The Liar

Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory - Olin Miller

So this is a story that fits so adroitly to its subject that I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking it was a set-up but it is in fact true for what that assertion is worth (particularly in the context of what follows).

I am always endeavoring to expand my horizons, on my better days out of an allegiance to Truth, Knowledge and Wisdom, failing that out of a relentless dissatisfaction with myself and existence and consequent motivation to “help” or “improve” myself.

In such sprits I recently resolved to work my way through the book Gödel, Escher, Bach which I purchased many years ago and made some headway in and then ran out of steam with. Starting over and completing it has been on my to-do list for a very long time.

As I recently related, I started this book and quickly ran into a situation with the first formal exercise in logic presented in the book for the reader to play with. You can read that essay for a more detailed account of my experience attempting the exercise and reaction to my general failure with it.

Now.

When I approached that exercise in the book I honestly wasn’t looking to make it into essay fodder or whatever. What I did come to it with was a memory. It was a pretty specific memory and it did not remotely occur to me to seriously question it. The memory in essence was of undertaking this exercise, solving it, and feeling good about that.

This was a time in my life (if memory, ahem, serves) when I’d been through some personal and work experiences that gave me cause to doubt the quality of my intellect. I have a very specific recollection of working on this puzzle restoring in some small sense a feeling of confidence in my highest faculties, my ability to contend with the most abstract of human metaphysics, which ability had once got me through the calculus, physics and chemistry, thermodynamics and quantum mechanics with, if not exactly “flying colors”, at least reasonably respectable grades.

So I was genuinely distressed and depressed the other day to be absolutely brick-walled by the little logic game in question. I tried to be philosophical about it but there was a real, grim shadow at the back of my thoughts saying “you know, that’s it - the mind is inexorably on the downhill side”. The best I could hope for is that I was still on the part of that hill where the downward pitch was long and shallow.

But finally I said to myself, look: if you’re going to let that stop you all you’ll have proved is that it doesn’t take much, and my modus is all about persistence these days, so I went back to the book.

Where, immediately, it became clear that there was some fundamental flaw in that memory my whole reaction was based on. It was clear the reader was not expected to solve that puzzle. In fact is appeared it was not meant to be obvious whether the puzzle was in fact solvable at all - and indeed that this was the important point to be derived from attempting it at all.

While I can take comfort in the the fact that my frustration over the puzzle was not a sign of decaying intellect, it’s really just trading one interrogation of my brain’s capacity for another. What in the hell was I remembering? I broke it down into a few possibilities:

1) Had I merely played with the puzzle a bit, given up per the author’s suggestion, and felt satisfied merely with my ability to understand and manipulate the system of symbols and rules? Possible, though it would have been an awfully low bar to clear for forming a lasting memory of accomplishment.

2) Had I played with the puzzle and felt satisfied because I determined to my own satisfaction that the puzzle was unsolvable or at least intrinsically very difficult - and gave it up to have this confirmed in later reading. Equally possible, though this sort of accomplishment doesn’t really fit my memory that well.

3) Did I screw up and falsely “solve” the puzzle by performing some illegal operation without realizing it? This could certainly have happened, although I would think I’d have noticed the discrepancy of subsequent paragraphs that make it clear that a simple, direct solution is not an expected outcome. This interpretation stands out with the possibility that I'm actually getting smarter as I age.

4) Was I actually remembering some exercise from later in the book, one with an actual attainable solution? This possibility alone has at least the prospect of a relatively definitive confirmation, in that I could encounter this hypothetical later exercise and recognize it. Of course it would be hard to fully credit any such recognition in the light of the general dismantling of the memory in the context of the first exercise... And of course this option also raises the specter of going through the same intellectual and emotional wringer all over again.

5) Did I more or less fabricate this memory from a bunch of similar bits and pieces? Certainly I have a large store of wrestling intellectually with tricky constructs and pulling a credible ah-ha moment out of the struggle and feeling good about it.

There’s simply no way to know. And as always in this sort of situation I can’t help but wonder at how much of my memory is suspect: moments and fragments, misinterpreted sensations and misheard conversations, all assembled into narratives by my brain the better to fake there being some sort of sense to it all. It’s a fair point but I can’t see much of a path forward based in continuously dwelling on the fact that the entirety of you memory is suspect in ways that are mostly impossible to verify or correct.