The approach to memory taken here is a historic approach.
Memory is an important aspect of what it means to be human, and people have always wondered about how memory works. Unfortunately, we humans have been the butt of a mischevious joke. We are able to expereince the power of our memory, but we are not born into this world with the means of understanding how memory is possible. Thus, the History of Memory is an interesting saga of struggle to understand a fundamental aspect of human existence. Much human intelectual effort has been exerted on this problem, and the story of those exertions is a rather heroic tale, a testament to human sticktoitiveness.

Memory is fundamental to human mental experience. Memory occupies a royal position at the Center of Mind. Due to the central importance of memory, the literature of memory is large, elephantine. Elephants have also been used as a symbol for memory, we say, an elephant never forgets.

 Surrounding the Royal Elephant are a group of Blind Observers. Each Blind Observer has investigated the Royal Elephant by touching a part of the animal. Each Blind Observer has partial understanding of the nature of memory. The main task of this book will be to go around the Royal Elephant and question the Blind Observers about what they know. In the end, we will be able to attempt to integrate all of the various partial understandings into a holistic unity, the best understanding of memory that we can achieve. Each Blind Observer has been working furiously to achieve a monopoly on one way of thinking about memory. Competition between the Blind Observers has been the norm. I will be attempting to unify these fragmented views of memory into a global economy of memory. Can we be Meta-Mouse, the blind mouse who who asks all of the other mice what they are feeling? 

Elephant art will be included throughout as a metaphor for memory.
 

important theme: our brains present us with a version of reality that is incomplete....we cannot directly see how our brains produce our memories and thoughts. A major struggle in the history of memory is the struggle to free ourselves from the "natural" naive view of mind and to relace that view with a deeper understanding that is based on the facts of how the brain really does produce the mind. This is problematical because at all times our intuitions about the mind are implicit in our thoughts about mind, always swamping out even the idea of a need to go deeper into understanding the mind. "The Dead Hand of PLato" as what is being over-come. Question: did the intuitions of philosophers like Schopenhauer preceed any rational scientific understanding of brain? If so, how is such intuition possible. Compare to Darwin's intution about evolution...both based on carefully being in tune with what the unconscious mind is telling us without accepting the screams and hsteria of the conscious mind that only serve to pervert reality? These initial grasping by people like Schop and Witt are primitive compared to more modern attempts to make their intuitions solid within evolutionary epistemology. Must address issue of why selectionism has been so hard to integrate into our thinking about the mental, why instructionism has so dominated to the exclusion of selectionism. Then more recent problem of going over-board on selectionism....finaly counter reaction by Sejnowski. Finally zeroing in on the true complex answer.

Elephant Tree by Richard T. Harwood
(make explicit the idea of a tree of knowledge, its topology and the means by which its branches are discovered.)

Battle between the Simple and the Powerful first approximation (Dead Hand of Plato) and the more subtle and complex combination of ideas about the unconscious, randomness of creativity, painful selection process of making implicit unconscious ideas explicit in conscious thought and formal mental models that can be shared in the memosphere. Is there a non-scientific system for playing with "wild ideas" that produces ideas that can then be selected by science? Is this mostly done in an unconscious way.....is what Wittgenstein was trying to do was to make this process a consciously understood one so that we can actively avoid the too rapid descent into falling in love with wrongful mental creations?

In a case of historical inevitability, only a society that is in the control of the Daed Hand of Plato would have exercised a period of wild hypothesizing (rationalized as being in close proximity to the truth of Ideal Forms) that must preceed any real scientific refinement that weeds out the errors and hone in on the guesses that were correct.  We need an error-filled idea producer that can then be a source of "hypotheses" to be tested by the harsh lathe of empiricism. The need for both wild guesses (large leaps through the state space being explored, provided by "philosophical speculation") and a system for close refinement to local optima (science)

Human activity that implicitly explores the implications of memory (see the Art of Memory) or explicitly does so (philosophy, science). Then finally, a meta-exploration by people who see the entire implicit/explicit scene and can play Wittgenstein's game of trying to find a niche for philosophy in the selection of logically correct and general forms that can be accessed through personal experience, a step that is independent of science's further refinements in terms of empirical evidence.

Two types of memory.....

relate these two to A and P consciousness, perception and thought

1. only the appearance
" For me voluntary memory, which is, above all, memory of the intellect and of the eyes, gives us only the appearance, not the reality, of the past. But when a smell or a taste, rediscovered in totally different circumstances, reveals the past for us, in spite of ourselves, we feel how different this past is from what we thought we remembered, and what our voluntary memory painted for us, like bad painters who have their colours but no truth." Marcel Proust, interview with Elie-Joseph Bois, in Le Temps, 1908.  (source)

2. meaningful
"What should we be without memory ? We should forget our friendships, our loves, our pleasures, our work; the genius would be unable to collect his thought, the most ardent lover would lose his tenderness if he could remember nothing. Our existence would be reduced to the successive moments of a perpetually fading present; there would be no longer any past. Poor creatures that we are, our life is so vain that it is nothing but a reflection of our memory." Chateaubriand 1790. Memoires d'Outre Tombe (source)

(could have entire section on literature and memory.....a natural continuation from memory myth)