Memory

What differentiates the living from non-living?
Memory.
What is memory?
Experiences stored in biochemical form.
Memories informing an organism interactions - iteration.
DNA is physical memory, stored in biochemical algorithms - patterns sequences.
Over time the evolution of nervous systems develops a second source of iterating memory - experience.
The two memory sources overlap - enhancing and sometimes contradicting each other.
Genetics is the study of physical memory; memetics is the study of mental memory - gradually developing into cultures.

In my Interactions & Interpretations thesis I give my own views on how memories inform and iterate, without requiring a mystical agency.

The intervention of memories in an organism's interactions is what we call "will".
Past experiences - intervene upon ongoing, dynamic, interactions, adjusting them in accordance with precedent.
In inferior organisms - plants - the memory source is only the physical - genetic - and so this adjustment is slow and based on trial/error dualities.
Cosmic flux - including chaotic energies - are to unpredictable to make this method effective in the long term.
The evolution of the more immediate, dynamic, mental source of memory multiplies organic efficiency and effectiveness.

Free-Will refers to this iterating guidance offered by stored memories - intentionality.
Willfulness evolves to cope with fluctuating interactivities - changing circumstances.

"Free" refers to the degree the mental memories can usurp or adjust the physical - genetic - memories to fluctuating circumstances, expressed as choice.

The ability to store experiential data as an additional source of reference - along with physical memory, i.e., DNA, develops into the ability to become conscious of consciousness.
Gradually the organism can usurp its physical impulses - based on genetically programmed reactivity - and contradict them altogether - developing nihilism: idea negating the real.
Experiential knowledge, coupled with genetic knowledge, where mind controls but does not deny the body, opens up new options for the will to choose from.

Man experiences genetic memories in the form of intuition, impulses, instincts...
Experiential memory still overrules it to the degree that the individual's brain is sophisticated, undamaged and not infected by corrupt ideologies/dogmas, such as those founded on nihilistic principles: anti-life, anti-aesthetics, anti-reason, anti-reality.

In sleep the brain shuts itself off from external sources of stimulation - from experience.
It then experiences internal sources more vividly, but because these internal sources have no ability to conceptualize, abstract, they adopt the memories from the experiences already stored in the brain - which are gradually eroding, so it is usually the previous days experiences which come forth in sleep to help the body, i.e., organs, cells, transmit their messages to the sleeping brain as often confused, nonsensical, allegory, i.e., lacking sequential self-consistency.

Memory and Identity

Memory - DNA & Experiential (genes/memes) is a continuum, creating an unbroken chain which we call "self," or "I".
The Greeks equated death with forgetfulness (Lethe) - loss of memory.

Aletheia - unforgetting - their word for truth, is the negation of Lethe...to recall self, or who and what you are is to reaffirm your identity, your life.

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Memory is identity.
Forgetfulness is death.

Two sources of memory:
1- DNA - genetic.
2- Experiential - 1st and 2nd hand experiences - memetic.

Corrupt memory and you alter the individual's identity.

But past cannot be changed - it is what they refer to as divine, as god, as immutable and determining.
The past can only be forgotten, or rewritten, in the present.
This is why they hate the body. 
The body is past made present, and perceived as appearance. They hate the past those who despise the body - see Abrahamism, nihilism, in general, is negative towards the past, i.e., nature, as the sum of all past nurturing.
This is why they emphasize nurturing as a rewriting of nature. They want to forget the past - brainwash, erase....zombify.
They want a blank slate - tabula rasa - to rewrite the past, to create their ideal man. The Last man.
They want to be gods - creators of worlds.

I explained elsewhere how modern/postmoderns - nihilism - idealizes a man with no past but only a present and a future.
If the past cannot be erased or forgotten then it ought to be revised to accommodate the present.
This is why they are "progressive" - men with no past but only a present and a brilliant future.
The past is to be invented in the present in accordance to present needs/desire, ideals.
Appearances are labeled "superficial"...irrelevant, because they can be changed, concealed, or declared irrelevant.
Thus, "you can't judge a book by its cover"....implying that life is like a manufactured artifice, like a book, which can intentionally contradict its content with its cover, or that can use a generic cover - uniformity - which does not reveal the contents.

The mind stands in the way of the body's wisdom - pool of inherited memories.
Often the mind contradicts them, if it becomes infected and infested by nihilistic memes - pool of alternate corruptive memories.
The body communicates this accumulated wisdom when the mind is quieted - in dreams or meditation - always in the form it appropriates from the mind's experiential memories.
A mind must learn to decipher the communications.

Choice, as an expression of will, is not only determined by genetic memories - DNA - but are finalized by experiential memories evaluating circumstances, and an organism's own energies (self-awarness) in relation to an objective.

If you could upload your consciousness into a computer you would be killing yourself and replacing it with an incomplete copy.
Whenever continuity is broken then identity is broken.

The primal force of life and biology is replication.

Cells cannot do this perfectly, which forces adaptation and evolution.

Evolution is never complete.


To pretend that humanity, or some geniuses, "can do it better", than the whole of life, is misguided, a delusion of grandeur.

The same belief permeates the Abrahamic ideal of "freedom through innocence", that all Sin can be washed away, Blank-Slate Theory.