Active Forgetting and the Metaphysics of Retention: Rethinking Memory in Neuroethics and Artificial Intelligence

Contemporary neuroethics confronts a counterpoise between preserving the continuities that support agency and enabling transformations through which a person’s relation to the past can change. In this correspondence, I examine a retention-centered tendency within accounts of identity, cognition, enhancement, and technological preservation. This tendency should not be mistaken for a uniform commitment across neuroethics: Glannon’s embodied account of mind and his analysis of memory modification already complicate the identification of personhood with neural records or uninterrupted recall. My intervention concerns whether forgetting can be understood not only as a loss to be repaired or an intervention to be justified, but as a productive capacity in its own right. Rooted in Nietzsche’s concept of active forgetting, as mediated by Deleuze, I argue that intelligent life requires some freedom from the determination of present possibilities by accumulated experience. Bergson’s philosophy of duration and Deleuze and Guattari’s accounts of becoming provide resources for considering this transformation without equating it with the literal destruction of the past. The salience of this distinction becomes apparent as these theoretical models are operationalized in artificial intelligence, which similarly requires distinguishing unwanted interference with acquired capabilities from deliberate machine unlearning. Neither indiscriminate retention nor indiscriminate erasure supplies an adequate ethical principle. The relevant question is how retention, revision, and forgetting can be governed to support agency and adaptation without concealing responsibility or transferring the costs of remembrance to those already harmed.