This episode reminded me of a question asked by my teacher when I used to study the ethics of psychological experiments: if you scan the subject's brain just to study its activity, you accidentally find that his brain structure is pathologically abnormal, or necrotic or a tumor ,what should we do?
I thought again about the "ownership" of memory: if a memory is a personal memory, then this memory belongs to me alone and is my privacy; if a memory is a shared memory of two people, then this memory is considered a Not counting the privacy of one of them? Who should it "belong to"? Whose privacy is it?
Black Mirror S4E3 directly combines these two issues, and sparks further thought and (perhaps) fear.
In the play, extracting memory pictures becomes like scanning brain pictures, which allows us to directly obtain the most direct witness memories of the crime scene.
But if we see the witnesses' unrelated memories of the case, are we "violating" the recaller's "ownership" of this unrelated memory? If the content of this unrelated memory is illegal and unethical, what should we do? How should we deal with those who remember?
More interestingly, what if our memories are actually wrong? The film mentions a very valid point about memory, that is, the memory picture is not really "going back to the past", but we recreate it after filling in the scattered fragments that we remembered on the spot based on our current needs and experience. A complete, slightly detailed picture, and those "remembered fragments" are largely distorted, just as we would easily remember the woman in yellow as the woman in green. Is this half-distorted and half-compensated "reproduced" clip, or is it not our personal privacy?
But whether the memory is reliable or not, we can choose to keep silent, so that we have the opportunity to hide our dark side forever. Even if others have the ability to extract our memory pictures, others have to ask for our permission before actually doing it, but this has become a legal obligation of witnesses in the play (the right to remain silent?). In this way, ethical tolerance seems to have been raised invisibly.
But the finale of the episode undoubtedly sparks more thought: If the object we're fetching memory images from can be a hamster, a creature we can't ask permission, what are we going to do?
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