The Wykehamist
‘ instinct’,‘ habit’, etc.; but some impulses are surely not memories, you may say— surely the impulse to recoil from pain, for example, or seek shelter and sugar are not memories? The answer of this broadened conception of memory would be to say that these are memories, just perhaps not your own, but your genetic composition’ s.
This is trite, perhaps, but it is universal as an idea, and for that reason more than appealing. It is, ultimately, an image of how everything is shaped by its environment, itself a collection of things, shaping each other, but, importantly, not all in some meaningless infinite flicker, but with each one of these things moving as if with purpose; the more I am shaped by that which surrounds me, the more I am a vessel of memory, the less it has to shape me. Memory implies the existence of an equilibrium(‘ memory harmony’). For the frictionless pendulum, this is instant; for the riverside rock, much slower.
This would appear to be an exposition of a poeticised, metaphysical‘ statistical mechanic’, but the poeticisation is not ars gratia artis; to me, it is a thing of genuine unbelievable beauty that the forming of molecular bonds, the evolution of life, the function of language and the emergence of economy are all consequences of this one same law of equilibria. Now, what they literally are, beyond analogy, is of course a point of massive contention, sounding pseudoscientific at best on first interaction, but it is this theory which obsesses me; not least because, in its mathematical content, it emerges effectively ex nihilo( or at least aprioristically), but nonetheless forces a world that, at the smallest scale, in the simplest conceivable memory foam( still as in the pillow), is a theory of quantum gravity. This derivation is the text on which I am currently working. For those who would like a rich but non-technical introduction to this manner of thinking, from single-celled life through to humans and AI( though not one that indulges seriously in the possibility of extending to the super tiny regime its analogies as mathematical structure), I strongly recommend Blaise y Arcas’ What is Intelligence( now in Mob Lib).
To make sense of this, I will give two examples, that of molecular bonding and language. My recent interest in chemistry— barely having borne it for IGCSE— was sparked by discussions with Oliver Jing( Coll:, 22-) and CSM, as it is the natural next hierarchical rung in the ladder of natural phenomena— ASIDE: this word gives me particular joy because I use it in an exactly Kantian sense of φαινόμενᾰ( that which appears to be reality to me), latently holding between its vowels an absolute richesse of quantum information theory— after particle physics. Chemistry, from what I gather, always takes place in
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