Memory
Posted: November 29th, 2006, 9:02 pm
Memory -- (noun?)
some thing i had before i started heavy drinking.
What's your definition?
some thing i had before i started heavy drinking.
What's your definition?
Post your poetry, artwork, photography, & music.
https://www.studioeight.tv/phpbb/
that's awesome!the feeling of a messy story that is still present
probably awesome, too, but (because) it needs more explanation..... the Borges/Funes danger
. details (the flavour of)
. maybe is a verb
This is an old book, I suppose molecular biology and has come a long way since 1969The 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
'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.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/health/art ... 23soul.htmAs 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.
No I meant neurotheologians.btw, stilltruck, the quest. is what is Memory?
emphasis mine.did you perhaps mean anaestheology?
"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