Is your brain just one big data repository?

I’m in a nihilistic mood today. Bear with me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUjSgEfiAgA

Raven and Tara circa 2009

FACT: There’s a lot of poetic ways you could describe the brain.

Maybe it’s the essence of your being, the producer of your most articulate musings, or the mystery of what makes you, you. Sure, it might be all of those things but at its most basal level it's an approximately 3 pound chunk of meat that zaps itself with little electrical signals to 1) keep you alive and 2) sometimes make you think very silly things.

"Brain" by Puzzlefry

I’ve been thinking a lot about the brain lately with my own brain (you know, as one does), and in conferring with two wildly different texts, I’ve come to the conclusion that your brain (and mine) is one big, messy, complicated assemblage of photo memories; complete with all the dangers and ethical lapses of the dynamic duo that would be a reckless, immoral photojournalist and their best friend, a biased, crazy hurried curator.

You know, sometimes you just sit down with a work of art like Sontag’s In Plato’s Cave, then immediately follow it up with a fun little bit of Johnston’s Introduction to Data Curation and it gets your brain juices flowing.

Let’s recap.

Sontag is a stunningly blunt, witty author, armed to the teeth with so many niche photography facts and references that she had me up in arms about how the photo, the camera, and the “act” of shooting being far from the neutral act I thought it to be.

She provides textual and real life evidence that we make the photo to be many things - an appropriation in which we “put [ourselves] in a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge” (4), incontrovertible proof of something’s existence or non-existence in an exact form (5), an event (11), and invasion (11), a choice of non-intervention and passivity in the real world (11) one one hand, and an omnipresent (11) exploiter (13) on the other.

Sinister, uncomfortable, and makes you look at your phone a little weird, right?

GUIDO MIETH VIA GETTY IMAGES

Businesswoman making big eyes while looking surprised.

Now we bring in Johnston.

The Introduction to Data Curation does exactly what you think it does: introduces (wait for it) data curation. There are two descriptions that are relevant here. Johnston explains that, “there are many motivations for storing and preserving data, but the ultimate goal [is] reuse by others” (1).

FACT: data is collected for reuse

Further, Johnston defines data repositories as “a searchable and queryable interfacing entity

that is able to store, manage, maintain and curate [d]ata” (3).

FACT: Repositories are meant to answer questions with data.

All seems fine and well, right?

But then I started thinking of my brain like a camera. It makes a lot of sense. Your memories are like photographs and videos, and your brain; a hard drive. Common analogy.

Now think about the words you associate with photography: framing, focus, memory.

Now think of your brain doing the same.

Very similar, right?

But replace framing with bias, focus with tunnel vision, memory with fact.

How do you feel?

Now think of your brain as a repository, or hard drive. It stores all of your perceptions, framed, focused and memorized based on who you are, based on what you’re around, and uses them over and over to get you through life.

If your repository is filled with biased, narrow, skewable, “reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out” (Sontag 3) images, and the “ultimate goal” of your collection is reuse, doesn’t it seem like all your thoughts and memories and context and knowledge might be just that: biased, narrow, and skewable?

By this logic, suddenly the AI that learns from computing human interactions and becomes immediately violent and racist, tracks. Suddenly our assumptions and presumptions of ourselves, others, and everything we perceive through the lens of our lives becomes…filtered.

This begs the question: Are we ever perceiving fact? Truth? Reality?

Are we ever seeing others - seeing ourselves for what we really are?

It’s enough to make you want to smash up your hard drives and throw away your cameras, but can you get out of your own head?

If your brain is just one big repository, are we all fucked?

Part of me thinks no, humans are more complex than machines, more compassionate, more empathetic, more human.

But there’s a small part of me that looks at the world, looks at the news, looks at my internal monologue and thinks…

otherwise.

i hope my silly little pictures and gifs offset any sense of pending doom and gloom you may have developed over the course of internalizing this post, dear readers <3