On 26 Dec 2014, at 19:55, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/25/2014 11:45 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]
] On Behalf Of Kim Jones
Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2014 7:46 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Long term memory is extra-corporeal
On 26 Dec 2014, at 1:43 pm, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
On 12/25/2014 1:17 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
In paper
Forsdyke, D.R. (2009). Samuel Butler and human long term memory: is
the cupboard bare? Journal of Theoretical Biology 258(1), 156-164.
(see http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/mind01.htm)
the author considers a possibility that the long term memory is
outside the brain. I guess that Bruno should like it.
That seems backwards for Bruno's idea. If memories are outside the
brain then they should survive destruction of the brain. But as I
understand Bruno's idea one's "soul" survives destruction of the
brain as in reincarnation, but memories don't.
Brent
Don't forget this is about long-term memory. How long is long-term?
I would say beyond the life of the individual. Seen like that,
there has to be some kind of library or lookup table which in no
way correlates to anything to do with human brain size, the authors
conclude. Certain of these very-long-term memories do get encoded
somehow to survive destruction of the brain, as in Jung's 'racial
memory' or "collective unconscious' - the original engrams or
patterns of recognition (archetypes) some of them terrifyingly
inexplicable and probably arising in dreams and recorded as
revelations. Folklore is the racial memory of homo sapiens. We
still churn it out. What we cannot remember exactly we plaster over
with something else anyway, because HS are natural-born story
tellers who cannot pass up a good story. If the shoe fits, we tend
to wear it. It's literally in our DNA these authors conclude. This
suggests to me that the notion of "Junk DNA" is perhaps itself junk
as the very purpose of DNA is to record ie encode experience at
something for the purpose of passing it on. DNA cannot fail at that
purpose. Whenever scientists declare something "Junk" or "Dark"
this just means "we are clueless over this" so it's time to find
the macro-molecular link that allows this almost-Lamarckian effect
of racial memory to come about.
The term “junk DNA”, itself has been junked a while ago, when it
was discovered that a portion of this DNA acts like a kind of OS
that switches encoding sections on and off. It is a
mistake I believe to look at DNA as a static repository of
hereditary information alone. It is this of course, but it turns
out to be more complex, dynamic and layered than the simple static
model. A lot of the so called “junk DNA” (but not all of it by any
means) seems to be involved in this dynamic process. Especially,
during the process of embryogenesis, DNA expression is undergoing
dynamic highly sequenced and seemingly (somehow) choreographed
changes (through methylation and other means).
Other parts of this junk DNA, seem to be parasitical in nature;
e.g. the selfish DNA hypothesis, and this also seems very likely –
IMO. If such DNA “parasite entities” exist, perhaps
using viruses as vehicles during their “life-cycle” in order to
ride with them on into a hosts DNA and insert themselves into a new
happy home, passing copies down for as long as the lineage
continues. Perhaps a parasite is “junk” for the host, but from the
parasites perspective I am sure the view is different… so even here
in this case is it really junk.
-Chris
But to say that DNA provides "long term memory" seems like an abuse
of terminology, making a metaphor into a factual description. DNA
provides "memory" only in that sometimes parts of it get to
reproduce. Genes are more persistent units, but their "memory" is
just get copied to not. There's nothing Lamarckian about it, much
less extra-corporeal survival of memories. Memories are necessarily
things that are remembered. I don't remember any previous life and
I doubt that you do either.
It might depend what we mean by "long term memory". When an spider is
born it certainly comes with some amount of memory, at least
procedural memories like the way to build a web, or to recognize a
mate or a prey, etc. There is nothing irrational in thinking that we
too have such prewired skills, and most plausibly also some more
declarative form of knowledge, that is some forms of memories. This
would not contradict Darwin Evolution (and does not need anything like
a Lamarckian theory). Our brain is not much wired in advance, compared
to some other animals, but it is still wired in a large part. We might
not remember a past life, but we do remember the result of billions
years of evolution. This might be illustrated with the genetics of
phobia for example, or of instincts.
Now, brains and molecules are useful fictions, but when thinking about
the mind-brain relation, the idea that memories can belong to parts
outside the skulls is a bit of an aristotelian delusion. With
computationalisme our memories are distributed in infinities of number
relations, and nowhere else.
Brains? That's all in the head! (note the pun).
Bruno
Brent
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