Mr Richards on technology, information, and people

I am in the middle of reading Borges's Collected Fictions (translated by Andrew Hurley) and have already concluded the man was a genius. Most recently, as of a few minutes ago I completed reading Funes, His Memory.

First off, I appreciate the translation note that said in the original Spanish the title was "Funes el memorioso." Yes, there is no exact translation into English for "el memorioso," which basically means "the guy with lots of memory," but to leave it as Funes, His Memory is to almost say the story was about Funes's memory. But it is about Funes and his inability to think.

Funes is "virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas" but has the most amazing memory in the world. He learns the entire Latin language in a week - from a book written in Latin and a dictionary. He proposes a new numbering system based on words - having memorized that 7014 is equal to "railroad." The narrator, in talking to Funes, disagrees and says this is not a system.

Funes and Locke agree that a language with each thing having its own name is disagreeable, but for differing reasons. Whereas Locke thinks the detail too much, Funes thinks it too little. And that's the problem with the ability to recall each and every experience - to never forget - by that same token he can never think.

Borges writes, through his narrator, that: "To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract."

Its a powerful statement and one that should be compared to the cheapening cost of new hard drives and cloud computing storage space. Do you really need 24 days of songs in your iTunes? Do you require photos, every one, to be kept throughout for the next 30 years?

I think all this digital storage is a great thing but at a certain point you have to compromise. Every one experience cataloged, stored, and re-experienced is another new experience that may never have time to happen.