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+--- Thread: Article Time, not space, contains memory (/thread-19231.html)
Time, not space, contains memory - C C - Nov 21, 2025
https://iai.tv/articles/memory-is-not-stored-in-the-brain-auid-3420?_auid=2020
EXCERPTS: The leading theories of memory describe it as being stored in the brain – similarly, some argue, to the way a computer stores memory. But this assumption relies on materialist assumptions and problematically bypasses the hard problem of consciousness. Memory is not stored in space, but in time, argues philosopher Victoria Trumbull.
[...] If we assume that the brain stores up discrete, localisable memories, it then becomes extremely difficult to explain how the brain can be said to generate, preserve, and reconstruct “representations” of this kind. How can the brain translate an image of experience, itself intangible and invisible, into a physical record or neural pattern? The neuroscientist is left with the philosophical challenge famously known as the “hard problem of consciousness”: given the complex physical machinations of the brain, whence arises the conscious experience of remembering?
[...] In truth, the theory of localization far exceeds the facts of current neurobiology. When neuroscientists locate memory “in” the brain, what they’re really finding is that certain brain regions are active during remembering. But being active during a process is not the same thing as being the storage location for that process. The brain is undoubtedly involved in remembering, but involvement does not necessitate containment.
[...] Memory is, essentially, a fact of time—it is the persistence of the past—and, because it is a temporal phenomenon, it is fundamentally extra-spatial. To extend to memories, to a series of moments in time, the obligation of “being contained” in a place is to transfer to a temporal phenomenon a quality which applies only to the collection of material bodies perceived in space. And it is this series of observations which leads us directly to the reality of the mind: because the past overflows the present, memory overflows the brain; and because memory overflows the brain, mind overflows the body. (MORE - missing details)
RE: Time, not space, contains memory - Magical Realist - Nov 21, 2025
Quote:"First of all, it is important to note that the objects of memory are not like the objects of perception. They are neither visible nor tangible. The remembered thing or event is not found in the present, except somehow intangibly “in” the mind, while the perceived object is present physically and externally. Second, memory-images essentially bear the mark of “pastness.” They are attached to the past by their deepest roots, so that we immediately recognize a memory as distinct from a perception and thus know it as “memory.” An individual recollection points to the wealth or totality of the past that it belongs to and from whence it originates; it points to the total history of the personal life we have lived since our birth."
It might be better to see memory more as a part of consciousness in itself, especially due to its imparting to us the qualitative feel of the remembered experience---the taste of the fruit, the pleasure of a song, or the heartache of a death. If it is not spatial, as our ordinary perceptual experience is, then it must be woven into the fundamental stream of time itself, which provides continuity between the immediate and the past as one recalled experience. We can experience the past because our consciousness is always part of the past, immediately accessible to its persisting experiences and feelings and moments.