Funes And Memory

Having a forceful memory is good, however is remembering everything useful? Powerful memories provide advantage to the people. On the other hand, remembering every minute of the life is an anormal and baleful thing. Remembering every single detail prevents people from thinking because generalizations cannot be made. In addition to that, in order to use the knowledge we need to combine the similarities and neglect the little differences. This accelerates our thinking process. Besides, Plato’s “Theory of forms/ideas” talks about the protoype issue and this theory says that everything in this world is the copy of the real. However, we take them as the same by ignoring some differences and generalize. This helps us to think. In the short story “Funes, the Memorious” written by Jorge Luis Borges, Funes could remember everything and this was a liability for him because “in Funes’ overloaded world there was nothing but detailsвЂ¦Ð²Ð‚Ñœ (Funes, the Memorious, Jorge Luis Borges). Thus, in the story, memory is not an asset but a liability.

First of all, memory is one of the most important element that provides thinking. It is necessary for conceiving. However, men’s memory is innately selective and it eleminates the unnecessary details. At first sight, it looks like a disadvantage but it is not. “In order to think, we inevitably need to generalize, and in doing so, we must forget” (Funes,the Memorious Jorge Luis Borges). The capacity of the human brain is not sufficient for remembering every single detail and use them in a logical way. Therefore, human mind creates systems in order to archieve and use them if it is necessary. Creating a system means eleminating the differences and taking the basic similarities. We should make generalizations for using the knowledge we gained. Otherwise, our mind would be lost in the details. Remembering sufficient things provide advantage. Else, memory becomes a liabilitiy.

Secondly, people need to generalize and create a prototype in their minds. As Plato stressess in his “Theory of forms/ideas”, everything in this world is bad copies of the ideas and prototypes. The prototypes are the best creation ever made for a specific thing. It includes all the “perfect” qualities and people try to reach that prototype. For instance, when someone talks about a “cat”, we all understand the same thing. No matter if that cat has a brown tail or grey eyes. Even if that cat has lost its two legs it is still called as a cat. Providing that we could remember everything. Then, “cat” word would mean so many things and create so many images in our mind. So that, people couldnot come to an agreement or even think properly. In order to ensure accurate knowledge, people need to reach prototypes.

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