Episode 8.26: Episodic alternatives to consistency.

There is no particular reason why we should be consistent with our own behaviour in the past, whether with what we’ve said, or what we’ve done, or what we’ve thought, or what we’ve written. It’s perfectly possible - there is no moral or universal law forbidding it - to be inconsistent, to make every action that we perform independent of all those that we have taken in the past, and perhaps of those that we will take in the future. This is called being episodic, or living an episodic rather than a narrative life. It’s an interesting idea, and this little episode is about it. The more episodic a life becomes, the less compressible it may be.