Episode 244: Thanks for the Memories? (Borges' "Funes the Memorious)

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:01:18] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, the actress Sydney Sweeney was under fire on Twitter last week because of a video or photos of her at, I think like her parents' house party where there were likely MAGA people

[00:01:36] and also some pro police t-shirts. We need to take a public position on this. What do you think it should be? Oh god, I'm so glad I missed whatever news cycle that is. I don't know who Sydney Sweeney is. I don't know what the controversy was. Really?

[00:01:52] Like that's good. I have no idea. You should be proud. I wish I could live a life like that. You're a slave to the news cycle. So first of all, who Sydney Sweeney is? Did you watch either White Lotus or Euphoria? No. Okay, well. No.

[00:02:10] Yeah, she is a hot young actress. We know what your type is. Yeah, not in this case. It's the blonde. So all it was was that there are people who are MAGA fans and what? Maybe like a blue line kind of like t-shirt.

[00:02:31] And people wanted to cancel her for it? I don't know. It was hard to tell, you know. God, man. My position is that I will still do drugs with Sydney Sweeney. Because Euphoria makes it look so fun. No, I didn't see that.

[00:02:47] But in White Lotus, her and her friend are in this Hawaiian island and they all, each of them bring like this huge supply of drugs, which like they then lose. It gets kind of stolen from them. And the show is not good after that.

[00:03:02] Like it was awesome when they had all the drugs. I seriously am like, I guess I could see why people might care. But really, like I would have to fire like my plumber and shit, you know, who like

[00:03:16] pulls up to my house with his thin blue line sticker. Oh my God. I'm kidding. I don't know if I can still do the podcast with you. You just let like pro police plumber. Do you ever have those situations where you're talking to somebody because you're

[00:03:29] being, you're just being like whatever, like normal. Like at an Uber driver or somebody who's come to like, to your house for some reason or other. And then they just all of a sudden say something that you're just like, oh shit. Oh, OK. Yeah.

[00:03:42] Oh, in retrospect, I guess, but yeah, yeah, it doesn't bother me. I don't mind talking to people who have. It doesn't bother me at all. No, God, no. It's good. It's like good to be able to talk to somebody like that.

[00:03:53] It's got a sense of like where they're coming from. Well, even if it's not good, I don't care. Even if like, I don't know. Right. It's just like, it's good to be useful in the struggle against depression.

[00:04:04] It's just like, it's good to be able to talk to a wide range of people. Yeah. And it just as like a human being and you don't have to like, I feel like there is this weird

[00:04:15] view that that must weaken my stance on the issues if I, if I have any association with those people. You tolerate their company. That seems, that seems like a big error of modern times. Yeah.

[00:04:27] It is like endorsing or somehow lessening your commitment to say not want guns till I have a friend who's into guns. This is where I think this is going is you're going to say that you'd love to have dinner with former SS. Exactly.

[00:04:43] Well, it's, you just, you can enjoy their jokes and stuff, but you can't enjoy that they were SS. Nor can you in like enjoy the dinner because they're German and they, you know, their food is terrible. So I didn't know they were, I didn't know they were cooking.

[00:04:58] So like if it were at a Turkish restaurant though, you'd be okay with. Yeah. Or like an Italian restaurant, Japanese restaurant, you know, they're like, we can be like one of the access members. I don't know, bad Mussolini, Fettuccine, like, right.

[00:05:11] Like, but that's the point is it's good food. Like, they can't be both murderous fascists and their food is bad. In Mussolini's Italy, at least the spaghetti was al dente. You didn't just get a bunch of like bratwurst and like mustard.

[00:05:30] Anyway, so today we're going to talk in the second segment about Borges great story that we've been wanting to do, meaning to do for a while. Funes, the memorious or as in our translation, Funes, his memory. Yeah.

[00:05:47] One of I think three big disagreements I have with the translation. What is the memorious? You can't just change it like that. But yes, I read his like justification. Well, maybe we could save this for the second segment in the first segment.

[00:06:02] Well, number one, we picked another fucking article that we can't talk about now. But this time we didn't record a whole episode on it, but it turns out the guy is just a race scientist and or at least is very inspired by race

[00:06:16] science and so yeah, I would put I would I bet you he has a thin blue line sticker on his on his notebook at the very least. Yeah, I like sometimes those people go beyond they get to the point where they hate the police because they. Oh yeah.

[00:06:32] You know, and especially the feds. But anyway, this one was our fault for not having read like it passed a certain point to see where they were like and was as race science shows us.

[00:06:43] It was very much on the topic of something we would talk about in an opening segment. Right. I mean, like one day, like we'll be able to pick an article and then just actually record it and then publish that recording. You know, one day, one day.

[00:06:56] Yeah. So anyway, we thought given that it's our 10th anniversary, we could. Happy anniversary. Happy anniversary. Ten years is as of recording yesterday, August 30th was the 10th anniversary of when we released our very first episode. But not Tamler anniversary of when we recorded

[00:07:14] the first episode that went unreleased, which appears to be about a year before that. Yeah. I dug up some old audio files of us. Yeah. Calling ourselves bad wizards, not even very bad wizards. Bad wizards.

[00:07:29] Yeah. And I said them to you and you listened a little bit to it. But we were like even like more serious. We were like using more, more formal terms. We were taking it seriously. Yeah. We like we knew we were going to be lighthearted.

[00:07:42] But but we still I think there's some pretense that we would be a bit more academic. We would be educational in some way, be edifying or enriching the minds of our listeners. Yeah. It's funny because I associate early episodes more with us

[00:07:59] being more over the top the other way, like dog fucking and. Yeah. I agree with you that once we started, yeah, there was just some awkwardness, I think, about the very first yeah, attempts at recording because we barely knew each other number one.

[00:08:13] And so that's going to obviously. I saw at the end of one of the snippets because I was like, why is this called part one when it's so short? And it's actually a snippet because at the very end you go something like,

[00:08:30] I'm sorry, Dave, I think that the audio is a little loud. And I was like, he's never been that polite ever since. Yeah. I'm sorry, Dave. I think that we should. Yeah, I can't even picture myself saying that.

[00:08:44] Nor can I remember any like discussion of like bad wizards. Should we go to very bad wizards? Like, like I have no memory of that even being like a debate or an idea or anything. I have a vague recollection that that we were trying to find

[00:09:01] a name for our podcast before just settling on the inspiration of your book. It's but apparently somewhere in between that first step. Like we went to bad wizards for a bit. Yeah. That's really good. Like also VBW, I like the way that sounds BW.

[00:09:15] That doesn't sound like bowel movement, but with the upside down. Yeah. Or Brazilian bikini. So we're going to be naval gaze, which is to say we're going to just make some I guess some observations about our our task.

[00:09:33] But this was inspired by what by a tweet that said, how would you describe the podcast now as opposed to to ten years ago? What was when we started? Yeah, ten years ago. You know, it's funny in that earlier clip and maybe we'll play it like I describe

[00:09:49] what the podcast is, which is, you know, issues in philosophy and psychology and ethics and especially in relation to the emotions. Like I got pretty specific, right? It's going to be about topics like that.

[00:10:03] And but, you know, we'll talk about them in a way that is much more informal than you would normally expect to hear a discussion about these things. And I think we did, although it was very informal and we were always filthy and we haven't entered this

[00:10:22] while I've never taken like the whole well, canceled culture, blah, blah, blah. Seriously, things have gotten a little bit more. The expectations for better and for worse have become higher and we were not living yet in that era.

[00:10:36] So you could probably find some things if you really want to try to cancel us. There's probably some stuff in the first 30 or 40 episodes, like, you know, I have had it. I was listening to before we were recording, I was going through a few episodes here and there.

[00:10:52] And one of our early episodes, we start reading an email that we got from a graduate student. And we're saying that this is unlike another email that we had just gotten, which had been essentially complaining the whole time about our prison rape jokes

[00:11:07] and that somebody had decided to stop listening to us because we had made prisons and that was like in the single digit episodes. Yeah, I remember that. It was my but I remember actually even the context of it. It wasn't like a joke about prison rape.

[00:11:21] It's it was the only good thing about getting older. I think it was like after my birthday or something. Oh, yeah, that's right. I don't know. But like, right? Is that I become every year a less attractive candidate.

[00:11:34] You know, if I end up going to it was not thinking that's funny to joke about, but also, you know, like I really do believe that has been like a small consolation about getting older. But that was all just to say that there were people

[00:11:52] not looking to cancel us, but just canceling their subscription to us. Yeah, right. They hadn't yet discovered canceling the woke mob, the woke stop. Yeah, we were barely on Twitter, you know, yeah, I had. I mean, but, you know, like the repugnant one star review came from Episode

[00:12:14] six where we were joking about like pushing a pregnant woman off a bridge. And like again, the context was like they keep having to try to make it worse, you know, like what the like what it is that you would have to do.

[00:12:27] But the one star repugnant review was about Episode six. So like, yeah, I think we were we had established our bona fides on that front. And I think although like a greater majority of the episodes were about like classic moral psychology topics,

[00:12:45] like a much higher percentage of them were about that. Well, and as like as we've said many times, when we first started like the goal, at least for me was six episodes because I thought that's that was going to be the number of topics

[00:13:00] that we could that we could really discuss. And it just like in that sense, it has to change because we can't like we just had to keep broadening topics. But there's one way in which it really hasn't changed is you listen early on

[00:13:14] even like our the pilotiest of our pilot episodes. We had movie quotes in them and movies were always going to kind of play a role in, you know, even if we weren't going to directly discuss a movie,

[00:13:28] they were going to they were going to serve their illustrative purpose to even as we've expanded and talk more about our like film and books and TV shows. It's never not to me been about philosophy and psychology. Like it's in my head, it's still always like that.

[00:13:49] And so even if it's remember, we had a discussion way back when about well, is this movie even about anything? Psychology? Yeah, it's like vertigo or something. Yeah. And I was like, I mean, yeah, it's just the way I think about it. It's going to be. Yeah. Right.

[00:14:03] You were like, I know, I remember you said something like I didn't even think that we required that anymore. Like you won. You're like, you've won. Like that's what pisses me off is like now I'll agree to do a movie

[00:14:15] without even like, you know, like it being clear what the tie in is. I remember that. Yeah, the joke was early on. I really just wanted to do a movie podcast. Yeah. With who? Well, originally, my idea was we would it would just be top

[00:14:34] three movies or top five movies on a topic, which and we've done those kinds of episodes not in a long time. Yeah, but you had another friend you were going to do that with. Yeah, it was Josh Weisberg, a former friend of the show.

[00:14:46] Former friend of the show. Yeah, we're like as a show, not friends with them anymore. I mean, the unforgiven episode was Episode 11. So it's not like we weren't like agreeing to do that. It's just that they came every like 10 or 15 episodes at first.

[00:15:05] Yeah. Most and I don't think literature was not something we did. Like, was the first piece of literature the bore has his babble on? Is that even a very good question? That's a very good question. I don't know. Like, that's a definite change.

[00:15:24] I also don't know when we we landed at the format of opening question intro segment break music second segment. I haven't actually done the work to go see. No, we're so unprepared for this. It's got to be so boring.

[00:15:40] But I will say that I do think the thing that has been constant is we do episodes on what we want to do episodes on. And I think as the podcast has evolved, we want to do episodes on short stories and movies and books and

[00:15:59] and more because I think, you know, look, I was thinking about this on my back right home. 2012 is an interesting time in our fields, right? For me, I would say like experimental philosophy is kind of in its heyday around that time. Moral psychology, social psychology.

[00:16:19] This is before like all of the replication crisis, at least that everybody knows that something's up, right? Even like the election, it's like it's right before Obama's second or his reelection. I have my infamous episode eight where I was like, look, it's great. Like he got reelected.

[00:16:39] You know, I think Republicans are going to be done with like race baiting as a electoral strategy. And you know, like we've moved past that as a country. And it's like in both cases, I think like there was a kind of complacency

[00:16:53] and overconfidence from people who, you know, had it pretty good within those like all of the fields, you know? And we didn't see a lot of the kind of fundamental problems that were lurking like either politically or in psychological method.

[00:17:10] And I think it's a little less clear with philosophy that things have changed that much, but not because there hasn't been like a big crisis. Yeah. But you know, it's funny because we have an early couple of episodes called the burning burning bridges episodes

[00:17:31] where we dared criticize our own fields. Yeah. Yeah. I think we were always on the more skeptical side of our own fields. And like I was probably skeptical of some psychology things, not enough. Yeah. But you were always just so in love with philosophy that, you know,

[00:17:50] you could be critical. You can't be mad at philosophy. Yeah, my attitudes were philosophy, I guess. I think as I've gotten exposed to more, the sound's so bad, but like more just run of the mill. Like, you know, when you're somebody like me who has a side

[00:18:08] interest in philosophy, you read a lot of the great papers. You don't read like, you know, what? Sideways music. Paper. Yeah, papers someone had to pump out to get tenure. So that's why. Yeah. As I've learned more, I've come to be a little bit more of the

[00:18:24] corporate to some kinds of, you know, I always kept kind of analytic methods and philosophy at a kind of arms length. I often found like conceptual analysis and the methods associated with it to be obviously kind of worthless or lacking in some fields.

[00:18:42] But I don't think I applied it enough to stuff that I was doing at the time and certainly hadn't arrived at least in a way that I could articulate at a kind of Vic and Stinney in position on a lot of the main philosophical.

[00:18:58] You've got a name for it now? What's? Yeah, yeah, because I didn't know. Like, I didn't know that Vic and Stinney, like I didn't read philosophical investigations and so I had no idea that all these and that there's a whole school totally neglected and ignored

[00:19:10] school of philosophers who believe that essentially what I believe, although they they act differently than I do about it. But yeah, their goal is to like, we got to change it. We got to convince all these like philosophers that that they're doing it

[00:19:27] wrong and say, no, you don't go because it's not that won't happen. It just has to die out. But there's a couple of things that I thought I wanted to cover. One was the the question that we often get as to what

[00:19:41] your favorite episode is and maybe relatedly what episode people should start with. Like I recently got this and have you landed at an answer to these? I think forced because I do get the question a good amount. Ecclesiastes is always one and it has the opening segment,

[00:20:01] I think about compersion. So I think that gives a good kind of I don't know, like a summary of who we are and what this is about in Ecclesiastes. I remember being one of my favorite discussions. Similarly, yeah. The niggle episode on the absurd, which I always do.

[00:20:22] Like as my one of my favorite discussions, that I forgot until I was looking the other day that that has the opening segment about the paper with the holes, which is the very bad wizard's yest of very bad wizards, I think there's two opening segments

[00:20:39] with holes that are very bad. The tongue. Right? It's the one where the tongue or your toe or whatever to gauge the size of holes. Yes. Not the one where what is a hole? No, no, no. But both of those in their own way are quintessential opening segments.

[00:20:58] Yeah. And so given that I often turn to the absurd and Ecclesiastes episodes, it sort of is an answer to the question we got on Twitter, which is like, you just an existentialist podcast at this point. And I think I always want like I was wanted to be

[00:21:17] it just took us a while to figure out that that's like something that we could be or or enjoyed talking about, you know, like the big. Although like two of our first ten episodes are kind of on those themes, right? The meaning of life one in episode three.

[00:21:37] I mean, that's also about relative values and things like that. And then episode 10 is just explicitly about it. It's like God and the meaning of life. And like, I think we always had this in us, but again, like we just took it to a different level

[00:21:51] when we started to do Nate, when we did Naplesly Absurd and then, you know, doing Dostoevsky. And we yeah, we both just love that shit. Here's one thing I will say that's a big difference, even though it took a lot of time to do it then.

[00:22:07] I feel like a bigger part of my like mental life is devoted to the podcast now. Yeah, because the thought that that the podcast would be even close to in the running for like a central aspect of my life was so foreign to me early on.

[00:22:25] Like it's it's kind of cool. Like I actually was talking to somebody who who is a former grad student of ours. And he was he he he wrote a letter for my full promotion packet because they asked former students.

[00:22:40] He was saying that that like he was talking to one of the professors here who was on the committee, like his former advisor about my case and that they made a like they were actually made a big deal about the podcast, like in my in my promotion.

[00:22:54] Like that's changed. Yeah, 2011 and 12 when we're working on this, like we're both newly minted associate professors, which means we have tenure, but we're not full professors yet. And you have to do some actual like academic work to get promoted to full professor, which we now both are.

[00:23:13] And podcasts were different. Like you would talk to people and you would say, I'm doing this podcast and they would either kind of look at you like Sean Nichols and be like, OK, right. Or they just wouldn't know what a podcast was

[00:23:26] and you would have to like explain that to them. And then it went through this boom where now if you tell somebody you're doing a podcast, we're like, oh really? Yeah. Wow. Like how'd you get that idea? Where was the sweet spot? Yeah.

[00:23:42] But like like you, I had like my Dean, the Dean and his letter recommending me for promotion like brought up the podcast as it's like a real positive. And so if we haven't changed that much, the world has changed to make this respectable

[00:23:59] kind of also kind of a cliche already. Yeah. And like tedious but like also respectable. You know, we went we went from not cool to not cool for two different reasons. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But that's so that's been nice.

[00:24:18] It's allowed us to do I mean, one, we have jobs that are flexible so we can do this, but it's allowed me to do more things that I actually enjoy doing. Yeah. Than I would have otherwise. A greater percentage of my time doing things

[00:24:32] that I really love doing because as any teacher knows the best way to understand something and learn it is to teach it. And we're not teachers on the podcast, but it's the same kind of idea where you have to read something closely and talk about it.

[00:24:47] You know, and you're not just reading it by yourself and thinking about it by yourself. Right. Reading something with the intention to communicate that thing is a very different kind of reading or watching or whatever. And I will say, you know, there was somebody, I think

[00:25:03] maybe he was on Patreon, somebody was saying like, how do you guys do? It seems like a lot when it comes like doing the Deadwood stuff and doing the podcast and the AUA. How do you see all the movies?

[00:25:14] And yes, that's right. Time to watch all this stuff. And it's like, you know, obviously, like obviously my kids suffer, you know, like my daughter just doesn't see me. Yeah, we sacrifice fucking everything, you know, and we just get like jacked up on like, remember,

[00:25:34] you went through a big like coke phase. And am I over that? Yeah, I don't know. Like sometimes. No, I but, you know, as lazy as I feel like I feel, I guess I do work a lot, you know, so.

[00:25:51] I don't know if I work like a lot, but I think I consider myself lazy because a lot of the time because I'm doing stuff like this, you know, with I still for whatever reason don't consider work even though now we make a bit of money doing it.

[00:26:05] And yeah, and actually people give a shit about it. They don't give a shit as much as if we like publish an article that like 19 people read in some journal. But still they appreciate it. And they don't make fun of us for it anymore.

[00:26:25] Well, not to our faces. Not to our faces. Yes. I mean, unless except for Sean Nichols. He still. Go to his grave just being like, it's a stupid fucking idea and no one wants to listen to that.

[00:26:38] OK, I have one last question for you, which is, OK, we've done it for 10 years. We have no plan to stop if anybody's what? Or at least I have no plan to stop. Do you have a dream guest for this podcast, not just someone you want to

[00:26:51] like now that not that chick that you mentioned at the beginning? Sydney Sweeney. Yeah. I mean, like for the podcast. Yeah, by the way, my daughter not like whenever I talk about Sydney's even. I wonder why. So dream guest, you know.

[00:27:12] Oh, well, David Lynch, I would love to say guest. Like that would be pretty awesome. You know, as as we found sometimes like the dream person isn't necessarily the best guest. But I feel like David Lynch could be a good guest for us.

[00:27:30] And let me think about it more. Do you have some Sam Harris to come talk about 2001 space? Space Odyssey. We may get that wish. I'm not manifesting it. No, because I asked you the question having not thought about it at all really

[00:27:50] like as you say, the guests, some we might love somebody and they might be a terrible guest, so it's really hard to know. David I think would have been like an unbelievably great guest, but like we would have had to do it earlier in the podcast.

[00:28:05] Yeah, I'm fortunate. Yeah, I would have loved Norm. You know, I oh, God, that's the best one. Yes. 100 percent. Like that's like there's not a close second to Norm. Chappelle would be a second. I don't know how you can't be that. Yeah, but Chappelle would be a second.

[00:28:22] Substactive. And then and then J.K. Rowling. No, she can't. Kathleen Starr. James Lindsay really. I want to get him back. Get him back. See what's changed. I don't know. Like if anything's changed in his life. Good to see you again. How are things?

[00:28:50] In my defense, like you said, who's your dream guest? And he has sadly passed, but he would have been like the ideal VBW guest. You would have convinced him to take us seriously. You know, you'd have a little patience for us.

[00:29:03] I think Bill Burr would be a fun guest if we're going to do comedians for you. We talk about Boston sports. That's right. Everyone would love that. I wear my Yankees hat. All right. Yeah. That was great. Great segment. Great. So thanks for the memories.

[00:29:25] It has been kind of awesome. Yeah, I'm a little bit sentimental about it. I'm and I'm proud. 10 years. 10 years. Different like stages of life. Both our daughters are going to college. Crazy. My daughter, like when we started was young enough

[00:29:40] where it was cute that she would do that opening disclaimer. Are we going to keep it? Yeah, right. You said you didn't like the idea of losing it. I don't. But I said ultimately it was her decision. Because I could see. She doesn't care. OK.

[00:29:54] Not that you've asked. Can we get that Sweeney chick to do the opening? Two drugs and then we'll record just some openings. Hang out with those two. We'll be right back to talk about Funez, the memorials or his memory.

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[00:33:40] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the show where we love to reach out to you and thank you for being part of our community, for getting in touch with us and just for keeping us going, keeping us motivated for 10 years. Ten years.

[00:33:56] Ten years. If you would like to get ahold of us, ask us questions, give us criticisms, give us compliments, you can email us verybadwizards at gmail.com. As well we say we read them all. We don't have time to respond to them all.

[00:34:10] We've gotten some really nice ones recently as well. Yeah, absolutely. And some weird ones. You can tweet to us at peas, at Tamler, at Very Bad Wizards. You can join our lively community at reddit.com slash r slash

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[00:34:48] Really, I just porn hub, you know, I spend most of my time. You got one of the premiums. What do you get with those? At 3,000 patrons. Maybe like, can we get a sponsor? You know. Oh God. You can follow us on Instagram.

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[00:35:21] And I don't know that you can leave reviews on Spotify, can you? I don't think so. Yeah. Well, so they have some other like master plan. They just they just look directly into your brain. Yeah, exactly. And if you'd like to support us in more tangible ways,

[00:35:38] there are a bunch of different ways to do that. We were, you know, on our 10th anniversary, let's take a moment to thank everybody who has contributed something both just an interaction, but also an actual money because it does really motivate us in a different way.

[00:35:55] And it is just I don't know. I'm very grateful for all the generosity that people have shown to us over the years. You can find all of these different ways on the support page. You can buy some merch. We got to get update our merch.

[00:36:11] I mean, come on. It's been 10 years. It's been a few years. Oh, yeah. For my daughter's friend. Yeah. That's going to happen. And you can give us a one time or recurring donation on PayPal and you can join our Patreon.

[00:36:27] And we've recently had a nice nice uptick in Patreon supporters, I think motivated in part by this new Deadwood series that we are dropping at this point, at this stage now every two weeks on off Tuesdays.

[00:36:45] It's a little hard to keep up, you know, with doing both of these, as you can tell, like from the preparation from our opening segment. Like we're stretched a little thin right now with all of this stuff.

[00:36:56] But so for now, at least you'll get one of those every two weeks, each devoted to a full episode of Deadwood. This is at the two dollar level at the one dollar, just one dollar per episode.

[00:37:08] You get all the volumes of Dave's Beats and you get ad free episodes most of the time. They're ad free, I should say. Sorry. There was a snafu, but I fixed it. Off, off in ad free episodes. And yeah, and also at two dollars and up,

[00:37:29] you get all our bonus episodes, our whole library. We've done a lot of them right now. Like I can't, I don't know how many, but, but a lot of them and at five dollars and up, you'll get to vote on an episode topic.

[00:37:42] This is coming right up like tomorrow. I'm posting that call for episode topics and you will get to vote on from a list of five finalists that Dave and I select. And you will also get access to our Brothers Karamazov series,

[00:37:57] also something that we really enjoyed and are proud of. You get also all of Dave's intro to psychology lectures. Wow, five dollar tier. You get a lot of shit. Two dollars and two. And at ten dollars and up, this is our highest tier.

[00:38:15] You get to ask us questions. Another thing that's going up tomorrow. And our call for questions for a monthly ask us anything video that we have really enjoyed doing. They tend to be long and rambly, but they are a lot of fun to do.

[00:38:34] And you get to ask the questions. We also release an audio version of that for all two dollar and up patrons. So thank you so much again. So I appreciate it so much. So grateful for all the support over all these years. It's it's it's a night.

[00:38:53] The proudest thing. I think we've said this probably a thousand times, but the community of people that we've built and interacted with over the years and who supported us, it's warms the cockles in our hearts. If anyone has been listening from like since the earliest episodes

[00:39:12] and is still listening, I'm kind of curious to hear from them. Like a dag sorus. Yeah, I know people come and go because I do that with every podcast that I listen to, definitely. But if anybody's sort of been there,

[00:39:25] I mean, I don't know if anybody could have been there from the day that we released our first episode because who the fuck knew who we were. But also there are these psychos that just binge like two hundred and forty

[00:39:37] episodes in like two weeks or something like that. How do they not just get immediately institutionalized? There should be like overcasts should have like some signal that they send to people. Like an algorithmic sort of like early warning indicator of self harm.

[00:39:55] Exactly. Self harm or or likely harm of others as well. Yes, thank you. All right, let's get to the episode. I think I have COVID, dude. Oh, God. Fuck. Actually, your cough is something that's probably gotten better over. Yeah, it has actually, but not today.

[00:40:19] The worst day is where the vape days. Yeah. It's just the constant. It's just watching you kill yourself. As you take a sip of your purpose. All right, Tamler, today we're talking about well, one of my favorite things to talk about. Aborje's short story.

[00:40:37] This time it is Funes the Memorias, Funes his memory as is in our translation by Andrew Hurley. And only our translation and only our translation. And he has like an explanation for why in Spanish it's Funes el memorioso,

[00:40:51] which is just one word that means like a person who has a very good memory. And yeah, this was published in 1942 originally, but then it made its way in 1944 to the Fictionist anthology part two. And it's it's actually pretty short.

[00:41:13] So here as as with many of these stories, there is some fictional version of Borges who is the narrator and he tells the story of a man that he met three times in his life, a guy named Irenio Funes, who basically after falling off of his horse,

[00:41:35] gets a head injury and develops this. I'd even hesitate to call it an ability. It's more like a disability, I guess, of remembering absolutely everything. And we'll get to what we mean when we say everything because like it's everything, including things that you didn't think

[00:41:53] would be the proper objects of memory. But yeah, so he acquires this incredible talent. Broad strokes, that's the story. There's no real. Yeah, there's there's no real plot other than that. Borges, the the narrator of the story is from Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina.

[00:42:15] And he goes to this little town in Uruguay where I guess he summers with his father and there is when he first meets Funes as a teenager before the accident. And he has an initial encounter that's kind of weird and kind of interesting, which we can talk about.

[00:42:33] And it's not until a few years later that he goes back to that same town on his own that he hears that about the accident that happened that left that left Funes appears to be quadriplegic or maybe paraplegic.

[00:42:48] And he just spends all of his days in his room, but he has developed this very uncanny ability to remember every single thing that's happened. So on that second visit, he first talks to Funes after this this accident lends him a couple of books.

[00:43:08] He says that he wants to learn Latin. So he lends him a couple of his Latin books, thinking that he won't learn them and then ends up having to come back to pick up his Latin books. And there he has sort of a full conversation with Funes

[00:43:18] and he learns more about what precisely is going on in the mind of young Funes, who's at this point, like 19 years old. Right. And then you hear that he dies at I guess 21 or something. Yeah. Two years later from congestion of the lungs,

[00:43:34] which is what I feel like I'm dying. Yeah. Oh no. David has, yeah, he might have COVID. I will be the only COVID version of the Very Bad Wizards podcast possibly. Yeah, so this story is, if I compare it to a story that we've done before,

[00:43:53] I would say it is the library of Babel. In a couple of ways, I think it's both about how when you have something that initially appears good, if you have it too much or an infinite amount of it, it becomes disabling.

[00:44:11] It becomes, all of a sudden its value is annihilated. In both cases from the library, where you have every possible book, but there's no order to it. So it's like, it's almost like having no books with his perfect memory. As the narrator says, he has trouble thinking now

[00:44:33] because he's lost the ability to provide order to his vast infinite memory. The lack of the ability to catalog these things is ultimately crippling. And I'd say the other way that I think it's like it is there's a kind of moroseness to it.

[00:44:53] I remember that from the library of Babel where everyone is just this kind of a morose obsessiveness that pervades the character and just the tone of the story. And in both cases, there's not really much of a story. And it is about people who are, they're too far,

[00:45:13] they're in too deep to rescue themselves, but they're past the point of being excited or enjoying this infinite gift that they've been given. Yeah, it's a good point. And it's unclear whether Funez is enjoying at least some of this. We know that he can't sleep, but it doesn't,

[00:45:40] I don't get the sense that he has views himself as a tragic figure. He views this as like, I was once asleep and now I see, and now I am awake. The analogy there to the library of Babel is a good one in that less is more.

[00:46:02] Like too much dilutes truth. Funez has lost, I think in some deep way access to the kind of truth that is important because he's so consumed by the kind of truths that are trivial. Everything is a detail to him and nothing is an abstraction.

[00:46:22] Yeah, we might have a different read on that aspect of it because I might say that he is maybe closer to the truth in some sense, but a truth that is useless to him. And in order like that with creating order and the ability to think things through,

[00:46:45] there needs to be a kind of falsification or a kind of a neglecting or overlook. But like, I don't know, like I was actually more referring though to like just the mood and the tone of it. While I agree with you that he has pride about his

[00:47:02] and may even think like, oh, this is the real shit that I'm on right now in the life I was living before was a stupid dream. There's no joy or a sense of excitement to, I don't know, at least that I read.

[00:47:15] It seemed like something that was a burden to him. He has the curtains like in, like there's no light in his room. It seems just like this compulsion, this obsessiveness that doesn't seem to bring him happiness. I got the darkness from the narrator.

[00:47:31] I think we don't really get too much from Fune's, but it sounds like he's very content to have to be in the darkness. But we can talk about that. And what you said before, like what you said before, you just rephrased what I said. Like I didn't,

[00:47:47] I said that he has the truth about details, not truth about the abstract things that matter. Oh, but see, that's where we might disagree. So I didn't rephrase it. I think that we have to impose falsehoods or subjectivity on reality

[00:48:04] in order to be able to make sense of it. Whereas you think we're closer to the truth or at least accessing different kinds of truths than he is. But I take a more anti-realist kind of approach to this story as a thought experiment.

[00:48:21] Oh, see, we're gonna have to flesh it out because from what you said at the beginning, I thought you were taking a realist approach to like him having access to like truer things. Well, he has more perfect information, more accurate information than we do. But that's not truth.

[00:48:39] Well, you know, we've never like done an episode on truth and what we should have signed in black. I mean, you said true. You said that he has access to truth. I mean, I do think he has access to truth

[00:48:51] in a certain way, in the same way that like, you know, in those black mirror episodes or like the Ted Chang story where they start preserving your past in videotape form or audio form that it's that those things are closer to the truth

[00:49:09] than, I mean, maybe you're a pragmatist about truth. No, that's not... More of a pragmatist. Those things are more accurate than how the people remember them, especially when... Yeah, that's what I'm trying to hold you to be saying. That he has access to some things that are truer.

[00:49:25] Whereas I was saying that the truth that he has about is truth about details. What he fails to have is truth about that you can acquire when you reason about those details. Like, you can't make inferences about the things that he notices.

[00:49:43] Right, so then I think this is probably, I'm embarrassed to say, but this might be the, like a debate between a nominalist and a universalist or something. You know, like, I think I have nominalist leanings on this front in which when we start to universalize

[00:50:03] and systematize, we are doing that to be useful but we're not adding to the truth. Okay, well, maybe the details about what he seems to remember will matter for the... But there are some details about, like, that I think are a little unclear exactly what is going on.

[00:50:25] You know, there's a line with the dog. Like it irritated him that the dog at, that he saw at 315 is the same dog as, you know, the one he saw from a different angle, like two seconds later. It's like, what does that mean that that irritated him?

[00:50:43] Is he denying that they are the same dog? Like, what does he think a dog is or the same dog would even mean? Well, that's a great, I mean, that's a great example of I think his, he's a true Parfidian about the identity of the dog.

[00:50:59] He's saying there is nothing meaningful in saying that dog at 315 is the same as dog at 420 or whatever. Right. Okay, so we start out again, like I said, by this first introduction where Borges is driving into a town, this little town in Uruguay,

[00:51:23] which is right next to Argentina. Have you guys like conquered it or something? Is this like somebody going to a colonial... There is a joke that, you know, Argentina is a much, much bigger country, both in terms of physical size and population.

[00:51:38] And so they tend to look down on Uruguayans just as a kind of a general sort of joke that they say things like Uruguay is one of our provinces. Like the French do at the Belgians, they're their pollocks, you know? Yeah, it's not so bad.

[00:51:57] As far as I know, it's not that they're stupid. It's that there might maybe a little country, but they're definitely an also ran, you know? So how you look at me. Right, Texas. Maybe. So one of the things that his very first introduction

[00:52:13] when Borges is riding in with his friend, you know, he describes this like he's riding in a horse and they're sort of trying to escape, they're trying to run faster than the storm that is coming. And so they go into this little street

[00:52:25] that has these high sidewalks on either side of it and they see a little boy or a kid running right alongside them. I heard quick, almost secret footsteps above me. I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow broken sidewalk high above.

[00:52:39] Borges' cousin, which is from this town, this little town, shouts out to that kid, what time is it? You know? And the boy without pausing says, four minutes till eight, young Bernardo Juan Francisco. So he uses all three names of him and he knew the time just perfectly

[00:52:59] without having to check. He also says his voice was shrill, shrill and mocking. No, I think that's important. Like this is why I sort of asked about did Argentinian attitudes is I think this is a very prideful young man

[00:53:12] who doesn't like like big city kids coming into his town and so wants to show that he's not impressed by them. Yeah. No, I think you're right because there is a part where he says, like he never called me those words like city's like big city guy

[00:53:29] but everybody thought that of him. Right. Yeah. And but this is before his accident. So he clearly has some dormant potential or some kind right? That he knows the time but it's not totally clear what that power is

[00:53:44] or how you would get that would like what it points to. Yeah. And I wasn't sure whether Borges was using this sort of a contrast like this extreme focus on time versus or it was foreshadowing. Like I don't quite know what we're meant to think

[00:54:02] of this ability that he had before the accident. You know, we do hear that he was already, he was eccentric and he was, he shied away from people and maybe Borges is trying to present to us like a kind of autistic savant,

[00:54:25] maybe somebody who's on the spectrum already. I also don't know what to make again early on in the first paragraph where he's, where Borges says the name of a person, Pedro Leandro Ipuche has written that Funes was a precursor of the race of Superman,

[00:54:39] a maverick and vernacular Zarathustra. And I will not argue the point but one must also not forget that he was at the street tough from Frey Ventus with certain incorrigible limitations. So I did come across like Nietzschean influences on Borges and I think,

[00:54:55] I don't know if this was a tribute to him but there is this Nietzsche quote, imagine the most extreme example, a human being who does not possess the power to forget who's damned to see becoming everywhere. Such a human being would no longer believe in his own being,

[00:55:13] would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent particles and would lose himself in this stream of becoming. Like the true student of Heraclitus, he in the end he would hardly even dare to lift a finger. All action requires forgetting

[00:55:29] just as the existence of all organic things requires not only light but darkness as well. So I think it's, it might just be a kind of tribute to Nietzschean. That's Nietzschean saying. Oh wow, that's great. Where does he say that? This is, shit.

[00:55:45] Is it in thus Bokzeresutra or I don't think so. I think it's in something else. I got it from this article, which we should post about Nietzsche, Borges and Nietzsche's kind of connection. That's clearly like that's the, I mean that has to be a direct reference.

[00:56:02] Yeah, Clancy Martin. There's a lot of quotes that philosophers, William James has one. Did you come across this? He, William James said, if we remembered everything we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. The paradoxical result is that one condition

[00:56:19] of remembering is that we should forget without forgetting a prodigious number of states of consciousness and momentarily forgetting a large number we could not remember at all. Yeah. So like that's very much this story. Yeah, super interesting. Today's episode of Very Bad Wizards

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[00:58:33] That's 80,000hours.org slash wizards. Our thanks to 80,000 Hours for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. So he goes back, right? This is years later after the accident and he hears that Funes had been bucked off of a horse. You know, I don't know.

[00:58:59] It's like the narrator has some weird connection to this guy already. He says, he has this interesting, when he says I was told he'd been bucked off a half broken horse on the ranch in San Francisco and had been left hopelessly crippled.

[00:59:12] I recall the sensation of unsettling magic that this news gave me. The only time I'd seen him we'd been coming home on horseback from the ranch in San Francisco and he had been walking along a high place. And I don't know what he's talking about

[00:59:26] with this unsettling magic other than maybe that weird feeling that you get when you hear that somebody you knew something happened to them. Yeah, it's probably like, there was something about that first encounter that made an impression on him. Yeah, it's a weird phrase.

[00:59:42] I wonder in the Spanish. In the Spanish, it's uncomfortable magic. Magic, but it's still magic. It's still magic, yeah. Yeah, and this is before he's even been told the magic part of that. Yeah, it's just about like maybe he's like,

[00:59:59] was it weird that my only vivid memory of him is using his legs and now you're telling me that's what he doesn't have anymore? Maybe it's something weird, sort of like did I do that? Or it's like, I think like there's something about this kid I can tell.

[01:00:18] It's such a weird gift to be able to, I take it like there's no, he's not wearing a watch. So to be able to know the time perfectly without looking at anything. Without looking at anything is a weird gift. And so, okay.

[01:00:32] So he says, this new event told by my cousin Bernardo struck me as very much like a dream confected out of elements of the past. I was told that Funez never stirred from his cot. His eyes fixed on the fig tree behind the house

[01:00:44] or on a spider web. At dusk, he would let himself be carried to the window. He was such a proud young man that he pretended that his disastrous fall had actually been fortunate. Twice I saw him on his cot behind the iron barred window

[01:00:58] that crudely underscored his prisoner like state, once lying motionless with his eyes closed, the second time motionless as well, absorbed in the contemplation of a fragrant switch of Artemisia. Do you know what that is? No, I assume a flower. So sorry. Well, what's the switch of it?

[01:01:16] What does that even mean? Like a stick. Like a switch is like a branch. Oh right, cause you people like beat your kids with switches. Yeah, exactly. But I love how here Borges is like, he's self deprecating. That's why I want to believe that it is Borges

[01:01:34] who's writing this. He says, it was not without some self importance that about that same time I had embarked upon a systematic study of Latin. It's like you go to France. That sounds like Borges. That sounds like when Borges is writing in his style. Yeah, yeah.

[01:01:47] He's like, I admit I was being a little douchey about it, but I was traveling, literally in my suitcase of all the things you can pack in a suitcase. He had like four volumes of Latin text. And so he says, because there are no secrets

[01:02:02] in these small towns, which if you have any experience in these small towns, absolutely, absolutely the case. Funes finds out and he sends him this like very flowery letter reminding him of our lamentably ephemeral meeting on the 7th of February, 1884. And it basically asks him, he says,

[01:02:21] I want to learn Latin. Would you mind lending me some of your books? I promise it'll only be for a short time. I'll return them to you soon. Borges, I guess at first thought it was some sort of a joke. Brazen conceit.

[01:02:33] He's like, who is this fucking country boy from Uruguay? Then wants to like learn Latin just with a dictionary. Like, all right, I'm gonna send him like the most impossible text. I got this. Which I assume Kishara's gradus adparnassum is one of. It's tough.

[01:02:56] Like, I'm not sure if that's the one I would have sent to teach a young country boy his place, but it would be in the top five. So here's another little sort of self deprecating moment for Borges, because right after that he says

[01:03:12] on February 14th, he got a telegram from Buenos Aires urging him to return home immediately because his father was not at all well. And he says, he basically he felt like a local hero that he had gotten a telegram. Right.

[01:03:27] So he says, God forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to communicate to all of Frey Bentos, that little town, the contradiction between the negative form of the news and the absoluteness of the adverbial phrase,

[01:03:41] the temptation to dramatize my grief by feigning a viral stoicism, virile stoicism. All this perhaps distracted me from any possibility of real pain. So I get what he's saying though. Like, totally. You get a little bit more important, like something tragic happened to you. And so you're like,

[01:03:59] and you got a telegram in this town. Like they don't even know what a telegram is. And it's totally true. It's like he like there's little sentences like that where Borges, like it's like if I wanted to write one of those like French novels

[01:04:12] where are you like all the foibles of like human beings are like I put, you know, like here's just my little, one little detail, you know? Cause it really gets at just the pathetic vanity that we can have. Right, right. So as he packs his bag,

[01:04:32] he just remembers at that moment that he was missing the two volumes that he had lent to Funes. So his ship was set to sail, ship. It's a river you have to cross. And so after dinner that night, he walked over to Funes' house

[01:04:51] to pick up those two books that he had lent them. At the honest little house, Funes' mother opened the door. So he walks down the hallway and again he hears suddenly I heard Irenaeus high mocking voice. The voice was speaking Latin. With morbid pleasure,

[01:05:08] the voice emerging from the shadows was reciting a speech or a prayer or an incantation. The Roman syllables echoed in the patio of hard packed earth. My trepidation made me think them incomprehensible and endless. Later during the enormous conversation of that night,

[01:05:23] I learned that they were the first paragraph of the 24th chapter of the seventh book of Pliny's naturalist history. The subject of that chapter is memory. The last words were, I kind of butcher. Ut nihil non isdem verbis, reder et tur auditum.

[01:05:40] Which I looked up at some point. Nothing that has been heard can be repeated with the same words. Yeah. And then it's just like an account of their interaction. But what's interesting, he bends over backwards to remind you that this account is reported by someone

[01:06:01] with a normal memory. Exactly. So whatever we're seeing is the result of somebody trying to remember an interaction that happened. I'm not sure, do we know how many years earlier? I don't think so. I don't think we know. He says, but you get the sense

[01:06:19] that it's been some years earlier at the very least. Yeah, we do know that it was in 1884 that he first met him. And I think this is three years later. I think you can calculate that from the last paragraph. But yeah, I love that.

[01:06:37] That he's opening the door for some unreliable narrator stuff here where he's saying like, yeah, I'm about to tell you the story. Like my story is really starting here, but my story is limited by my own memory. So everything I tell you about his perfect memory

[01:06:54] has the possibility of being wrong because of my memory being imperfect. Right. So yeah, then we really get into exactly what his both gift and curse is. As you say, he at least wants to portray or publicly express the attitude that he is,

[01:07:20] you know, that it's a gift. Yeah. And that, but certainly the narrator doesn't see it that way. And again, this is all filtered through this objective perspective of the narrator, but I got the sense that the just general mood is not positive.

[01:07:40] Well, you know, it's a dark room. He's paralyzed and he's clearly obsessed in the way that we had a long discussion about a level of obsession in the library of Babylon, at the library of Babel. He's fast and the narrator is obviously fascinated by this guy,

[01:07:57] but how could that not be fucking depressing? You know, he's sitting here in a dark room. And the way that he starts talking to him is that Funez starts naming off the cases of prodigious memory that are catalogued in the naturalist's Historia.

[01:08:15] So he mentions Cyrus, the king of Persia who could call all the soldiers in his armies by name, Mithridatis, Yupitor, who meted out justice in the 22 languages of the kingdom over which he ruled Simonides, the inventor of the art of memory, Metrodorus who was able faithfully to repeat

[01:08:33] what he had heard, though it be but once. And there he says with obvious sincerity, Irenaeus said he was amazed that such cases were even thought to be amazing. He's like, that's what people think is special? Like, it was not special.

[01:08:50] But what do you think that's supposed to suggest? I mean, he has perfect memory. He knows that there is a reign of memory that people have. Is he really, and he knows that most people have very bad memories? And he even himself was probably one of those people

[01:09:09] but like he didn't have perfect memory like he has now. So why this scorn? Why the, I feel like this is part of his character that Boris is giving us is his need to, I don't know, be superior or something like that is constant even though he knows.

[01:09:26] Like there's no way that he didn't know that this is the kind of thing that people thought was impressive when it came to memory. I read it as, you know, Borges, I think goes out of his way to say, he says with obvious sincerity,

[01:09:41] he said he was amazed that those cases were thought to be amazing. In the Spanish, it says with good faith, he said it in good faith. I think that maybe at least the feeling that I got was that this is, again, if you think about somebody

[01:09:56] that's heavily on the spectrum, he was saying it matter of factly. He realized that the gift that he had was so far above these that he was actually kind of amazed that anybody would bother to write in this great history book

[01:10:10] of these feats of memory when they just were like, but that's not that impressive. And it may even been why he wanted to the books in the first place. Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about it. Cause he heard about it and he's like,

[01:10:22] oh, it's finally somebody that I can connect with. And then it's like, oh no, they're just like everybody else. Right. And in 1884 or whatever, it's not like you can find the translations. You know, it's not like you could just go. Yeah. No, you need to some like-

[01:10:35] Oh, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of it. Like in a quest. So now it makes more sense cause in a quest for figuring out what you are, like he's trying to figure out what he is. He's heard that there are these famous accounts.

[01:10:47] And so he learns Latin not to be pompous, but to like, you know, his equivalent of Googling, it's just gonna take him a while to like learn to Latin, read the Bliny. And then be like a little disappointed

[01:11:01] that these were the ones that are written of in history. Like that's not, like I'm not that. I'm like completely. It's like the thing that like if you have some condition or something, like you want to immediately look up to see like if other people have this condition

[01:11:19] or even if you've seen a movie and nobody's seen and there's nobody for you to talk to. Who's seen you want other people. I think he's looking to connect with other people. But you know, you remind me when I was defending my dissertation

[01:11:31] and I was on the job market, I got an attack of hives all over my body. I used to get hives. I am allergic to dust mites. And so I used to get hives as a kid. As an adult, like they went away. I was still allergic.

[01:11:46] I would sneeze and stuff and every once in a while I'd get a little puffy, but I hadn't gotten hives in years. So I'm defending my dissertation. I'm on the job market. And I guess maybe it was stress or anxiety that triggered this,

[01:11:59] but all of a sudden my entire body broke out in hives. Just covered. Like there was no spot aside from my face and my hands that didn't have hives on it and they were like connected. And I remember going to the internet

[01:12:15] and looking up Urtakaria to see pictures and not seeing anybody who looked as bad as me. And thinking those aren't hives, these are hives. Yeah, right. That's exactly what that's not perfect memory. Can we talk about like, so there's this somewhat famous black mirror

[01:12:39] where you can have something installed in your eye that will just record everything from your perspective that you, that you see and you will always have the option of going back and looking at it. And then also the Ted Chang's, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

[01:12:59] also has a technology like that. And it doesn't make the people who have it not be able to think. It does give them at least access to anything Erennial has access to, but not immediately. Like they have to, they can turn it off, right?

[01:13:24] Like they have to turn it on to make it work. So there's something different about Erennial who has no ability to switch this off that actually sort of attacks and then eats away at his ability to function as a normal human being. Whereas these people don't have that

[01:13:52] because even though they have access to the same information, they also have access to not having the information. And in fact, I think that some cases of memory are like that where the people who do these memory feats like the world memory championships

[01:14:05] or the people who can like, remember like they'll meet, they'll memorize 100 people that they meet right there. Like the people who do these sort of side shows to show off their memory. Those people are using techniques to memorize that are effortful.

[01:14:25] And so they can choose to recall or choose not to. But there are cases of people, they're not that many of them, but they're called highly superior, HSAM, highly superior autobiographical memory. Those people, it's intrusive. They can't help, but it's only autobiographical. So they can't help, but remember,

[01:14:47] if you were to say like July 12th, 1989, that whole day would come flooding into their mind like everything they did that day. And so they can't help, they can't stop that from entering their mind. And it feels like Funes has something like that,

[01:15:07] but on steroids where those people don't have like, I'm looking right now at the wood grain of my desk. I am perceiving the pattern. There's no way in hell that I would remember like the details of that pattern. Even if I had an amazing autobiographical memory

[01:15:25] like these people, that's not gonna be one of the things they remember. There's still a big filter like on memory, which is what are the things that you remember? So Funes has this curse or gift or whatever where everything that enters his senses becomes an encoded memory.

[01:15:44] Right, and it's indiscriminate. And then it's indiscriminate and it's intrusive. Yeah. And I guess that's the thing that I'm wondering like would it have to be that way? And maybe it does. I'm thinking of like if I think of my wedding day

[01:15:59] or I think of some big event in my life, the day Eliza was like, I have memories of that, but number one in a weird way they're constructed. They're not a replica of like my perspective at that time, which is I think a key difference.

[01:16:17] Like even with my accurate memories, they're still constructed. Number two, like there are things I remember like I remember seeing Eliza's head for the first time. I remember walking down the aisle. I remember like if I'm Funes, I'm gonna remember with equal vividness

[01:16:34] like every time I went to the bathroom or every time like I scratch myself. Seems like he's lost the ability to even tell what's important in that memory and what's not. Yeah, exactly. Even worse is what I was gonna say. Even worse than what you're describing

[01:16:51] is when I talk about memory and sensation and perception to my class, I always try to describe it as a sort of filter. Like there's all this stuff out there in the world and some of it hits your senses, right? Like you see some light,

[01:17:06] you don't see the whole spectrum of energy. You hear some sounds. Some of that stuff enters what's called sensory memory. It's like literally in and out that I saw like a blade of grass as I was walking my dog today like this specific blade of grass.

[01:17:21] It entered my eyes and it got processed in my brain but my brain knows immediately that that's meaningless. So it doesn't even make my short-term memory let alone my long-term memory. It seems as if the way that Borges wants to describe

[01:17:36] Funes' memory is a way in which it's no, it doesn't exist for anybody which is that blade of grass moving in the wind is as vivid as seeing your daughter's head appear. Right, exactly. Yeah, so zero prioritization on information or on sensory. Right, yeah.

[01:17:55] And I guess the question I had was and like this gets more metaphysical too like if you press it, but is there any reason why he can't emotionally favor some memories over the other while still remembering them? But like is there any reason

[01:18:14] or is it like the whole reason that we can prioritize like the importance of certain events is because our memory is already doing it for us kind of like our memory is already kind of filtering out what's not important and what's important. And if you have perfect memory

[01:18:30] then you can't ever like build that structure of systematizing like what is actually matters to remember and what doesn't, what was important or significant for you or what wasn't, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, totally. I think you're right.

[01:18:46] So some of it is done maybe just automatically by the brain, a lot of it is done by either purposeful or non-so purposeful attention like whatever captures your attention has a better shot of, right? So but it's interesting though that you talk about emotion

[01:19:04] because the same people who have studied these people with highly superior autobiographical memories they have done a lot of the work on the role of emotion in memory. And so it just is true of the human brain that things that are emotional are more likely to be remembered.

[01:19:23] And we have like a decent understanding of how that works. So it actually just solidifies those memories when you have an emotion accompanying it. And it seems as if what we can infer is that whatever brain damage he had or whatever deficit he had

[01:19:38] that mechanism is completely broken. He's not prioritizing at all. Right, because it doesn't need to anymore like emotional, if emotional resonance is needed to like help discern which memories to discard and which memories to keep. Like you don't need that if you're gonna just keep every single memory.

[01:19:55] Or that maybe he's have a deficit in the emotional mechanisms. And so he does keep every memory because nothing gets highlighted, right? Everything gets like sort of weighted equally. And that's crazy to think that like the way that a blade of grass was moving

[01:20:10] in the wind and the way that the light was glistening off of it would have the same level of vividness and take up the same amount of space in your mind as the first time you saw your daughter being born. And now we're from our sponsor, BetterHelp.

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[01:23:00] Our thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. Are they incompatible? And maybe they are for empirical reasons, not conceptual reasons. But it seems like you could imagine somebody with this perfect recall who is still able to decide which memories made him happier.

[01:23:21] And also just again at a more metaphysical level would be able to say as we understand dogs that's the same dog. This is what I don't fully get about it. The reason I think Jen is the same Jen when I'm gonna go down and see her.

[01:23:38] I haven't seen her since this morning when I go down and see her in the evening that that's the same Jen is not because I think she looks identical to the same Jen that I saw this morning, but just that I know that she lives in the house.

[01:23:52] You can infer a real look. Yeah, it's like the way it attacks his ability to generalize, it's not clear to me how that follows from perfect memory. And especially for someone who didn't have perfect memory before. And so who gets that people refer to someone

[01:24:13] as the same person even if they look different or they see them from a different angle. And also people who get, oh, pieces of fruit that look like this, we call that a pear. Even though there are different pears and there are different kinds of fruits

[01:24:26] that are ambiguous or whatever, what I never fully got about his condition is why it attacks his ability to generalize just even in pragmatic ways so strongly. Why it just obliterates that so strongly. Why it just obliterates that capacity. The way I understood it was,

[01:24:46] but there's a couple of things that I think you're saying one is even if he has perfect recall why can't he still prioritize? But you're putting the cart before the horse and maybe this is the empirical part, which is the prioritizing is what makes you remember.

[01:25:02] So that's why in a normal person we forget most things that ever happened. The only things we remember are things that we prioritize whether they're prioritized because they caused us to have an emotion or whether we chose to rehearse them like in memory

[01:25:17] because the prioritizing isn't happening anywhere near like the low levels that it's happening to us. Like I know to ignore the blade of grass, it sticks in there and it won't leave. And so that's one part and I think that's just-

[01:25:31] So is the idea that like if my brain was already filtering out like a lot of the differences between Charlie two days ago and Charlie now I would really not be able to like get- Well, so okay, well that's the second part

[01:25:45] because I don't know that it follows that that would be the case but I think this is what Borges wants to say what does it mean to say that something is the same? It means that you are forgetting and this is the money shot of the article

[01:25:59] is that it is to forget a difference and he can't forget any of those differences. He's like, no I get that to you it's the same as if an alien would say David and Tamler are both human and he would never bother to think

[01:26:14] that they're two different humans. He can't do that with blades of grass and he can't even do that with time which is interesting. My little pushback is me remembering you as the same David Pizarro from 10 years ago. I don't think that me thinking

[01:26:34] that you're still David Pizarro is because I forget all the differences between David Pizarro at in 2012 and David Pizarro now. I feel like I'm just acknowledging that we call somebody the same person even though there are a ton of differences and it may be that like they're completely

[01:26:55] not how you remember them the next time you see them. It's still the same person because that's our convention of, we call the same person with the biological lifespan that person but we're not necessarily forgetting all the differences. Now maybe the idea is okay

[01:27:15] you're acknowledging that there are differences but if you really knew how many differences there are like the thing that makes you even have this convention is the first place is that you focus more on the similarities and personality, similarities in space and time, similarities

[01:27:31] but if you really knew how different everybody was we just wouldn't even have that convention in the first place and it wouldn't make sense. Is that the idea? I think so I think what we're getting is maybe a slow decline into an inability

[01:27:51] to reason as well because obviously he remembers Borges from the first trip. So it's not that he can't- And he knows to ask him. And he knows to ask him, he knows to write him. So it's not that he can't,

[01:28:01] the feeling that I got is that as this memory condition where he remembers everything and remembers all of the differences the differences are intrusive because he can't, forget them that he's developing, the way that I read it is that he was developing a metaphysics

[01:28:26] where he is now perplexed at what it even means to say that something is the same. Because he experiences everything as so different each time in the real Heraclitus kind of way. Like he's actually experiencing it that way. So his metaphysics is kind of changing

[01:28:43] and that's why I feel like he's systematizing in a way that's so odd where he gives every number a name as opposed because God, and it feels like he's going to continue, like at some point he won't even be happy saying it's the same number.

[01:29:02] No, he's a true particularist, he's a true- And I feel like in decline, his metaphysics is in decline as this has taken over his life. Or progressing. Or progressing, right? He is like, if Parfit bit the bullet experientially

[01:29:16] and was like, no, I really am not the same person. You really are not the same person. Like I'm going to act as if that's true. That's what I like about the phrasing of it irritated him that the dog at 314 from this angle.

[01:29:29] It's like the use of irritation or in some translations, I think it's bothered, but like it suggests that this is an ongoing process. It's not that his, like it's just like why would we have a metaphysics where this dog that looks so different at this moment

[01:29:45] is also this, it's not that he doesn't get that by convention that's what the deal is. It's that it just seems so like incomprehensibly like stupid to him. It's like, it's like, it's just as no more similar than like another dog that I would be looking at

[01:30:02] from the same angle. Like, you know, like, like that should be the same dog because I'm looking from the exact same angle or something like that. Yeah, no, that's a great way to put it. That irritated, that's totally right. That irritation he knows, he knows,

[01:30:15] but it would be like you and I encountering somebody who was like, hey, look at that. We saw it yesterday and we were like, what are you talking about? That's an elephant. And you just realized that they were talking about gray things and like they were referring

[01:30:26] to a rock from like, no, it's a gray thing. Like you telling me that's not a gray thing. You're like, but there are so many other. Yeah, that irritation. And he kind of knows, he says, my memory sir is like a garbage heap.

[01:30:40] He knows that something is wrong or at least different. I think he's increasingly convinced that he's right. Right, he's right, but it's like, he also knows that it's like destructive in a certain way. Like it's a tragic story in that sense.

[01:30:56] And that like, I think at least definitely the way he perceives it, he is gaining more accuracy at the expense of being a functional person at least. And I don't know, like you could read into the pulmonary congestion, like that's how he dies.

[01:31:13] Is it like just too much? Like everybody needs oxygen, but maybe like too much oxygen or, you know. Maybe he stopped being able to tell the difference between oxygen and nitrogen. Yeah, there was something like that. Or you took too much. Here's the other thing that seems

[01:31:31] like such a difference in kind. One of the things that you become aware of as you get older, memory really is a construction. And a lot of your memories, even like memories that you have with other people are like joint constructions.

[01:31:45] It's not like the black mirror thing at all. Like an example that I wanted to say from this, because it just happened like this summer I was on the camping trip with Eliza. And I told her this story about how like

[01:31:59] one of my friends from high school, Ed and me got lost in this hotel. And we were going from just this kind of abandoned hotel going to different floors. And I had this vague memory, but I could see us both doing that at some point.

[01:32:10] And she was like, that was me and Sadie. And I told you that story. So I had literally co-opted her memory, made it into my memory with like my analog of that friend. And like, and it's just like, it just,

[01:32:30] and then I realized I must do that all the time even with ones that aren't like literally somebody else's memory that I have just like. And that's so in that sense, it's like completely different what we experience with memory and what he experiences. Yeah, no, absolutely.

[01:32:49] There's a, I know exactly what you mean. And it's true. Like this is why we have false memories all the time because we tend to talk about things. So like the famous studies on these flash bulb memories where people say they remember exactly where they were

[01:33:04] when this happened, when people went back and researched it they found out that a lot of those memories weren't accurate at all. And it's because we rehearse those events with each other. So like if I ask you where you were during 9-11

[01:33:17] we've talked about, you talk about it so much with other people, you start incorporating that shit into your own story and unable to distinguish. Like, yeah. But you feel them as memories as much as anything that turns out to be a true like or more or less accurate.

[01:33:36] And it really is an active act. And so I think that's like such a big difference probably then in terms of your metaphysics. If everything that happens before you is something that you're constructing in your mind then you're clearly bringing so much to the table

[01:33:52] in terms of processing. Like it is a Kantian thing. It's a very Kantian thing where you're just importing all sorts of categories, not just space and time and duration or whatever. But like you're imposing all these things on your past as you understand it.

[01:34:09] Some of them that are approximately accurate and some of them are completely made up but there's something that's making you do all those things that like completely will affect how you understand reality. Yeah, even at the level of sensation and perception

[01:34:26] you have this where it's like little kids, infants learn really quickly that what an object is and like that a glass on a table is a glass on a table not like some sort of glass table thing. Like they develop or they come depending who you ask.

[01:34:48] They either learn it really fast or they came in knowing what those rules are and those shared rules mean we have a shared reality. And so the metaphysics becomes a shared one where it's like glasses are a thing, tables are a thing, table glasses aren't a thing. Right.

[01:35:08] You know, right. And it feels like Funes' metaphysics is just getting fucked because it isn't including categories anymore. It only has instances. Everything is all one thing. Everything is or... A river, it's the Heracliton River. Right. And so there is no category that contains two things.

[01:35:31] All right, everything is its own thing. Yeah. And so there's a kind of holisticness to his experience which is it's like, you work towards this and some Buddhist practices but that everything is just this flow, this ocean of like non-dual consciousness and the categories that we impose,

[01:35:51] the distinctions that we impose are, that's our contribution. But everything is just the same stuff completely and totally always in flux. Very Heracliton. And I do get the sense that Borges is trying to portray that that is how he sees the world

[01:36:10] but not in a way that makes him, I don't know, blissful or enlightened. So this is what confused me because I get what you're saying and I get how that might be the result of somebody who has funes as a way of processing these memories

[01:36:26] but it's very much described as not oneness. So I could see like being overwhelmed by the fact that there are 18 billion things and then treating it all as one sort of stream but he's like, I feel like what's bothering him here is that he's seeing 18 billion things,

[01:36:43] not like 18 things like you and I are seeing. Right, right exactly. And it's certainly not one thing, one harmonious whole that he's seeing because he talks about things as having their own kind of separate existence. I wonder if that's cause he's in this transitional period

[01:37:00] like you were saying before. I mean maybe, I mean, he dies at pulmonary condition. He dies in pulmonary condition. But maybe had he not died of that, he could have, like it could be like this is this sort of really uncomfortable interstitian period, this transitional state.

[01:37:20] There's some stuff that we definitely, I definitely wanted to get to like the systems that he starts working with where he starts where he says that he's going to develop a system of enumeration. But what bothers him is that numbers are treated

[01:37:40] as like 100 or 200, they're just like one of this thing and two of this thing. When in reality, they're all like 100 different things so they should each have their own name. Their own name, yeah. So he applies this mad principle to the other numbers

[01:37:54] instead of 7,013 he would say Maximo Perez. This is a part where I think Borges is just like hilarious. Like I think Borges is having some fun with that. He says instead of 7,014 it would be the railroad. Other numbers were Luis Mellian, La Finur, Olimar,

[01:38:10] Sulphur, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, Astu Patin, Napoleon, Agostin Devede, instead of 500 he said nine. Yeah, I love that. Instead of 500 he said nine. Yeah. So they're always on the borderline of going crazy. Like there's a here is like this, you know, Talaan, Oak Park.

[01:38:30] They're always like as they get put in touch with the infinite it's never like this kind of transcendent like great. Like it's just like they're going fucking insane. Right. You know, he says his own face in the mirror.

[01:38:46] So right after that dog example that you were talking about he says his own face in the mirror, his own hand surprised him every time he saw them. Which is kind of interesting because it means that he's still at the point where he's expecting

[01:38:57] to see the category him. And now he's seeing like a different. Exactly, that's the like cause he's in this transitional phase where he hasn't given fully to the flow. But when he sees himself and the just the vast differences

[01:39:13] that there must be between even if he, you know, is wearing the same clothes and like so many differences like it's just like there's no way that could be me. Like it's like every time there's some completely different person in the mirror, you know. Right, right.

[01:39:27] And so because now his experience is made up of so many more things, like I guess metaphysically things, he wants to develop this a catalog of vocabulary to give each of those things a name. So the dog at 315, you know, this is one of those

[01:39:42] like mind blowing things like the author of the Quixote. He's just pushing my mind's like ability to even grasp what yeah, it's a process. Like he wants everything to have a name. So he starts doing it, but he realizes that it's doomed

[01:39:58] because it takes him one full day to remember all the details of one full day. So he might be able to catalog his childhood memories, but it will, but you know, it'll be old. Yeah, I love that. 10 lifetimes to really do that. All right.

[01:40:13] And so then it says to getting toward the end here that he couldn't sleep because to sleep Borges says is to take one's mind from the world. It's actually in the Spanish is to distract yourself from the world and Funez lying on his back

[01:40:29] and the darkness of his room could picture every crack in the wall, every molding of the precise houses that surrounded him. So this is what I think is so like such an interesting idea. He in order to fall asleep, he has to imagine houses in a neighborhood

[01:40:46] that is completely unfamiliar to him that he's never seen before because there he can imagine homogeneous houses. And in the ability to like not notice all the differences his mind can finally rest off and fall asleep. Yeah, that's so interesting.

[01:41:03] And you know, it was inspired as you texted me by his own insomnia and at times he talks about it as if it's a metaphor for insomnia. But, and we all have this experience of your mind racing and you can't fall asleep. But I love this idea

[01:41:24] that the thing that allows you to fall asleep is not that you stop thinking but you start your thinking is a fuzzier things. It's when you're like, it's when you're really remembering things, something you did that day or something you have to do tomorrow or something like,

[01:41:38] and it all feels very sharp and vivid. That's when you're really struggling to sleep. But when your memories get kind of more hazy then you can actually relax and fall asleep. Yeah, count sheep only focus on the one thing not all the things. Yeah, and even counting sheep,

[01:41:53] like what does that mean? Like you've never seen sheep like jump over a little railing before. So you're just kind of, so you have a very vague picture of that in your head. You know what I mean? Right. That's sad. Like there's a, again,

[01:42:06] there's always a little bit of a tragic element to his stuff. You know, we had this amazing MC Escher exhibit that just came to Houston. It's been here all summer. I've seen it three times. And I'm not like an art person really,

[01:42:19] but like this exhibit like had all of like, pretty much all of his like his most famous works. Like there's like 50 masterpieces in this exhibit, probably more. That's super cool. It's so fucking amazing. And he was also, I think in conjunction influenced by Borjas,

[01:42:35] I think they had interacted, but they're both have this fascination with the infinite. And a lot of Escher stuff is about these kind of infinite loops, these Mobius strips, these, but with Escher you get this sense of just abulience like this excitement.

[01:42:51] This just, it's this kind of nonstop playfulness that there's some dark themes in some of them, but the overall sense you get is of this like bursting with enthusiasm, all these new ideas, all these cool things to think about. One of the really interesting things about Borjas is

[01:43:09] like he's fascinated by these ideas, but there's always a weight to them. There's a cost, you know? Totally, totally. And he makes you feel it like in this story at the end here. So he says, in the teeming world of Ironeo Funyes, there was nothing but particulars

[01:43:31] and they were virtually immediate particulars. In the Spanish it says, it uses different words there. It says something like there weren't even details, they were only immediacies. So like he's not even, like instances are their own details like that parsing through time is like enough.

[01:43:52] And then Borjas says, which gets to that sentiment that you're describing, Ironeo was 19, he had been born in 1868. He looked to me as monumental as bronze, older than Egypt, older than the prophecies and the pyramids. I was struck by the thought that every word I spoke,

[01:44:09] every expression of my face or motion of my hand would endure in his implacable memory. I was rendered clumsy by the fear of making pointless gestures. The Spanish is more like I was frozen in fear. And so he's afraid that like just him moving

[01:44:26] is like filling up this guy's mind with useless information. And that can't be good for him. Right, because there's something earlier, I wanna find it where he says, he doesn't just remember things, every time he remembers them, he remembers remembering that.

[01:44:43] And then he remembers remembering the remembering of it. And so every memory spins off a possible infinite number of memories because it is infinite, his capacity, right? And again, it's like Asher plays with this where he has like himself, like self-portrait

[01:45:00] looking into a sphere and then you see like his face in the sphere holding another sphere and like it goes on. But in this case, like you said, it's like this is really bad. This is driving crazy. And like he doesn't wanna add

[01:45:15] to like some new infinite sequence of memories of, you know? It reminds me of the that quote that I love from Borges about mirrors and copulation multiplying. Yes. It's like I don't want now- That's in Emma Zunz, right? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah.

[01:45:34] He doesn't want to multiply it in the mind of Erineo because, you know, and when I took this to me, I don't know if you did, but when he says that he looked as monumental as bronze older than Egypt, in his mind, he contained the same amount of

[01:45:51] in whatever information, memories as a civilization would. And so he's feeling the weight of that. You can see on his face that he is as old as the pyramids, even though he's only 19. Right. And that's so sad too that he's 19. I know, it's so sad. Yeah.

[01:46:07] He was always clearly a precocious kid, you know? But like, yeah, like he's lived like 8,000 lifetimes, but painful lifetimes by the time he dies at 21. And what makes me sad is what you pointed out that I hadn't thought of that he would be

[01:46:25] that he would be picking up those Latin books just to try to find out what was wrong with him and finding that nobody else, he was alone in this. Nobody else had that. Like those were parlor tricks. He's like the weight of the fucking metaphysics.

[01:46:37] Like metaphysics is multiplying in his head at a rate that it has for no man before him. Yeah, it's like if you were a mind reader all of a sudden and could be other people's mind and then you wanna hear of other people's mind readers

[01:46:50] and you know, oh no, that's just a fucking trick that they're playing on the audiences. Yeah, you know, it's funny. Like one of the things I love about this podcast, like something like that I didn't think of, it just came up in the conversation

[01:47:02] and that idea just popped into my head as we were talking based on something you just said. This is one of those things where just talking about something is part of interpretation. It's part of how you understand things. And we can't, it would be wrong to credit

[01:47:19] either of us for ideas sometimes when we have them as a process of like the dialectic. I don't know what word to say. It's an emergent property of us. Marxist dialectic, right? No, maybe a Hegelian. That undersells it I think. It's a Hegelian dialect. Hegelian.

[01:47:44] So there is that thing that you're pointing out about the difference between Escher and Borges. And I remember where, oh, it's in Borges and I where he says this Borges, I also like to play games with infinity. I think he uses that phrase games with infinity.

[01:48:04] And that's what Escher is doing. Borges is playing games with infinity that have like a tragic, like there is that the tragedy. There is like peering into infinity and being, it's a bit of horror. Yeah. And there's a weariness. There's a wild bill kind of weariness to it.

[01:48:31] Just like the heaviness. And in this case, it's just infinity that's causing that in some form or another. He's great. You know, we should wrap this up. Yes, we have to. Irina Funez died in 1889 of pulmonary congestion. Tamler. On looking at yourself in the mirror topic,

[01:48:49] I never really understood like what it must feel like viscerally for him until today. Like I'm doing this team taught great books course that I do in the fall. And you go to a lecture and then I had to go teach my section right after that.

[01:49:00] And it was down for her. And I never bring an umbrella. So it was a downpour. I just got a haircut and I go into the bathroom. I see my class. I'm like, hey, I'm just gonna go like dry off cause I got completely drenched.

[01:49:11] And you know, I have a decent head of hair for a man of my years, but like when the rain is all down on it, like you could just see what a facade it was. It's like one of those Hollywood like fronts

[01:49:24] of like, to the point that I didn't know that. And I saw in my head and it's like, just these streaks down otherwise like bald head, just these streaks of hair. And I'm like, who the fuck is that? Like what is that? Who's that? Jesus Christ.

[01:49:40] That's how he must feel like every time. Like, what is that? Like I would not have recognized. I didn't think you could put as much, you could pour a bucket of water on my head. I did not think like I could look like that. That's why I don't,

[01:49:52] that's why I refuse to let people take pictures from above and behind me. Yeah, I know. That's what time will do to us all. Hey, Tamler, happy 10 year anniversary, but I'm realizing it could be like a billion anniversary. Who said we had to divide it up by years?

[01:50:08] Exactly. What does it even mean to say happy? Happy sulfur anniversary. Happy sulfur. Happy fourth anniversary. All right, join us next time on Very Bad Berserk. Brain in! Brains in U.S. Anybody can have a brain? Good man, just a very bad wizard.