Consciousness and False Memory

 

Because conscious awareness always follows brain awareness, an argument can be made that conscious awareness is simply the post representation of short term memory resulting from brain awareness created from sensory input from events as they occur. This conscious awareness is fraught misinterpretations of events as they actually happen.  As such eyewitness testimony is the most unreliable evidence in court trials.

Memory, of course, can be stored for longer periods of time than that experienced immediately following an event as brain memory and recalled to consciousness at some future time when prompted by some stimulus to the brain. You can, for example, witness an event such as, say, a murder and store it in brain memory for recall when the policeman investigating the crime questions you or you are on questioned on the witness stand at a subsequent trial. But you may "remember" things you BELIEVE happened that, in fact, never actually happened, happened differently, or happened not at all as and stored as false memory.

You may be shown proof that the event never happened or happened differently but you will continue to remember the false memory of the event until lost to long-term brain memory, or forgotten. A false memory is indelible.

False memories may begin as true memories that transmogrify into false memories as the brain adds to and subtracts from the memory over time. Memory is malleable. And, so it is that consciousness awareness of reality is always subject to error.

 Once again we find that consciousness is always a step removed from reality. and is sometimes a false or altered representation of fact. The event is real. The sensory data received and processed is real. But the memory of the event is not and the conscious awareness of the event is not. And, once again, consciousness deceives us as an arbiter of the reality of existence because the false memory is, in fact, not a truth of any kind. This only compounds the problem of lack of conscious awareness of truths of our existence and proof of the truths of of it

“All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know." ~ Richard Wilbur (1921-2017)

 Or, more accurately, on the shore of what we BELIEVE we know.