some kind of tragic circumstances. Same goes for memories.

Continuity of existence is a charade that we’re willingly playing, bc it’s easier that way.

I have (had) two relatives succumb to dementia (Alzheimers) before they passed.

In one case, that person reverted back to the memories which were at the time of my early childhood. We reconnected in a way that shed off the later traumas for both of us, and while I still could not love that person, I appreciated them for who they were (or thought they were) at that time. And I could grieve their passing.

The other person was pretty much dead to everyone anyways, so yeah, once their memories were gone, they were already dead to us.

You might want to read Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton

Memento Mori?

How deep do you want to go down the rabbit hole?

Do you trust your memory? Is how you remember it really how it happened? If someone else tells you it happened another way, is there any way to tell which one, or even if either, is correct?

If the memory happened long ago, how much of the body that was there then is still here now? Is any of it?

How much of your knowledge can be trusted? Do you still believe thunder is the sound of clouds bumping together, or some other old story from your childhood?

If you have a memory of a dream, or a hallucination, is it a memory of a real event? If you don’t remember that it was a hallucination, does it become real for you?

Step out of self-focus for a moment. What is a memory? The resonance between a perceived pattern and the stored pattern in the pattern-recognition system in your head. If the pattern isn’t perceived to trigger the memory, do you still remember? If the connection is malformed, and the smell of chocolate reminds you of the taste of cheese, what does chocolate taste like when it isn’t in your mouth? If the connection is fully broken, and you forget your name, who do you become? Who are you if, after living longer as this new self than as the old self, your brain heals and restores your memory of who you were?

Is the body that holds this memory you? Where are the edges of that object? Materials move constantly in and out of the visible bounds thought of as your flesh, through lung tissue, through skin, through disgestive tissues, eyes, teeth, all of it to varying degrees. Nothing is impermeable. When oxygen is absorbed by your skin, carried to a neuron that forms part of the pattern that tells you you had a chicken sandwich last night, is chemically bonded to another molecule and expelled again, when it is part of you? Is it part of the memory?

Research shows ones personality can be changed by as little as how long it has been since lunch. Are you a different person when you are hangry?

How much of you is your memory? If your memories go away, how much of you remains? Does any?

Is there even a you? The you you are now is clearly almost nothing like the you you were as a child. Are you still the same person? If yes, how? If no, when did the transition happen from one to the other? If information is part of what makes you you, are you even the same person you were when you started reading this comment?

If there is no real separation between you and the things that move in and out of you, is memory anything more than a cycle of reactions, matter and energy triggering chemical changes triggering chemosyntesis, chemotaxis, osmosis. Do even those things exist, or are they merely more patterns of information found to assist the pattern of matter that stores them in the function of preserving that information?

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE, PHILOSOPHY RABBIT HOLE!