In the interview with Professor Gilbert, I found two points that he made extremely interesting. First, he made the case that remembering is in part imagining the past, and that people long ago could imagine themselves looking and feeling a certain way earlier in their lives; similarly, it’s easy for us to imagine and fictionalize how people in the Middle Ages talked and behaved because in both these cases, the documentation of the past, if it existed at all, was in such a format (writings, drawings, etc.) that it gave our minds more leeway to construct a fantasy of what we thought occurred. Now, however, with the proliferation of technology that allows us to capture life exactly as it was – through photos and videos – which decreases the imaginative portion of memory, since we can simply watch old recordings of ourselves to see how we were. In the far future, too, if people want to know what life in the 21st century was like, they would not have to do much fictionalizing; the abundance of social media videos, photos, shows, and movies preserved for eternity will show them exactly what we thought and how we lived. The second point I found interesting was that even if we knew the events that would happen to us, we would not know how we would react to those events – even something as simple as if we’d be happy or not. Professor Gilbert raised the examples of losing one’s job and winning the lottery – two cases where our emotions should be fairly obvious – as examples of why there will always be uncertainty regarding our future lives, even if the facts are presented before us.
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