Memories..

Originally recorded 2019-09-10 14:07:10 PM

Memory is coming up again and again in my recent thoughts as I journey towards coloring more and more areas of my ‘color-the-shapes’ existence. We humans are our memory.

If it wasn’t for the accumulated data and interplay of these data-points built up over a lifetime, we would be helpless against the forces that surround us – natural and social. We don’t remember our infancy because that is a period of our lives that others live for us. Alzheimer’s strips relationships to that same infantility.

We lose most memories but may retain subconscious ripples of them in the shape of neuroses, phobias or character traits but not the memories themselves. And then through our lives, our memories of ourselves and others’ memories of us, influence how we live our lives. Do we have an inherent memory meme that aims to survive past our lives? On a Darwinian scale, that is indeed the whole premise of propagation of the species. But even at the individual level we want to leave behind a legacy of some sort.

If memory was transferable, we would be immortal. Then it wouldn’t matter what the hardware is. We could move from body to body and carry our ‘selves’ into eternity. (Can thought exist outside of the embodied brain? Is it just binary code played out by memory loops interacting with chemicals in the brain being the medium? If yes, then it could be a microchip elsewhere!)

On a related note, I’m sure we are way closer to a nuanced version of immortality by combining voice recognition, artificial intelligence metadata about worldviews and decision types to create a virtual version of oneself that can reside on a phone as an app and that can interface via a device or other inanimate constructs like a robot, the ‘magic mirror’, holographs or even ‘droids’.