Can drugs break the chemical chain of memory? Should they?

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Value Beyond Memory

I know that it can seem like a natural thing for us to feel that the value of having lived and experienced lies in the richness of our remembrances of what we have lived and experienced. But Memory can fail. You have experienced this failure in a terrible, tragic way in that your mechanism of Memory was damaged by physical trauma such that records of your experience were forcibly taken from you, or at best rendered inaccessible to you, suddenly, as if by theft. This is exactly what happens slowly and globally as a result of internal structural failure as Alzheimer's deepens. It is also what happens to each of us totally and finally when we die.

Yet Memory is only a tool of Creaturehood--that is, a tool of, by, and for being a living creature, for the purpose of successfully navigating spacetime as we creatures need to navigate it. The function of Memory is to allow us to store and post-process records of Perception such that we may winnow Perception for patterns of Cause and Effect for the purpose of fine-tuning subsequent Action. "The next time I see ice on lake I will think: Danger!" "The next time I see three shiny leaves I will think: Danger!" "The next time I see 'toner low' I will think: Reorder!" Memory is the facility that allows us to virtualize World--to *model* world--in Brain such that we may more successfully navigate Environment to keep our arc of Creaturehood unbroken across the unfolding succession of states of Being that we call Time.

The most widespread mental affliction, abetted and aided by traditional approaches to education, is mistaking one's mental model of the world for the world. We can see that this is Mistake because, since we know that a mental model depends on and is housed in Memory, and we know that Memory can, and ultimately will, fail, we know that a given person's model of World lasts only as long as its user lives. The practical proof of this understanding that mental model of World is not World is when we witness the death of another and we do not--World does not--end.

What does *not* vanish from World when we die and our mental model of World vanishes? To build toward this understanding, consider that as you live from instant to instant, you are your own successor. The reason that fundamental equations describing position in spacetime do not describe an "at rest" condition (as in the Newtonian "an object at rest remains at rest unless acted upon by an external force") is that, because Being ever unfolds in the succession of states, of statenesses, that we call Time, there is no such thing is absolute rest. You could not possibly be here reading this now if you had not existed 200 milliseconds ago, five minutes ago, two weeks ago, five years ago, and so on, back across and through the unfolding of Being--across Time--that you and your forebears traversed as you and they lived their lives.

From this we can see that the particulars of a given state of Being are absolutely dependent on the particulars of all prior states of Being. You exist Now precisely as you do precisely because you have undergone precisely what you have lived and because the Universe that contained you unfolded exactly as it did. The unfolding of your life, embedded as it is in the superset of the unfolding of Being that is Universe, *is absolutely essential to establishing the particulars of all subsequent states of the unfolding of Being that is Universe.* Your contribution to the unfolding of Being through living and experiencing your life, through Having Been, cannot be undone, damaged, removed, stolen, or denied. Its robustness is independent of Perception, and therefore independent of Memory. The value of your life is incalculably vast; the fact and facts of your Having Been are irrefutably, indestructibly Eternal.

Posted by: dpnewkirk   Posted on: 08/18/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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