Re LambdaC's cite of Bergson that "Memory must be, in
principle, a power absolutely independent of matter",
just some more materials for analysis..
SENSATIONS:
"In SRM, a reminiscence [is] a partial
re-experiencing of the event ... your present vantage
point connects up via a clear-loop link to the actual
moment in spacetime where that [event] is still
eternally present [and] is NOT recalled from some
storage space in the brain ... memories are never as
clear as direct perceptions because the clear-loop
link connecting the past with the present becomes
degraded with time, acquiring extra breaks that make
the clear link less transparent and more cluttered
with other memories....
"[However] unconscious memories such as muscle skills
are probably stored in the brain in more conventional
ways ... the unconscious data rate in the human brain
is at least a trillion times larger than the
conscious rate ... Coexistent with this unconscious
mechanism, part of the brain acts as a sentient
subsystem, an intricately woven spacetime tapestry
stretching back into the past with caterpillar
circuitry to simulate the flow of time and memories
that are not located in the brain at all but far back
in the past where/when they first happened." /1
MEMORIES:
"Patiently she explained that the recapitulation is
the act of calling back the energy we already spent
in past actions. To recapitulate entails recalling
all the people we have met, all the places we have
seen and all the feelings we have had in our entire
lives ... then sweeping them clean ...
"'When you recapitulate, try to feel some long
stretchy fibers that extend out from your
midsection', she explained... She assured me that
while recapitulating, we extend these stretchy fibers
of energy across space and time to the persons,
places and events we are examining. The result is
that we can return to every moment of our lives and
act as if we were actually there [and reclaim the
energy left behind]". /2
and THE FLOW OF TIME:
"There are no fewer eternal Objects. It is even the
fourth and last component of Whitehead's definition
of the event: extensions, intensities, individuals or
prehensions, and, finally, eternal objects or
"ingressions." Extensions effectively are forever
moving, gaining and losing parts carried away in
movement; things are endlessly being altered; even
prehensions are ceaselessly entering and leaving
variable components...
"With Leibniz the situation hardly differs...
Everything flows down below ... permanency is not
reduced to monads that actualize the virtual, but is
extended to the possibilities that they seize in
their acts of reflection, and that are born in the
extended composite materials... Figures, things, and
qualities are schema of permanence that are reflected
or actualized in monads, but that are realized in
flux; even composite substances, as we shall observe,
need an ultimate quality that marks every one of
them...
"But then, in the midst of this totality, Leibniz
adds the conditions of a Baroque concert... For
Whitehead it involves prehensions being directly
connected to each other ... For Leibniz, to the
contrary ... only an indirect harmonic contact ..." /3
TO DIG DEEPER:
1/ Nick Herbert, _Elemental Mind_, p132, describing
James Culbertson's Spacetime Reductive Materialism.
Also see
http://www.alienlogic.com/exi-lists/extropians.96/2046.html
for more detail. Culbertson's 1976 _Sensations,
Memories and the Flow of Time_ is a diagrammatically
dense schizoanalytic dialogue that still sits on my
shelf, like an itch that I can't quite reach.
2/ Taisha Abelar, _The Sorceror's Crossing_, p46-47.
Becoming-woman, for a man, does not necessarily
require socially-oriented 'drusy handshakes', though
it may require a certain kind of energetic celibacy,
certainly for becoming imperceptible..
3/ Gilles Deleuze, "What is an Event?", from _The
Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque_, available at
http://acnet.pratt.edu/~arch543p/readings/Deleuze.html
(which site also provided many Michel Serres texts to
help overcome my earlier atomistic ignorance -
Lucretius quote of the day: "Never suppose the atoms
had a plan, Nor with a wise intelligence imposed An
order on themselves, nor in some pact Agreed what
movements each should generate. No, it was all
fortuitous; for years, For centuries, for eons, all
these motes In infinite variety of ways ... Meet
combine, try every possible, Every conceivable
pattern, till at length Experiment culminates in that
array Which makes great things begin" (Book 5, lines
420-433).
P.S. Re "fish & plication", behold the PHISHnet at
the Internet Ecologies Area,
http://www.parc.xerox.com/spl/groups/dynamics/
- Mark Crosby
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