In Finding Nemo, Dory (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) is a fish that can't remember a damn thing. The masses loved this character because the myth that a goldfish's memory lasts for only 3 seconds has been around the world, again and again. If there are two science-sounding myths that the common imagination has grasped, it is the butterfly effect and the flash memory of small fish. The latter points to a key feature of the human animal that, considering how it is represented, can tickle or terrify us. We find, for example, absentmindedness to be adorable for as long as the personality persists. And so, the mixed-up fish Dory, can keep forgetting things, for as long as she is still Dory. But when memory loss erodes the personality, breaks the continuity of the individual, erases the whole house of being, we see this as the growing nothingness of death.
But what about this little fish that moves here and there in its tank?
How do we think about it? The fish clearly understands that if it moves this way in the tank, then the whole tank moves in that direction. Its brain is big enough to make the very complex correlation between its movement and the movement of what it is not: the tank.
And so it knows it is contained, and this shows that even a goldfish in a bowl is somewhat aware of its imprisonment. Aware that the tank is a space in which its movements are limited. But here is the truly cruel thing that we must consider in all of this. If we take the little fish in the mobile tank and put it back in a normal aquarium, certainly its tiny heart will break and bleed. It will move here and there in the dumb tank and nothing will happen. It may keep trying any kind of motion (to the right, to the left; back, forward) in the hope of reviving that freedom (and it was real freedom) it experienced in that hall filled with human-made things. This little fish will suffer like nothing else. It will even hate its tank and predicament even more. One day, it will still stop moving and sink to the bottom of the tank.
