Memory without trace

Do you mean linear time is illusory, or the parsing of events is always user selective? Both? Or am I missing the mark completely? :)
Not illusory but not fundamental. It is a real aspect of the generated actuality within physical. And yeah, accessing an event is user selective. So with the correction to "not fundamental" - both.
 
To be fair the concept of a trace is also possible in Idealism. As Braude notes even a morphic field is a structure, and hence a trace.

I don't understand that at all. The definition of a memory trace is quite clear... it's believed to be in a physical structure, one which you can measure.

If we're going to invent things we can't measure, but then claim these invented things have physical measurable structures which we can find memory traces in, what's the point. Even Sheldrake is totally unclear what his Morphic Fields are, no point saying they have traces when we haven't even found them yet.
 
Somehow you don't seem to get the point that a memory trace is a physical idea. The aim is to argue using that idea - and physicalism - to prove the idea is false.


Yes, but the point about memory is exactly that - the memory can be used in all sorts of strange ways. Software is the most concrete and effective way to think about physicalism. Again, I am arguing from within physicalism to try to prove it isn't adequate.

David

Why is software the most concrete and effective way to think about the world? That doesn't make the slightest sense to me at all.
 
I don't understand that at all. The definition of a memory trace is quite clear... it's believed to be in a physical structure, one which you can measure.

If we're going to invent things we can't measure, but then claim these invented things have physical measurable structures which we can find memory traces in, what's the point. Even Sheldrake is totally unclear what his Morphic Fields are, no point saying they have traces when we haven't even found them yet.

But don't morphic fields - if they are meant to be akin to fields from physics - have to be measurable in some way?

Additionally the field is where the past information is stored and accessed by an organism in the present.

Aren't these reasons enough for it to be considered a trace? (In fact I'm not sure you even need the first one.)
 
Not illusory but not fundamental. It is a real aspect of the generated actuality within physical. And yeah, accessing an event is user selective. So with the correction to "not fundamental" - both.

Hmmm it seems there is always time, in the sense of an ordering of events. Even in the NDEs and mystical visions that claim suspension of time seem to maintain this ordering?

Honestly I never understand what mystics or NDErs mean when they say reality is timeless.
 
If we're going to invent things we can't measure, but then claim these invented things have physical measurable structures which we can find memory traces in, what's the point.
I see what you did there. Nice one. You managed to express the idea that "if we can't measure it directly then it doesn't exist" without stating as much.
 
Honestly I never understand what mystics or NDErs mean when they say reality is timeless.
If they ,mean there is at root - no linear progression the yes - It is. As for what you said about there always being an ordering of events - no not reallyt. Physical-oriented minds generally do place some sort of ordering on events. Rather than get into more complex areas let's put it this way - there is no fixed ordering of events.

Even for those who experience a small piece of "it's all there concurrently" relating that in words/terms brings them back within a linear format. We are attempting to squeeze something that is so far beyond rationality into our standard MO. Some more so than others. It both amuses and puzzles me that there are still those who believe intellect is all-encompassing.
 
I see what you did there. Nice one. You managed to express the idea that "if we can't measure it directly then it doesn't exist" without stating as much.

Nope, if we can't measure it, how do we know it exists? The idea that you can go even further, and then say that the 'thing' now has traces, doesn't make any sense to me... it's just an assertion, unless you can back it up with something we do observe even indirectly.

Sci implied something like Braude was agonising about 'mechanistic' ways of thinking... which I took to mean 'Memory Traces', considering the article. Memory traces seem to have s pretty clear definition. What's the point of just chucking them on everything... makes a nonsense.
 
But don't morphic fields - if they are meant to be akin to fields from physics - have to be measurable in some way?

Additionally the field is where the past information is stored and accessed by an organism in the present.

Aren't these reasons enough for it to be considered a trace? (In fact I'm not sure you even need the first one.)

Well I've looked up the meaning of 'Memory Trace', and how it seems to be used in Braudes article... can't see any distinction.

I just can't see any point in saying a trace is in summat, that we don't know what it is, or whether it exists.
 
Hmmm it seems there is always time, in the sense of an ordering of events. Even in the NDEs and mystical visions that claim suspension of time seem to maintain this ordering?

Honestly I never understand what mystics or NDErs mean when they say reality is timeless.

A good way to think about it, might be to reverse our popular perception. And think about constraining space to one dimension, and giving time three dimensions.

This would give you the ability to roam around freely in time, (just like we do in space), whilst being constrained to a linear view of space (just like time).

You have to spend a while working on what that might look like...
 
Well I've looked up the meaning of 'Memory Trace', and how it seems to be used in Braudes article... can't see any distinction.

I just can't see any point in saying a trace is in summat, that we don't know what it is, or whether it exists.

A field of memories is a trace because it's an object that has store past events of experience without actually being those events. Perhaps Sheldrake meant something different by morphic fields, or changed his mind since reading Braude's criticism. (Actually I'll email Sheldrake and see which it is).

A memory trace, from the way I read it, is any object meant to be structural representation of past events. The argument Braude makes is no such structure is logically possible.

So it's not that we don't know whether morphic fields exist, but as they were defined (or as Braude understood them) they are objects fitting the above definition. It may be that Braude is wrong, that traces are possible, but once someone defines any object as fulfilling the aforementioned role it falls under the criticisms in Memory Without A Trace.

For example - and as an admitted aside - I believe this also applies to Egnor's idea that memory is held in the Form of the body, as he asserts as following from his commitment to Thomistic dualism. Egnor unfortunately seems to think that if memories aren't stored in the brain they must be in the "soul" which he equates with the Form. Perhaps he explains it elsewhere but it's unclear to me from that article why he thinks the argument against memory traces proves a soul?

A good way to think about it, might be to reverse our popular perception. And think about constraining space to one dimension, and giving time three dimensions.

This would give you the ability to roam around freely in time, (just like we do in space), whilst being constrained to a linear view of space (just like time).

You have to spend a while working on what that might look like...

Hmmm....I'll have to chew on this. Thanks.

My first thought though is whether time can be considered to have a spatial axis?
 
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Nope, if we can't measure it, how do we know it exists? The idea that you can go even further, and then say that the 'thing' now has traces, doesn't make any sense to me... it's just an assertion, unless you can back it up with something we do observe even indirectly..

That sort of belief and the limited cognition that it brings IMO seems to make your participation here pointless. What you're stating amounts to "I will only accept non-physical only when it can be assessed by approaches geared to the physical." As I've stated before that's as convoluted and nonsensical as wanting to understand Chines by reading a Spanish dictionary. It is also ultimately non-scientific.
 
That sort of belief and the limited cognition that it brings IMO seems to make your participation here pointless. What you're stating amounts to "I will only accept non-physical only when it can be assessed by approaches geared to the physical." As I've stated before that's as convoluted and nonsensical as wanting to understand Chines by reading a Spanish dictionary. It is also ultimately non-scientific.

Jeez what a numpty... Lol... Talk about putting words in ones mouth...
 
Just to note JSTOR is offering online access to a section of their library (or possibly all?). In any case Heil's paper on memory traces, which Braude cites as a major inspiration, is available to read online for free:

Traces of Things Past


This paper consists of two parts. In Part I, an attempt to get around certain well-known criticisms of the trace theory of memory is discussed. Part II consists of an account of the so-called "logical" notion of a memory trace. Trace theories are sometimes thought to be empirical hypotheses about the functioning of memory. That this is not the case, that trace theories are in fact philosophical theories, is shown, I believe, in the arguments which follow. If this is so, one may well wonder about psychologists' insistence that any empirical theory of memory must involve the postulation of traces (or trace-like entities: engrams, schemata, etc.)

This paper reiterates Braude's points:

1) Traces introduce an infinite regression.

2) Traces assume the experienced world has some privileged structure that can be reflected in the structure of the trace.
 
I'm sure this piece will divide along the usual lines ;)... Take from it what you will:

http://www.sciencecodex.com/scientists_discover_how_we_play_memories_in_fast_forward-173343

In the brain, fast gamma rhythms encode memories about things that are happening right now; these waves come rapidly one after another as the brain processes high-resolution information in real time. The scientists learned that slow gamma rhythms -- used to retrieve memories of the past, as well as imagine and plan for the future -- store more information on their longer waves, contributing to the fast-forward effect as the mind processes many data points with each wave.
 
I'm sure this piece will divide along the usual lines ;)... Take from it what you will:

http://www.sciencecodex.com/scientists_discover_how_we_play_memories_in_fast_forward-173343

"Maybe they are transmitting their own imagined thoughts on the wrong frequency, the one usually reserved for things that are really happening," says Coglin.

Transmitting imagined thoughts on the wrong frequency...? Did I just hear that right... Lol. I'll have to read it first.... but..

You can put such studies with Borjigin's rat study, where she showed emergence of highly synchronised alpha gamma coupling during cardiac arrest.

And put those both together with studies showing behavioural effects caused by hyper-weak magnetic fields.

...and then you can have a stab at explaining the classic hospital veridical OBE.
 
From neuroscientist Tallis, A Smile At Waterloo Station :

...Neurophilosophers will not be impressed by my objection. The difference between the shock-chastened sea snail and my feeling sad over a meeting that passed so quickly, is simply the difference between 20,000 neurons or a hundred billion; or, more importantly, between the modest number of connexions within Aplysia’s nervous system, and the unimaginably large number of connexions in your brain (said to be of the order of a 100 trillion). Well, I don’t believe that the difference between Kandel’s ‘memory in a dish’ and my actual memory is just a matter of the size of the nervous system or the number or complexity of the neurons in it. Clarifying this difference will enable us to see what is truly mysterious in memory...

...Making present something that is past as something past, that is to say, absent, hardly looks like a job that a piece of matter could perform, even a complex electrochemical process in a piece of matter such as a brain. But we need to specify more clearly why not. Material objects are what they are, not what they have been, any more than they are what they will be. Thus a changed synaptic connexion is its present state; it is not also the causes of its present state. Nor is the connection ‘about’ that which caused its changed state or its increased propensity to fire in response to cues. Even less is it about those causes located at a temporal distance from its present state. A paper published in Science last year by Itzhak Fried claiming to solve the problem of memory actually underlines this point. The author found that the same neurons were active in the same way when an individual remembered a scene (actually from The Simpsons) as when they watched it.

So how did people ever imagine that a ‘cerebral deposit’ (to use Henri Bergson’s sardonic phrase) could be about that which caused its altered state? Isn’t it because they smuggled consciousness into their idea of the relationship between the altered synapse and that which caused the alteration, so that they could then imagine that the one could be ‘about’ the other? Once you allow that, then the present state ofanything can be a sign of the past events that brought about its present state, and the past can be present. For example, a broken cup can signify to me (a conscious being when I last checked) the unfortunate event that resulted in its unhappy state.

Of course, smuggling in consciousness like this is inadmissible, because the synapses are supposed to supply the consciousness that reaches back in time to the causes of the synapses’ present states. And there is another, more profound reason why the cerebral deposit does not deliver what some neurophysiologists want it to, which goes right to the heart of the nature of the material world and the physicist’s account of its reality – something that this article has been circling round. I am referring to the mystery of tensed time; the mystery of an explicit past, future and present.

That remembered smile is located in the past, so my memory is aware that it reaches across time. In the mind-independent physical world, no event is intrinsically past, present or future: it becomes so only with reference to a conscious, indeed self-conscious, being, who provides the reference point – the now which makes some events past, others future, and yet others present. The temporal depth created by memories, which hold open the distance between that which is here and now and that which is no longer, is a product of consciousness, and is not to be found in the material world. As Einstein wrote in a moving letter at the end of his life, “People like me who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” I assume that those who think of memory as a material state of a material object – as a cerebral deposit – also believe in physics – in which case they cannot believe that tensed time exists in the brain, or more specifically, in synapses. A material object such as the brain may have a history that results in its being altered, but the previous state, the fact of alteration, or the time interval between the two states, are not present in the altered state. A synapse, like a broken cup, does not contain its previous state, the event that resulted in its being changed, the fact that it has changed, the elapsed time, or anything else containing the sense of its ‘pastness’ which would be necessary if it were the very material of memory. How could someone ever come to believe it could?
 
I'm fine with this as I don't think it contradicts Braude or Heil's argument.

It will be interesting to see if the rhythms connect to quantum biology - IIRC Hammeroff has suggested this?

Ah it seems there might be a connection to memory:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25714379

The mechanism by which anesthetic gases selectively prevent consciousness and memory (sparing non-conscious brain functions) remains unknown...In recent years Eckenhoff and colleagues have found anesthetic action in microtubules, cytoskeletal polymers of the protein tubulin inside brain neurons. 'Quantum mobility' in microtubules has been proposed to mediate consciousness. Through molecular modeling we have previously shown: (1) olive oil-like non-polar, hydrophobic quantum mobility pathways ('quantum channels') of tryptophan rings in tubulin, (2) binding of anesthetic gas molecules in these channels, and (3) capabilities for π-electron resonant energy transfer, or exciton hopping, among tryptophan aromatic rings in quantum channels, similar to photosynthesis protein quantum coherence. Here, we show anesthetic molecules can impair π-resonance energy transfer and exciton hopping in tubulin quantum channels, and thus account for selective action of anesthetics on consciousness and memory.

And there does seem to be a possible connection to those rhythms as well? ->

Hidden origins of EEG

An important new facet of the theory is introduced. Microtubule quantum vibrations (e.g. in the megahertz frequency range) appear to interfere and produce much slower EEG “beat frequencies.” Despite a century of clinical use, the underlying origins of EEG rhythms have remained a mystery. Clinical trials of brief brain stimulation — aimed at microtubule resonances with megahertz mechanical vibrations using transcranial ultrasound — have shown reported improvements in mood, and may prove useful against Alzheimer’s disease and brain injury in the future.
 
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