Memory is an Otherworld

The popular idea of memory is a machine model. Memory is a hard drive. Experience is stored by the brain like a computer writes to a disk. When memory fails, it is a mechanical failure. Eventually the hard drive degrades to the point of unreliability. This is, like most machine models, wrong. Memory is an Otherworld. It is a place we visit which exists alongside the waking world—sometimes parallel, sometimes not. The rules of the waking world do not apply there. There we meet the dead and re-experience events no longer available to us in the waking world. Tick-tock time does not apply in Memory. Not only can we travel across decades in an instant, subsequent events alter previous events. Memory is built of stories. It has a strong relation to history—the story of the waking world—but the relation is far less strong than the machine model assumes. Memory is liquid. Subsequent events alter previous events, as I said before. Also, two experiencers of the same event, when they visit…