Prompt: Leonard relies upon scribbled notes to connect him to his past. He says that eyewitness testimony is worthless: “Memory can change the shape of a room…” Is he right? Do you think our memories are more reliable than his notes? Hume says identity is just a habit we have. Do you think Hume would see Leonard’s condition as any different from our own?
“Memory can change the shape of a room…” from personal experience I have no other choice than to agree with Leonard’s statement. In life our past experiences and the emotions connected to those certain experiences and memories can cause us to respond in either a positive or negative way. These emotional responses have the ability to shape our memories of an entire situation in such a way that the whole memory can reflect the emotions we felt in that moment. With this being said I do believe that memories are more reliable than a note or even someone else’s view on the same experience. In my own life I have trouble remembering certain parts of my life and I would have to say that just using some little memento or photograph to remember everything is pretty difficult. It is hard to tell if a certain photograph can tell you the story of an entire day or segment of your life, photographs are easily manipulated and changed to a point where they can tell an entirely different story. A perfect example of this is from a scene near the end of the movie where Leonard burns a photo, manipulates his notes, and essentially creates a whole new narrative for his life to follow. I think Hume wouldn’t see Leonards condition as any different than our own because Hume states that “identity is nothing really belonging to these different perceptions, and uniting them together, but is merely a quality, which we attribute to them, because of the union of their ideas in the imagination, when we reflect on them,” (Hume, 325-326). Leonard has his past memories and he has his photos that act as memory fillers which he reflects on daily to keep them fresh in his head. He also has the ability to separate specific memories that he made and turn those memories into a whole other person named Sammy giving him an entire made up narrative that for all we know is only real to Leonard and everyone he tells.
word count: 406
source: https://thinkingbeings.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/hume-on-id.pdf
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