Funes the Memorious - Jorge Luis Borges
Peter, Fraser, Nick speak with special guest Andres about what Funes's affliction tells us about thinking and perception.
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Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer, and I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. And this week, we're also joined by Andres Taxir, our resident expert on all things Argentinian. This week, we're discussing Funes el Memorioso, or Funes the Memorious, the short story by the Argentine writer and thinker, Jorge Borges. So first of all, if we can start off with yourself, Nick, if you can give us some background as to why Aleph Insights is interested in Borges, and then what we'll do is we'll move over to Andres, and he'll tell us about this particular story. So Nick, start us off.
Speaker B:Well, I've always liked Borges ever since I discovered him, which was probably about 25 years ago. But I've discovered throughout my life that things that he wrote have seemed to be recurrently relevant to things that I've been doing. And a few years ago, when Peter and I were working together, I hadn't established the company at that point, we began to notice that a lot of analytical problems that were superficially very different, all looked similar to one another. And we started calling this the Aleph in homage to one of Borges' stories by the name of Aleph, which is about a sort of point in space that contains all other points. And so we jocularly referred to this idea that actually all analytical problems were fundamentally the same as the Aleph. But we're not actually talking about that. As you said, today, we're talking about Funes, Il Memorioso.
Speaker A:Okay, great. So that sort of gives us the general. So let's go to the particulars. So Andres, if you can just give us an overview of this particular story.
Speaker C:Yeah, I think it's great. Maybe just to start with how this short story came to the mind of Borges, just to understand maybe the story itself. And everything started with a clock, with the chimes of a clock. That was maybe in the in the 40s. And Borges was in a hotel outside Buenos Aires, and he could not sleep. It was a hotel. It was in his room, this kind of big clock, he was chiming every 15 minutes, and he could not sleep. And that made him really aware of his body, of the room, of the trees outside, etc. And he started thinking, to sleep, I need to be able to forget everything that is around. I need to forget myself, my body, my bed, the room, the clock, etc, etc. Borges is really keen in this type of enumeration of things, and so on. And then he said, but I can't, I can't forget, I cannot sleep. And it was a period in his life that he had insomnia, then he was not able to sleep. And he said, what a tragedy could be not be able just to forget, because you cannot sleep. And inspiring that story, Borges create this fantastic short story, this character that is one of the most important characters of the maybe all the literature in Spanish that is Funes el Memorioso, that is simply a guy that he had an accident, and he cannot forget anything. But more than he cannot forget, he has the ability to see everything with a level of detail that is not possible for any
Speaker A:normal human being. So Peter, let's go to you. Can you tell us why is this story interesting?
Speaker D:So Borges explores some very interesting parts of understanding memory, how we make sense of the world in the story. And the this this character's inability to forget the detail he sees and remembers everything that's happened to him as as separate instances. So if he sees a dog, and he sees the same dog again from a different angle to him, they are two different dogs. And this happens with every every chime of a clock, every everything that happens in his life. So this this prevents him from being able to generalize. He can't say, oh, there's a dog. And that dog is like every other dog, because every other dog he sees is a different dog. And he has no, he's less able to abstract to abstract and say that this is a dog. So it must be have similar characteristics to these other dogs. And this story explores how this fundamental ability of ours and Borges even says, to think is to forget in this in this story, that our ability to contemplate abstract concepts relies on our ability to ignore to suppress the detail of any given instance. So we can build more general models for things so we can compare and contrast them.
Speaker A:Okay, let's build on that. Who wants to chip in?
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, I think the the, the way that I've previously explained why, how we can think about the way that Funes is crippled and his ability to think, you know, as Borges says, he's incapable of general platonic ideas is using the example of finding eggs in the supermarket. In in when you're trying to find things in a supermarket, you would generally, you know, if you want to find yogurt, you know that it's yogurt is a type of dairy product. So you can abstract from that and say, you know, well, I'm going to go to the dairy area. If I see milk, then I know that yogurt is going to be nearby. And it's going to be not far from the cheese. And you know, tinned foods are alike in some way that we can just say, well, they're, they're all, you know, tinned foods are united by being in a tin. And that's something we can see. And it fails a bit with eggs, because eggs aren't really like anything, are they? And I always find it hard to find eggs in the supermarket. I could never where I expect they're going to be. They're always just on the end of a shelf somewhere. And I think one way of thinking about the position Funes in is in is that everything is eggs to him. Everything is a unique instance. And and that, you know, that therefore means he's he's unable to, you know, navigate the world in the same way that I find it hard to navigate my way to where the eggs are.
Speaker A:Okay, um, well, look, let's just for a moment, let's just step back a bit. And I definitely want to come back on this and the meanings and the importance of this. But I'm just interested in in the general context, you've explained the story of how Borges was inspired to make this story. I'm interested in how does this fit in with what was happening in Borges life at that time? Or the general context? Why was he interested in this? Or what was going on around that time with him?
Speaker C:Yeah, I think this type of this story is really consistent with it with the work of Borges. This, this short stories included it. There were a couple of different editions, and it was published in a couple of different books, but the better known edition of this book is fiction is in Spanish, I think it's fictions, maybe in English. And, and there are a number of short stories there that are really consistent with this idea. I mean, clearly, Borges was really, really obsessed with the idea of perception, and knowledge, and the idea of what is general and what is detail. Borges has a huge obsession with libraries, with encyclopedias, actually himself, I think that when he was asked, which is his favorite gender, he would, he was saying that the encyclopedia, you know, he loved to read the encyclopedia. I think this obsession with classifying things is a core in Borges. And classification means essentially what you guys were saying before, means that the ability just to take things that are more relevant, and things that are not so relevant, then you have to exclude, you have to filter, and you have to group things according to some criteria could be wrong, could be good, you could agree not, but it's some type of work that you need to capture the nature is there, and you have to process it just to produce something else that we tend to call this type of models, or something like that. And I think it's really pertinent as well with what's going on in the world, I mean, in the 40s, in the 50s, the obsession with gathering data that now today, maybe tomorrow, the obsession is bigger, but this idea that maybe it's impossible to gather information there if we don't have an idea of how you're going to use it. And the problem of Foones is that, that he gathers all the information of the world, but he doesn't know how to use it.
Speaker A:Okay, so this takes the point where all of you have said pretty much is that this is a story or an allegory whereby we see what looks like a super talent, a super desirable thing to be able to do, which is to be able to remember everything together, all information on paper for a moment that looks like a very desirable thing. But actually, it's really an affliction, and it can prevent us. It means that we're not able to abstract. Okay. And actually, one of the things that's key about being a human is our remarkability to thinking in abstraction. Okay. So where do we go from there? I mean, is that it?
Speaker B:Well, I think it might be worth saying that the way that Borges presents the affliction that Foones has is only a hypothesis, right? You know, it's not something which we should necessarily take as fundamentally given. It's not written into the fact that Foones can remember everything. I don't think that actually there's any contradiction between being able to remember everything in perfect detail and being able to generalize. Now, Borges suggests there is a connection, but I don't think it's a necessary one. It's plausible. It makes sense to me that the two things might go hand in hand. But they're not fundamentally joined to one another. But I think, I mean, there's another potential angle here, which is related to something Andres mentioned about data gathering. Just to bring in an example from a project we're doing at the moment about trying to, which is we're looking at ways in which you could recognize that a particular word in a sentence is an object. So if I say the cat sat on the mat, to be able to recognize that the cat and the mat are objects. And you think, well, how could we train our machines to do this? Now, the amount of information in a sentence is absolutely enormous. If you say, well, I want to learn from scratch how to do that, there are so many things that could be relevant in that task. It might be relevant that there's the letter X in the third position in that sentence. Or, you know, it might be relevant that there's a gap before or after a word. Or it might be relevant that the sentence is exactly, you know, let's say 28 characters long rather than 32 characters long. Now, we know that some of those things are completely irrelevant and some are very important. But from a machine which hadn't been told that and had to infer that from just the information it was given in a sentence would not know where to start. There'd just be too many variables. And in a sense, I think there's one way of thinking about where Funes is, is in that he's overwhelmed with variables. You know, which is another way of thinking about why he might be crippled. There are just too many things that could, that he can attend to. And therefore that, you know, any theory he might have about the world is not determined by the data he has because there's so much data. You know, there's more data than there is, you know, there's too many data, too many things that might explain the world that he can see.
Speaker A:Okay. Peter?
Speaker D:Yeah, in the story, there's no indication that Funes has been upgraded in terms of his processing power. So he's still got the cognitive limits that we have. He just hasn't got the ability to get the detail. He's, there may be some, the story might be slightly hypocritical because he's still able to converse. He's still able to sort of function at the level where he's talking to the narrator. So he's still obviously able to sort of, well, well, is he necessarily able to still abstract slightly? Because he's still being able to talk about the concept of this dog and this dog being the same dog, but different in my mind. So he's still able to do it. Here, there's a part of the story, there's a conversation about numbering systems. And he invents a numbering system with 24,000 unique characters, each to describe all numbers up to 24,000. And the narrator discusses how a positional system is superior for various reasons. So he's obviously able to discuss these abstract concepts. So there's, and I sort of decided that if he was really had this, somebody who really had this affliction, they would be paralyzed because they wouldn't have enough processing power to deal with all these memories all the time. But also they, because they are unable to abstract, they wouldn't be able to explain. They wouldn't be able to explain anything. They wouldn't be able to explain what they, how those memories appear to them. The concept of memory itself, just the word wouldn't have any meaning to them.
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, I wonder if I was going to ask Andres, I mean, this is, I think a bit of a problem with the story. But is it something which Borges was aware of or is it something that was necessary to make the story work?
Speaker C:Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. And to be frank, I don't have an answer, but I have an hypothesis. Yeah, I think that I can try to answer in some way. I mean, I read, I think, this story, I don't know, in the past 20, 30 years, I mean, 20, 30 times. But when I read it for today, I pick up something that maybe was not so relevant before. That is, there's a huge obsession with the language. And clearly, and it's not by chance, it's Borges. He's writing, he's using words, and he's really obsessed with which words to use. And I think a good part of the trick, the way to sort out all the problems, what Peter was saying, that the fact that Furness, at the end of the day, was able to communicate what he was saying. And trying to create a language, a new language for a numeric language, and he realizes that it's not right. Because he said that, I will give up because it's impossible to do it. He even realized about that, that the limitations are there. But the fact that he's obsessed with bringing or creating a new language, and that he's, I mean, let me say in this way, the limitations of knowledge and language are together, are almost the two flips of the same coin. And then I think this is my hypothesis. I don't know if it was kind of the only way that Borges was able to use. But I think that the role of language is in explaining and in simplifying the words really relevant. It's not just a lot of data that we can not maybe put it in the right box, but also how we express that.
Speaker A:Okay, great. Andres, so can you tell me then, how does this story end? And what we can take from that?
Speaker C:Yeah, the story ends on the core of the story is that Borges, I mean, all the story happens in Uruguay. Yeah, Uruguay, close to Argentina. Borges used to go there. He's from Buenos Aires in Argentina. He used to go there for holidays. And one of the holidays that he goes there, he, when Funes already had had his accident, he lent him some books written in Latin. And suddenly his father, Borges' father has an accident. He has a health problem. And Borges has to rush back to Buenos Aires. And then he needs to go to pick up the books that he had lent to Funes. And he finds this amazing character. And he spends all the night with him. And everything that we know about the story is Borges telling to somebody that looks like an editor that is going to write a book about Borges what happened that night. There's a plenty of writers that are contributing to this type of book. And Borges is saying, look, the story that I'm going to tell is maybe not the most important or the most relevant or nothing, but I wanted to tell you what I lived that night. And then he explains what that night, what happened during that night. And he leaves the room and he just learns that Funes a few years later dies. There's nothing more than that. That's a guy that had an amazing night with Funes that making the game. Borges is really good. He says, when he explains everything, I will try to reproduce what I heard that night. But of course, I won't be able to remember everything because it was just one man that could remember everything. And then it's essentially it's that night. And Borges is writing this letter a few years later.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Yeah. And I think one potentially significant thing is that Funes is actually he basically lies on a bed, doesn't he? I mean, he's kind of immobile now. It's not he doesn't go into why I think the implication is that Funes wants to be sensorily deprived. He doesn't want to be exposed to sensory experiences because it's so overwhelming. But I think it's also possible to imagine that if Funes is as unable to generalize as it's suggested he is in the book, that he's incapable of actually making decisions as well, because that relies on having a model of the world. So it relies on having an understanding of how the world behaves. And that in itself relies on generalization. So to be able to say, well, when I last put my foot on the floor, it was a foot down from the bed. Does that allow you to infer that in a minute's time or it's also going to be just one foot below where the bed is? Well, only if you're able to generalize. If you're not able to generalize, it actually prevents you from being able to make decisions or navigate the world in any way, because every new moment is a new moment. And what has the past got to tell you about that? But I was going to ask, Andres, did Borges have any sort of formal psychological training or any background in psychology or was he an amateur?
Speaker C:I don't know. I don't think so. I think he, I can imagine that he was raised more in the, let's say, in the rational English tradition. He was a huge admirer of British writers of the 19th century, of the Victorian times. And later, Bertrand Russell, etc. He, he's, he's really obsessed with the, he was in some way a really scientist type of writer. Then I can imagine he had some type of concerns about psychology. And then I can imagine that if he's thinking or writing here about perception, about how people react to the outside world, etc. It's more from a, let's say, more impetuous type of approach than psychology.
Speaker B:And I think that touches on the, a very important debate in philosophy, really sort of predated psychology actually by a couple of hundred years, which was between the sort of English rationalist, the empiricist kind of tradition, which effectively said that when humans view the world, they're a blank, they're a blank slate. You know, the phrase tabula rasa, I think comes from John Locke's essay concerning human understanding, where he postulates that we just take in information about the world and form models of the world when we do that. Whereas I think, you know, if you look at Kant's approach to understanding how humans navigate the world, he says, well, you can't begin to do it unless you have certain in built assumptions. You know, so you have to effectively have certain kinds of fundamental aspects of the world, like cause and effect, like permanence, like the ability to generalize and to categorize without which you can't begin to think, you know, and so, which I think, I mean, I think that has largely been borne out from what we understand about the way that, you know, human understanding works. And I think the Funes story is almost, it's sort of saying actually that, yes, a blank slate will not get you to understanding the world. Simply having all of that data from the world is not by itself enough to enable you to understand it.
Speaker A:Okay, look, I want to wrap up, but what I want to do is just, if just a final thought from each of you, okay? So briefly for each of you, Peter, can you just give me a closing thought here?
Speaker D:Well, I think the story also relates strongly to an ongoing topic in our podcast about artificial intelligence. I think the inability to forget and therefore not to be able to think as we know what thinking is, it potentially tells us some very interesting things about what artificial intelligence may or may not be capable of. As we know, computer memory is pretty perfect and anything, any number you store, you'll get back as you stored it. And we have to develop workarounds, clever sort of statistical workarounds for categorization and the sort of things that we take for granted in our own wiring.
Speaker A:Okay, yep, look good. I want to give the final word to Andres, so Nick?
Speaker B:I think, yeah, related to something I'm interested in, which is how we ought to be doing forecasting properly. This, the Good Judgment Project, which I think I've mentioned before, has shown that part of what good forecasting involves is being able to say, okay, this system I'm looking at is a bit like these other systems. You know, when I'm trying to work out what's happening in, you know, if there's going to be a revolution in Haiti next year, well, how do revolutions happen? What other revolutions have occurred? You know, what are the precursors? What things tend to happen? How likely is it? And which, you know, fundamentally entails being able to generalize. And it's, you know, it's been shown that people who do that do better at forecasting than people who look at the real, the specifics, you know, the kind of inside view. What's the story in Haiti today? Which I think, you know, Funes is almost, it could be a way of thinking about what's going on with Funes. Andres?
Speaker C:Yeah, I think it's, I would like to touch one point that maybe we didn't mention it in this way, that is, what is remembering? Because all the stories about Funes remembering everything and the incapability of doing that, or if that's what's going on with that. But we don't talk at all, or we didn't talk at all, and Borges doesn't touch this point, that is, what is remembering? Because remembering is essentially filtering things and transforming things. And that's a dimension that Borges doesn't explore. We just see the perfect remembering, the full, the complete remembering type of scenario, and not the more real one, how we remember what we exclude and what we don't. And I think it's a really interesting topic that maybe for another time.
Speaker A:Thanks, gentlemen. Just before we finish, I've just got one final question for Andres, which is, I'm interested in how Borges fits into life in Argentina and the perception of him. And so it's a very crude comparison. But let's say if you're an English child, you know, part of your national register is Shakespeare, for example. And I often quote in the Spanish tradition, you're looking at Cervantes. So I'm just, but I'm interested in Argentina. Is Borges someone that every child in Argentina will be studying at the age of 11? Or I mean, can you just give me some idea? I'm just interested in that, how he fits in.
Speaker C:Yeah. Borges was a really controversial person. He was seen always as a elite type of writer, all his topics, all his production is really European slash abstract. I could, you don't see any trace of Argentina or Latin America there. You just see kind of universal topics. Then always people, the most popular bands of the Argentinian culture always suspect a lot about Borges who are not really keen about that. And actually during the Peronist years, Borges was not allowed to work fully or he was not helped. And Borges in some ways still now associated with a more conservative type of Argentina and a number of other writers. I don't know if with more or less quality, they've been in some way placing the role of more Argentinian. It's just more recently that Borges died at the end of the 80s that he recovered a place in the Argentinian literature. I think that every child I wish and I hope of 15 years old has read at least one or two short stories in high school, but I don't know if that's the case. Okay, really interesting.
Speaker A:Thanks. And just one final thing. One thing you said there that there's something he's been identified as this or has put people off or stopped him being so beloved in Argentina is a lack of Argentinian, a perceived lack of Argentinianness in him, which brings me on something that if I was thinking as you were talking that I'd like to get Andres back if we're able at some point, because I want to talk about identity and national identity because it fits in with the film that we're making. It fits in with all sorts of discussions we've all been having. I know that's something that we all want to talk about. Okay, so we'll wrap it up there. I really, really enjoyed that. That was a really interesting discussion. So I'd just like to say thanks to Nick and Peter of Aleph Insights as always, but a special thank you to Andres Taksir for joining us, our resident Argentinian expert. I'm Fraser McGruer. Thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. Thank you. Bye-bye.
