Creating False Memories

[Trusk'our he/him]

I made a post on the Cosmere forum a while back suggesting the possibility of hacking F-copper and gold to create new powers for an individual, using the Cognitive Aspect as a blueprint to overwrite the spiritual. 

At the time, my thinking was that someone would either tap a Metalborn's memories of using their powers from an Unsealed Coppermind or perhaps fabricate them from scratch using a futuristic computer to simulate and store them in a Coppermind. 

However, I've given it more thought, and I don't think that this is strictly necessary. 

What if you had an experienced Archivist who could take Unkeyed Copperminds and specifically archive memories together, splicing them to create a new, convincing memory?

What's more, they could possibly use a form of self-perception through training to modify their own memories, kind of like Wayne's method acting, but more extreme. If the Archivist couldn't fully believe a roll they played, they could choose to selectively store conflicting memories temporarily, perhaps even tapping other's memories to solidify the illusion. 

They could have entire personas stored in separate Copperminds, creating and collecting spliced, faked, and mimicked memories to get the act spot on.

Actually, having an Archivist character do this sort of thing in a book like Wayne (but better), would be pretty cool in my opinion. 

[Koloss17 She/They]

Well, I think they would also require a degree of dissociation for that to work. Copperminds, from what I understand, don’t rewrite memory. Unless you are suggesting that they store their own memories somewhere, which I suppose is a thing they could do. 
 

At the very least, it seems hard. 
 

(But a very fun Alleyverse character!)

[Trusk'our he/him]

1 hour ago, Koloss17 said:

Well, I think they would also require a degree of dissociation for that to work. Copperminds, from what I understand, don’t rewrite memory. Unless you are suggesting that they store their own memories somewhere, which I suppose is a thing they could do. 

My thinking is that you take a given memory, then deliberately store portions of it in separate Copperminds. You then take different memories and store fragments from them, then archive those memories in the previously made Coppermind to fill in the gaps.

For instance, you may be able to store a memory of when you walked down the street to your house, then tap the specific portion of the memory that has the information regarding who is walking (perhaps by taking the memory of your proprioception) and replacing it with another person's senses (who was walking down another street).

After all this, you've effectively made a new, false memory that says the other person went down the street to your house. If you tapped it, it would be jarring and you could likely tell it was false because of the incorrect proprioception (or maybe extra tangential memories attached, like Kelsier's recollection of the Southern Scadrien houses. That could be useful to add for realism), but you could give those memories to the other person to make them think they walked down the street to your house instead of theirs, or, you might be able to eliminate the jarring impact of the false memory by temporarily storing any conflicting memories. 

1 hour ago, Koloss17 said:

At the very least, it seems hard. 

Yeah, at the very least, it would probably require a level of skill that Shai has with Forgery, so it's not exactly something that could be done easily, but the benefits might be powerful nonetheless. 

[alder24]

54 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

My thinking is that you take a given memory, then deliberately store portions of it in separate Copperminds. You then take different memories and store fragments from them, then archive those memories in the previously made Coppermind to fill in the gaps.

For instance, you may be able to store a memory of when you walked down the street to your house, then tap the specific portion of the memory that has the information regarding who is walking (perhaps by taking the memory of your proprioception) and replacing it with another person's senses (who was walking down another street).

After all this, you've effectively made a new, false memory that says the other person went down the street to your house. If you tapped it, it would be jarring and you could likely tell it was false because of the incorrect proprioception (or maybe extra tangential memories attached, like Kelsier's recollection of the Southern Scadrien houses. That could be useful to add for realism), but you could give those memories to the other person to make them think they walked down the street to your house instead of theirs, or, you might be able to eliminate the jarring impact of the false memory by temporarily storing any conflicting memories. 

Full memories so it would be rusting hard to edit them in the way you propose, just text would be probably easier and doable. There's no "who's walking down the street" in your memory, because it's you, it's your memory, it's you - it's always from your perspective.

Memories in a Coppermind are stored in separate units, individually, they aren't seen as one memory because Sazed can have them all indexed and go to a specific memory without accessing any other memory, if he knows where that memory is (and there is WoB below). You can't really blend them together, they are separate from each other. You can tap those two memories at once, but that's a conscious decision of yours, you know they are separate and you would know those are different memories anyway. The biggest trouble would be to combine those memories into one memory, which a Feruchemist probably won't be able to do.

So I don't believe that you can edit your memories with just Feruchemy right now, as intent screws you over. But in the far future of Cosmere, in times when machines and fabrials will be used to work on investiture, I think it's reasonable that there would be ways to edit memories like 5D movies, that would be treated as one memory. Why? Because you might be able to break down each memory into bits of investiture and glue them together as you wish. Might is a key word here.

Spoiler

Paleo

When you store multiple memories in a coppermind is it still technically one large coppermind or could you say it's more like a ton of "virtual" metalminds, because you're technically tapping individual ones?

Brandon Sanderson

More like the second. I would say that's accurate. I mean I'm not sure that really aligns one to one but it is another good model, though.

Prague Signing (Oct. 26, 2019)

 

[clowncarcrash]

I don't think it would be that tough. Especially if you're delusional + memory degrades over time.

There's even cases where the power of suggestion can completely change someone's memory. I think as coppermind technology progresses on Scandrial, and as the people on Scadrial learn more about psychology, that's going to be used. A beat I think could be used, is, dude puts a memory of an incident in the coppermind. They might visualize it and imagine it over and over. Then person reads  and hears stories about the incident, by the time they take the memory back into their brain, would those impressions contaminate the memory? Would it cleanly overwrite it? That'd be a cool noir story.

 

I could see Brandon writing a story beat where someone with a crazy amount of affirmations completely warps the memory before putting back into a coppermind.

[+Lewis Nethur He/Him]

On 7/20/2024 at 12:24 PM, Koloss17 said:

Well, I think they would also require a degree of dissociation for that to work. Copperminds, from what I understand, don’t rewrite memory. Unless you are suggesting that they store their own memories somewhere, which I suppose is a thing they could do. 
 

At the very least, it seems hard. 
 

(But a very fun Alleyverse character!)

I...think this one is painfully correct, yes. I would expect rewriting memories to be most successful and feasible in beings with fractured and damaged identities and spiritwebs.

This is sort of a sensitive subject, I'd rather not say more if that makes enough sense on its own. Good observation in my opinion.