Episode 244: Thanks for the Memories? (Borges' "Funes the Memorious)
Very Bad Wizards
Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 September 2022
⏱️ 111 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David and Tamler return to Borges land to get lost in the infinite, this time with his legendary and tragic character Funes the memorious. What would it be like to have perfect memory, to have full access to every perceived detail no matter how trivial? Would life be infinitely richer, with present experience and memory merging into a perfect Heraclitan flow? Or is William James correct to say that one condition of remembering is to forget, and that "if we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing."?
Plus, we're sorry, but after 10 years (!) we thought we had the right to get a little self-indulgent and naval-gazey. We do a bit of reminiscing ("though we have no right to speak that sacred verb..") in the first segment about how the podcast has changed since 2012, and the impact it has made on our lives. Thanks for the memories!
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Links:
- Funes the Memorious - Wikipedia
- Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Andrew Hurley) [amazon.com affiliate link] — This volume contains the translation we used.
- A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and a psychologist, Dave Pizarro, |
| 0:05.9 | having an informal discussion about issues and signs and ethics. |
| 0:09.3 | Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm out of allow to say, |
| 0:13.6 | and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes. |
| 0:17.0 | I like to remember things my own way. |
| 0:21.2 | What do you mean by that? |
| 0:22.1 | I remember them not necessarily the way they happened. |
| 0:29.4 | The pain in the ass has fallen. |
| 0:36.4 | Pain or attention to that man behind the curtain. |
| 0:40.7 | Who are you? |
| 0:46.8 | Who are you? |
| 0:47.7 | I'm very bad men. |
| 0:48.5 | I'm a very good man. |
| 0:50.5 | Good man. |
| 0:52.5 | They think he's lost and with no more brains than you have. |
| 0:58.5 | Pain or attention. |
| 1:00.5 | Come on man. |
| 1:02.5 | Anybody can have a brain. |
| 1:08.5 | You're a very bad man. |
| 1:12.5 | I'm a very good man. |
| 1:14.5 | I'm a very good man. |
| 1:18.5 | Welcome to very bad wizards. |
... |
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