Recall

Which is more important: the experience of something, or the memory of it? Let's say you have the opportunity to either go on the amazing holiday of a lifetime, experience the most supreme pleasure and bliss you will ever experience, and then remember nothing about it afterwards. Alternatively, you could be given the memory of that amazing holiday, but never actually experience it. Presumably the person offering you these options doesn't like you very much. All the same, what would you choose?

I find myself tending towards memory over experience, but I'm not actually convinced that makes any sense. In the extremes, if memory counts and experience doesn't, torturing amnesiacs would be perfectly fine. They won't remember it anyway! Or, more mildly, your life becomes less valuable as your ability to retain memories decreases. Why bother to be nice to forgetful people? For that matter, why be nice to anyone? We all forget in the end.

There's an interesting phenomenon called the peak–end rule, studied by none other than Daniel Kahneman. According to that theory, we remember experiences not in their totality (eg, as the sum of all the individual moments in the experience), but by representative samples: the most intense experience and the most recent experience. That means that, for example, people will prefer longer, less painful surgeries to shorter, more painful ones, even if the total pain is much less in the short surgery.

So this is another angle into the same question: given that knowledge, do you use a surgical technique that causes more total pain but less remembered pain, or vice versa? Especially since people will use their memory to make decisions, so they themselves would choose more pain over less in this instance. And if you go with memory over experience, would your answer be any different if we were talking about an immensely painful surgery with a quick dose of sedatives at the end to wipe out the memory of it?

Perhaps complicating the whole thing is that memory influences experience. A memory isn't just an abstract record; you re-experience the memory as you recall it. So a happy memory makes you smile, an awkward memory makes you cringe, and a painful memory hurts, even though nothing has actually happened to cause that reaction. To really isolate memory from experience would require imagining an alternate human who can do those things separately. Someone who remembers without re-experience.

However, I think even that person has to make decisions based on memory. They would thus choose to repeat the holiday they remembered fondly but enjoyed less at the time, and the surgery that was more painful in total but formed less painful memories. That answer still seems unsatisfying to me, though; isn't this memory distortion spoiling the person's decisions? I mean, if you otherwise tricked someone into thinking a painful thing was less painful they'd go for that option, but it wouldn't be a good decision. On the other hand, that distortion is in fact how we remember, so it's not much good pretending that we don't.

So let's make one more change to our hypothetical: if a person who could remember without re-experience was also making their decisions in advance, with complete knowledge of how the experience would feel at the time, but also aware that their memories would not agree with that experience, how would they decide?

I think, in that case, the only sensible choice is to go with the best experience. Although the memories might not reflect it, those memories would have no emotional consequences. You would want to make the decisions that lead you to the best aggregate experiences regardless of what your faulty memory would tell you about them afterwards. However, this result is not terribly useful because there aren't any people who actually work like that.

But adding re-experience on top of this result isn't so hard: you still want to aim for the best aggregate experience, but you also need to take into account the impact of memory on your future experiences. This means you can't completely disregard your memories when they diverge from reality, but you also don't attempt to optimise for them directly. In most cases, your memories will affect your immediate emotional state less than the present situation. And if you assume that generally holds true over time, it also makes sense to generally choose experience over memory.