What are we?

This book sounds fascinating: On the Sea of Memory : A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering.

Perhaps for me for different reasons than one would ordinarily think. This interview with the author, Jonathan Cott, touches on it.

Salon.com Books | He lost his mind: "Do you ever stop believing that one day your memories will come back to you?

No, I don't think they will.

So you're resigned to that.

Yes, I am. Although in the book I do quote several spiritual teachers who say we are our memories, and therefore whether we remember them or not they're still with us. And so I'm hoping that in some slightly mystical way they are still with me, in my body somewhere. It's like when I wake up from a dream and I remember for a split second the content of the dream, the images in the dream, and then a second later I don't remember anything. But for that split second I remember them, and I think that maybe in some way those images have filtered down and integrated into my consciousness. Or my subconsciousness, let's put it that way. And they are there to draw on. But I don't know. That's just a mystical belief."

You see, I'm not so sure that we are our memories. I will accept that our memories are a huge part of us, but not all of us. I think what we are is much more complex than that (and this goes back to my argument with Ray Kurzweil, too). And for those that believe in an afterlife, exactly which you is going to live forever? The you of this moment? The you at age 13, full of hope and innocence? The you at 96, locked and lost in a fog of memories and confusion?

When I wrestle with this, I ultimately fall back on Steven Pinker's assertion: The mind is something the brain does. Without my memories, I am not me. And a slightly different chemical mix makes me other than me as well. Me is not a fixed asset. Yes, that's scary. And I fear that Mr. Cott is right and his memories are truly gone - wiped clear of his brain and totally unrecoverable.

So, what are we? We are a marvel. And the possibilities are endless. What we might be today, tomorrow, and into the future is filled with hope and adventure. And when the adventure is over, there's the memory of us, not stored in us, but in our friends and family and our works. That's where memory is most valuable.

mind, memory, science, religion, kurzweil