Memory is the metaphysical foundation of human life. It’s not genetics. It’s not DNA. it’s not mitochondria. It’s the storage in your brain, in your cells, and in the nervous system. Beyond the traditional idea of memory as things we felt, we know that memory and traumas can transcend generations though you it experience it differently than your ancestor did. Every night we go to sleep and feel the weight of every choice, every late-night doubt, every time you felt love, disgust, anger, laughter.
ChatGPT’s new memory feature—referencing all your previous chats to deliver better and more intimate conversations, answers, and style. It was exciting. Not because it’s some sci-fi leap, but because memory isn’t just tech. It’s the pulse of being human. Without it, you’re not just lost—you’re gone. For all the talk about AGI or the singularity being near, even the best AIs lacked a human form of memory that is experienced as more than data. It’s the surprise, the randomness, and the serendipity that is the essence of memory.
In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time he wrestles with memory’s grip. The way he describes lying in bed, half-asleep, as his mind drifts to old rooms he’s lived in, walls and furniture flickering back like ghosts. That’s memory—slipping in uninvited, stitching your past to your now. Sometimes it grabs you violently through the endless night. It can be triggered by everything from the Proustian Madeleine to the sound of a page turning.
It’s why Alzheimer’s is in many ways my greatest fear. It erases the only thing eternal in this universe. It slowly takes away the human spark. It starts covertly: forgetting where you put something, then why you’re there at all, eventually tormenting your soul with forgetting who you are. It’s not forgetting but violent erasure. You’re like a book with pages torn out until there are none left.
The cloud-based memory of ChatGPT should prevent such tragedies but it’s a vibrant painting demonstrating that memory is defined by it’s loss more than by what’s remembered. According to Samo Burja, the reason civilizations collapse is because knowledge is lost. The scale from individual to civilization is no accident.
Yes, yes, this is a dramatic tale—how can you leap from a new core feature of an LLM to the feast or famine of civilization? It’s a stark reminder that simply recalling the past is critical towards building the future. After all a computer is only as useful as what it can store. Memory it can access and understand is critical to what it can do going forward. Maybe it can’t yet understand the smirk you get when you remember some seductive moment but this is the first step.
Some like to gesticulate wildly that we live in some type of simulation. We can’t know or disprove that. It seems unlikely. However, memory is the key component in simulating anything. Why? Because every comparison you make, every improvement you try to make, every change you try to make, everything you wish you’d done differently is impossible without memory. Memory is the simulation itself.
So what does this mean for lengthy chats with ChatGPT on everything from perfecting your margarita to deploying massive probability projects with trillions of pieces of data? It means it has a better understanding of you and your project. If you tried a problem a million times you’ll eventually run into the issue of running the same sequence many times. You can finally live in the simulation some hope for since every decision compared with memory is itself the simulation.
With memory, you can actually file away what you did in the past and compare to it to everything else. Memory is what may actually give deliverance on the intelligence aspect of the AI equation.
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time