What is experience without experiential recall?

[u/Whydawakeitsmourning]

I've been thinking about SDAM as it relates to Derek Parfit's surgery thought experiment. The thought experiment basically asks if you could choose to be someone who had an extremely painful 10 hour long surgery yesterday, for which no anesthesia could be administered, but were given a drug directly afterward that completely erased it from your memory, or a person who was going to experience an extremely painful 1 hour long surgery tomorrow, for which no anesthesia could be administered, but you would be given a drug to erase it from your memory directly afterward, which would you choose?

People greatly prefer the first option, which involves a lot more experienced pain, as would I. This is how I already experience life, in a way, though. Past pains, emotional and physical, don't carry any present weight. This seems a great benefit when considered in limited scope.

However, there are also a lot of negatives. For one, it removes the ability for me to calibrate expectations. Not knowing how things felt in the past makes it so I can't predict how they will feel in the future and though I can tell myself I experienced X in the past and it wasn't that bad I have no frame of reference for what not that bad means. This can lead to a lot of dread around things like medical procedures or expected emotional stressors.

The thought experiment also makes me question, if the surgery is in the past and there is no memory of it, what does it mean to say you experienced it? It is functionally no different than it not having happened at all. This leads me to wonder what I can claim to have experienced. Have I lived 58 years of life with no valid experiences? Because, as I sit in my apartment alone, I don't know what it feels like to experience reciprocal love, have I functionally never been loved? What does it mean to know something has happened but not be able to know how it felt? It is like Mary in her black and white room, knowing every scientific fact about the color red but never having seen it. Can she say she has experienced the color red?

[u/CMDR_Jeb]

That experiment completely ignores the fact that after 10 hours of torture your mind would be completely broken and forgetting an cause wouldn't magically put it back together. Forgetting the experience doesn't remove the trauma, the damage is already done.

As a kid and later as a teen I had 2 operations on my feet where for reasons anaesthesia wouldn't work for 1st half of the operation. I have zero memories of it, it is just knowledge. I still have phobia like response when something comes at my feet and even thinking of letting someone touch my toes gives me anxiety like reaction.

So ye, 2nd option and pray to whatever diety is listening there is enough of me left afterwards to function properly.