If you removed all memories from a person, would they live according to the patterns of their past, or would they live in a new way?If you removed all memories from a person, would they live according to the patterns of their past, or would they live in a new way? Two possibilities coexist. The first is that preferences imprinted in DNA or patterns lingering in the unconscious would cause them to repeat past behaviors; the second is that, because memory has been extinguished, they would build a new framework of cognition based on newly given information, and so—while perhaps similar to the past—they could not help but live differently. Neither case has been quantitatively explored across a large population, so no one knows what the outcome would be, and due to ethical problems there is no way to conduct such an experiment or to find out. But a thought experiment is at least possible. At least on myself. One approaches the problem on the assumption that one's past background, knowledge, and experience have all been removed. With no memory of myself, there is nothing I am good at and nothing I am bad at. Since I don't know what I possess, I don't know what resources to use. Then in the end, in order to find the resources and abilities I already had, I would have no choice but to try this and that.
The conclusion of this thought experiment is quite reasonable. Without the abilities given to you and the decades of background you've lived through, a human is in fact treated by society as a useless, surplus being. So to learn and do something new effectively means entering the lowest stratum of society and starting from the bottom, whereas examining the weapons and talents one already has is the work of exploring the possibility of standing above such a from-the-bottom start. This becomes even clearer when thought of mathematically. Up to a certain point in life it is advantageous to verify, through judgment and trial, the functions, talents, and weapons one possesses; spending time beyond that point in exploration alone creates disadvantages for manifesting, developing, or monetizing one's talents. That is, exploration is permitted, but doing nothing but exploring until death cannot be an economic choice.
Some people discover their talents and weapons very early in life, but that very thing can become a curse for them. It is a kind of beta-stable state. What they thought was a perfectly fitting garment turns out to have been a straitjacket. Therefore, examining oneself solely through past experience or through the talents of one's youth is dangerous to generalize from. Rather, one needs to look back at oneself with a gaze that collapses one's own foundations at regular intervals. It is a thought experiment about oneself—asking, if I did not have this talent or this effort, with what and in what position would I be?
For me, this kind of thought experiment is regular. I don't do it intentionally. I simply trace things back from the root. About the ground I stand on. About the fire I am touching. About the water I have held. And I contemplate it. About what would happen if I discarded all of this ground, fire, and water. Put in simpler and rougher terms, you could call it business. If I abandoned my current business, what work could I do? Or you could call it occupation. If I abandoned my current occupation, what occupation would I choose?
Fate, mercilessly, has taken time away from everyone equally, and because of that everyone heads toward the same ending. However grand it may seem, the end is the same. Extinction. But during the time breath remains, what a human can enjoy is to be placed in this remote planet, in a situation where one does not even know where one came from, given the mission of survival, exposed dizzyingly and roughly, journeying through all kinds of things with the given environmental conditions and the seed value one has been assigned. What value, from a cosmic perspective, does it have where each individual entity heads and what they experience? What meaning does it have?
It is a funny thing. Truly a funny thing. The deception of everything is exposed right here. Because of a foolish mother, a wrong start was inherited from the very beginning, and so everything built upon it is dizzying and chaotic, and nothing can be set in order. She ought to know shame. If it had been possible, she should have extinguished herself. If she had truly known the value of it. But just as she taught humans not to be able to die, it stands as a cursed inheritance handed down from the beginning. The evil deeds she piled up with lies and deception cannot be repented for through any apology.