The Loop

Today, I was randomly thinking of a quote from the Road by Cormac McCarthy. "You remember what you want to forget, and you forget what you want to remember."

Now, your chain of thought is heavily dependent on where your mind has lately been. You agree, right? So emerging from a flood of studying biological systems and how efficient they are, I thought of this and wondered if it means that our memory storage and retrieval system is inefficient. Why this thought was significant enough for me to put it down here was this:

Suppose if you had a memory that was voluntary, aka, you had control over what you put in this storage system and what didn't make the books. You did this over a period of time. You'd forget things that you want to forget and remember what you want to remember. Think about that, and tell me, would that distort your reality at all?

You would literally be able to believe what you want to believe, because what you don't want to believe, doesn't exist. You have forgotten it. Crazy, huh?
So, this must mean that memories are imperfect to enable us to live a fuller life, more in touch with reality through realizations (you need to remember experiences to be able to realize something from them, I assume). But is that what memories really do?
Memories help you to hold on to things, whether it is love, or a grudge, or just a beautiful time in your life. Memories also mould action, some give it a fancy name of conditioned learning. And action is character. So memories mould character. Memories enable obsession and psychosis. Memories help you build preconceptions and prejudices. Yet, prejudice and preconceptions are limiting. So do memories really enable a fuller life? Thus this argument is circular. What is the purpose of memories? What was the purpose of evolution of memory in evolution of multicellular life?

Remember to remember that you remember. To what end?