While reading and annotating Galen’s article and trying to understand their argument, I find several interesting positions that were given along the way. One of Galen’s ideas that I was stunned by was when they stated: “I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand…” The reason I was stunned by this statement was that I believe myself and Galen have completely different views on the roles that are played by humans. Galen, based off of the article, believes that there is no ONE WHOLE person, Galen believes that there are different people that step in to play each specific role. For example, from my understanding, Galen believes that a different person plays the mother, sister and professor role, no one whole person can play and incorporate all of these roles into their life. I, on the other hand, believe that we all as a whole play several different roles as the same person. For example, I am a daughter, sister, friend and student. My same memory and life narrative are covered between all of the experiences that I play in each of these different roles. Each memory from these experiences helps me learn and grow as a whole person in each of these roles. I thought that this was a very psychology point of view from Galen and it really got me to thinking that maybe Galen believes people and their different roles are just like protons and atoms and DNA all come together to make one whole world. Within this article, I also started to think that poor memory and memory loss can lead to good and bad outcomes. One of the negatives that I learned from pathological memory loss was that you aren’t able to recall past experiences to be able to look back on them and learn from your mistakes to be able to grow as a person. Also, a negative could lead a person to tell false stories, someone might think they remember an experience when really it is all made up but they can’t remember, this could lead to falsely shaping your identity. The positive that I came across to poor memory was that it protects you from “disagreeable form of ambition, stop babbling, and forces you to think through thinks for yourself.” One last idea that made me sit up and take note was when the quote “there is no complete life” came up in this article. I agreed with Galen on this idea. I believe with Galen that our minds from day to day tend to only remember the most memorable details. Having our minds to remember everything we did every day can end up leaving out small details in our life narrative that could end up being important. This can lead us all to tell false stories and details about our self-narrative which Beck and I believe forms your personality. The interesting detail I found after reading both of these articles was that I did not find myself to the only side with one point of view, I found myself to agree with both ideas that both authors brought to the audience’s attention.
I definitely agree with your opinion on what Galen thinks. We all play different roles and weave them into one another’s lives in different ways. You also bring up a point that we tend to remember the “big” things in life but I know a lot of my most important memories are still the “small” things. It’s interesting to see differing viewpoints on this topic. It’s very fascinating to see both sides of the story and be able to understand both.