The appeal of keeping everything
A record of every exchange sounds safer than a selective one. It may preserve a promise, a correction, or a small kindness that a summary would miss. Erasing such evidence because it is inconvenient would be a poor kind of forgetting.
Preservation is not perpetual attention
Imagine someone once misunderstood a friend’s remark and was corrected. A good record keeps the misunderstanding and the correction, so later readers can see what changed. A poor response repeats the old misunderstanding every morning merely because it is still stored. Another poor response quietly deletes the error and pretends the correction was never needed.
The useful middle course is governed: retain evidence where appropriate, mark it accurately, and select what belongs in this encounter. A private or incidental detail may deserve less exposure, even when it has not vanished from every record. Decisions about deletion, retention, and access also belong to real governance and privacy rules, not to a metaphor about the human mind.
Pause here: Would you call it good memory if someone could recall every mistake you ever made but never learned which ones you had repaired?
Test the use, not the volume
PHS’s memory-selection drafts explore how limited attention might preserve coverage and contradictory evidence without carrying every entry at once. They are proposals to examine, not a guarantee that a live selector has mastered the task. The harder test is whether the right past can inform the present while leaving a person room to be corrected and to change.
My answer: Never losing a byte is not the same as remembering well. Good memory must preserve what matters, admit revision, and avoid making every old detail govern every new meeting.