-----Original Message----- From: Charles Brown
>>>>> "Dace" <edace at flinthills.com> 04/02/00 04:13PM >>>
>>
>>Information retrieval is not the meaning of the word, "memory." When we
>>remember something, we are bringing the past into the present.
>>
>>_________
>>
>>CB: This sounds like not only time travel, but time removal. You must be
>speaking metaphorically.
>>
>I mean that we bring past perceptions and thoughts into the present.
>
>_________
>
>CB: What we bring forward is like a photograph, a record of a past event, a
trace reflection, an imitation of the perception or thought.
>
Yes, photographs are an imitation of (visual) memory, but why assume that
memory itself is an imitation of memory? The assumption here is that nature
involves nothing more than whatever a few clever humans have concocted in
their laboratories. Nature and life are just a kind of warm-up to the
really great achievement, which is Western technology.
>
> Matter
>is the existence of the present. Mind is the existence of the past.
>
>_______
>
>CB: And the present is all that exists (for now :>)). There is nothing in
the world but matter.
>
And do you say this every night before you go to bed?
>Mind exists in the present too, as perception. It is, in part, in memory,
the imitation of the past in the present.
>
Now, this is a perceptive comment. Bergson makes much of this point. For
him, it demonstrates that matter and mind are not two separate things.
There is *one* thing which we abstract into two, and then-- prefering one
over the other-- "reduce" the other to the first. The elimination of mind
is thus a mind game.
According to Bergson, sensory perception is both mental and material. It is
mental in that it provides the ground for later memory, and it's material in
that it concerns the present. Moreover, he asserts that perception is
unmediated. That is, we do not create visual images in our brains. It's
not as though we're all watching TV in the backs of our heads. We see the
actual images of things-- in light-- not images of images reconstructed in
the dark in our heads. Vision does not separate us from the object of our
perception by constructing a representation of it. Instead, it unites us
with the object. Thus perception joins mind to brain and subject to object.
>_________
>
>
>
>
> This
>does not mean there are two existences. Of course, there is only one
>existence: Time. Consciousness, which joins body and mind-- present and
>past-- is the microcosm to time's macrocosm. This is Bergsonian
>metaphysics. The substance of reality is time.
>
>_________
>
>CB:
>
>There is one existence: matter. "There is nothing in the world but matter
in motion, and matter in motion cannot move otherwise than in space and
time." - Lenin
>
Do you have any reason for believing this, or is Lenin your Paul (with Marx
in the role of Jesus)?
Ted