On 12/25/2014 11:45 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
*From:*everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] *On
Behalf Of *Kim Jones
*Sent:* Thursday, December 25, 2014 7:46 PM
*To:* everything-list@googlegroups.com
*Subject:* Re: Long term memory is extra-corporeal
On 26 Dec 2014, at 1:43 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 12/25/2014 1:17 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
In paper
Forsdyke, D.R. (2009). Samuel Butler and human long term memory: is the
cupboard
bare? Journal of Theoretical Biology 258(1), 156-164. (see
http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/mind01.htm
<http://post.queensu.ca/%7Eforsdyke/mind01.htm>)
the author considers a possibility that the long term memory is outside
the
brain. I guess that Bruno should like it.
That seems backwards for Bruno's idea. If memories are outside the brain
then they
should survive destruction of the brain. But as I understand Bruno's idea
one's
"soul" survives destruction of the brain as in reincarnation, but memories
don't.
Brent
Don't forget this is about long-term memory. How long is long-term? I would say beyond
the life of the individual. Seen like that, there has to be some kind of library or
lookup table which in no way correlates to anything to do with human brain size, the
authors conclude. Certain of these very-long-term memories do get encoded somehow to
survive destruction of the brain, as in Jung's 'racial memory' or "collective
unconscious' - the original engrams or patterns of recognition (archetypes) some of them
terrifyingly inexplicable and probably arising in dreams and recorded as revelations.
Folklore is the racial memory of homo sapiens. We still churn it out. What we cannot
remember exactly we plaster over with something else anyway, because HS are natural-born
story tellers who cannot pass up a good story. If the shoe fits, we tend to wear it.
It's literally in our DNA these authors conclude. This suggests to me that the notion of
"Junk DNA" is perhaps itself junk as the very purpose of DNA is to record ie encode
experience at something for the purpose of passing it on. DNA cannot fail at that
purpose. Whenever scientists declare something "Junk" or "Dark" this just means "we are
clueless over this" so it's time to find the macro-molecular link that allows this
almost-Lamarckian effect of racial memory to come about.
The term “junk DNA”, itself has been junked a while ago, when it was discovered that a
portion of this DNA acts like a kind of OS that switches encoding sections on and off.
It is a mistake I believe to look at DNA as a static repository of hereditary
information alone. It is this of course, but it turns out to be more complex, dynamic
and layered than the simple static model. A lot of the so called “junk DNA” (but not all
of it by any means) seems to be involved in this dynamic process. Especially, during the
process of embryogenesis, DNA expression is undergoing dynamic highly sequenced and
seemingly (somehow) choreographed changes (through methylation and other means).
Other parts of this junk DNA, seem to be parasitical in nature; e.g. the selfish DNA
hypothesis, and this also seems very likely – IMO. If such DNA “parasite entities”
exist, perhaps using viruses as vehicles during their “life-cycle” in order to ride with
them on into a hosts DNA and insert themselves into a new happy home, passing copies
down for as long as the lineage continues. Perhaps a parasite is “junk” for the host,
but from the parasites perspective I am sure the view is different… so even here in this
case is it really junk.
-Chris
But to say that DNA provides "long term memory" seems like an abuse of terminology, making
a metaphor into a factual description. DNA provides "memory" only in that sometimes parts
of it get to reproduce. Genes are more persistent units, but their "memory" is just get
copied to not. There's nothing Lamarckian about it, much less extra-corporeal survival of
memories. Memories are necessarily things that are remembered. I don't remember any
previous life and I doubt that you do either.
Brent
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