Memory

The Philosophy of Art & Aesthetics.

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e_dog
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Memory

Post by e_dog » November 29th, 2006, 9:02 pm

Memory -- (noun?)

some thing i had before i started heavy drinking.




What's your definition?
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.

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stilltrucking
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Post by stilltrucking » November 30th, 2006, 1:00 am

What was your question?

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Arcadia
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Post by Arcadia » November 30th, 2006, 3:30 pm

A MONOLOGUE IN FOUR MOMENTS

I

Holy Mother of the Deep Unconscious!!!... are you Dylan? (shut up, Bob!), DYLAN THOMAS!!!!!!!!!!!????.........no lo puedo creer...!!!, are we in Swansea?, mmm......... London maybe?..... or it's just my luck and we are in the United States??, well, wait.... you are already dead, so maybe we are HERE!!!!

II

What's in the bottle you are holding??…, I can´t see the label... an orange juice… it's 2:30 PM... no, you don't bother me if you drink, I can run away easily. Let's see: do you mean heavy alcohol drinking or a metaphor for heavy adictive ingesta of whatever?. I know my alcohol limits: 1 litro of beer, half a litro of wine, 3 daikiris (of course not all at the same time). After that a floating and not at all dizzy sensation and I only want to sleep like a baby. Sometimes I'm also addictive in a more affective/mental way with no need to pass through the alcohol station....but I only know you by your poems, I will not talk about it with you.. .!. I used to be addictive to Coke but I noticed that I'm more propense to shrink fruits unexpectly now.

III

What is memory? well, I read more or less 17 years ago a book about Greek mythology by an author that I don't remember (maybe french) that talked during various chapters about the Greek deity Mnemousine or something like that. I only remember the sensation of: "damn greeks, you are so complicated... I have better things to do".
Here are some possible definitions, you can choose one or think your own if you stop holding the bottle (but who knows, you could write poetry doing both things anyway...):

. the appreciation of past facts
. the feeling of a messy story that is still present
. something that let us have the sensation of continuation and to act in the world
. a construction
. a narration
. bodies
. questions
. olvido
. something that my PC is lacking
. the Borges/Funes danger
. details (the flavour of)
. maybe is a verb

IV

Hey, are you listen to me??? (well.... I guess I prefer this than delirium tremens...!). All says that it's time for me to go...

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Post by e_dog » December 2nd, 2006, 12:15 am

btw, stilltruck, the quest. is what is Memory?

Arcadia:
the feeling of a messy story that is still present
that's awesome!



. the Borges/Funes danger
. details (the flavour of)
. maybe is a verb
probably awesome, too, but (because) it needs more explanation....
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.

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Post by stilltrucking » December 2nd, 2006, 9:31 am

Memory leaks from molecules paraphrase of Plath's
“Meaning leaks from molecules.”

The Molecular Basis of Memory, Edward M. Gurowitz Ph.D. Prentice Hall 1969
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I THE EVIDENCE FOR A CHEMICAL BASIS FOR LEARNING AND MEMORY

Current evidence for the chemical basis of memory and learning has come mainly from two sources….

II THE NATURE OF MEMORY MOLECULE

Behavioral events, as we have noted, must ultimately be the result of nervous system activity. Thus even though we may conclude that most of memory is not dependent upon ongoing neural activity, it must somehow affect the neural…

III BASIC CHEMICAL CONSIDERATIONS

IV DNA AS THE MEMORY MOLECULE

V RNA AS THE MEMORY MOLECULE

VI PROTEIN AS THE MEMORY MOLECULE

VII STUDIES OF INTER-ANIMAL TRANSFER OF LEARNING
This is an old book, I suppose molecular biology and has come a long way since 1969

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Post by Arcadia » December 2nd, 2006, 8:42 pm

e/dog: more explanation... I'm afraid I'm not good for that!!. But you can read Borges's "Funes, el memorioso" and also read some considerations about Argentina History and Politics also by Borges to start.
s/t: don't worry, I'll try to find a genetist/2006 for you!!

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Post by stilltrucking » December 2nd, 2006, 9:52 pm

It is to late for that, but thanks.

What I really need now is a neurotheologian.

'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
Such reductionist thinking seems like an assault on the last redoubt of the soul, or, at least, the seat of the irreducible self.

As many Christian theologians now say, human beings do not have souls; they are souls.

But Jeeves is realistic in thinking that it will take decades for many of his fellow Christians to accept this way of viewing the soul. And that acceptance will not be made easier by the hard-line reductivism of people like Dennett and Crick who, Jeeves says, "commit the fundamental error of nothing-buttery."

But grant Dennett and many other cognitive scientists their view that the self is not a spectator in the theater of consciousness but the composite of multiple drafts related to and constituting the biography of that particular individual. If this view is true, where is the self or identity on which even a broad-minded religious believer might base his notion of the soul?

Here Christians and others might turn to the wisdom of Buddhism, in which the self is correctly understood not as an entity or substance but as a dynamic process. As Galin writes in a collection of essays on Buddhism and science, this process is "a shifting web of relations among evanescent aspects of the person such as perceptions, ideas, and desires. The Self is only misperceived as a fixed entity because of the distortions of the human point of view." The Buddhist concept of anatman does not suggest that the self is nonexistent but rather asserts that it cannot be reduced to an essence.

Galin proposes that rehabilitating the notion of spirit may be the best way to a new understanding of the self in a post-dualist age. The experience of spirit, he argues, is itself part of the human capacity to experience implicit organization, hidden order, deeper and ineffable connectedness in what we see or otherwise encounter, whether a magnificent work of architecture like Notre Dame or a spectacular vista such as the Grand Canyon. Experiencing spirit is finding unity and wholeness in something, and Galin suggests that we view the self as spirit in that sense: the organization-or even the emergent property-of all of a person's subsystems, not just one more subsystem.

In recent years, the scientific study of consciousness has taken bold, if not always steady, steps in the direction of understanding the experience of wholeness and human spirituality in general. One prominent researcher, Andrew Newberg, a professor of nuclear medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, directs his university's recently founded Center for Spirituality and the Mind, a cross-disciplinary program devoted in part to the fledgling field of "neurotheology." In one respect, this venture marks yet another return to the legacy of William James, whose later work included his masterful Varieties of Religious Experience. The findings of Newberg and his late colleague, Eugene D'Aquili, do not yet rise to the Jamesean level, but they do point in a promising direction. They even suggest that if religion can learn something valuable about the unity of body and mind from science, then science might be able to relearn something from religion about the deepest purposes of our minds.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/health/art ... 23soul.htm

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Arcadia
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Post by Arcadia » December 3rd, 2006, 8:39 pm

a neurotheologian?!, it sounds good!. Tell me if you find one.

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Post by e_dog » December 5th, 2006, 10:21 pm

did you perhaps mean anaestheology?
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.

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Post by stilltrucking » December 6th, 2006, 4:19 am

btw, stilltruck, the quest. is what is Memory?
No I meant neurotheologians.

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Post by e_dog » December 6th, 2006, 3:57 pm

well, i mean anaestheology.
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.

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Post by stilltrucking » December 6th, 2006, 4:11 pm

Yep that is what you meant, you said--
did you perhaps mean anaestheology?
emphasis mine.

You asked me
I told you
What I meant

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Post by Diana Moon Glampers » December 6th, 2006, 10:50 pm

Ah yes the meaning of meaning.

cutting and pasting
"This is what I've meant over the years when I've said that the brain is a syntactic engine mimicking a semantic engine."

By that, Dennett presumably means that consciousness produces orderly, grammatical representations of something out there in the world that is meaningful, but it does not create meaning. It is not necessary to meaning
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Post by e_dog » December 9th, 2006, 4:46 am

the meaning o meaning is
meaningless ness
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.

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Post by stilltrucking » December 9th, 2006, 8:36 am

Johny Cash wrote a song about Vietnam. He had a line "Drive on, don't mean nothin' " about when soldiers were trudging along and one of them was suddenly blown into small bits of meat. What the soldiers told themselves to keep on keeping on "Drive on, don't mean nothin' "

And then there is firesign theatre, "what you don't mean can't hurt you"


and humpty dumpty
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean"

bullshit don't mean nothing, did not mean to get personal,
You know the difference between a truck driver and a cowboy?
The cowboy has the bullshit on the outside of his boots.

The troops are pawns in a macabre game of meaningless meanings, wrapped up in patriotic and religious bullshit.

Theirs but to do & die,

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