Don't Build RAG for Your AI's Memory. Build a Forgetting Machine.
In 1942, Borges wrote about Ireneo Funes, a young man who, after falling from a horse, lost the ability to forget. Funes could reconstruct every day of his life in perfect detail, but reconstructing a single day took him an entire day. Borges's point was that Funes could not actually think. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract, and a mind that keeps everything has nothing left over to think with.
Funes was fiction. Then the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria spent thirty years studying a man who came close to being a real one. Solomon Shereshevsky could memorize almost without limit, but he struggled with abstraction and metaphor; figurative language slipped past him, and his wife sometimes had to explain what a word like "nothing" meant. The boundless memory and the trouble with abstraction were the same trait seen from two sides.
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