A Hypertext Exploration of Memory and Mind
by John William Schmidt
 
Writing Books
When I was a kid I wrote a list of all the things I wanted to do in my life. By the time I was 35, the only thing left on that list was "write a book." In my case, "book" is an evolving term. I am only interested in the type of freedom provided by hypertext on the internet. Producing a printed book is not really of interest to me.  Frankly, I am not sure why anyone should try to construct a book these days without  doing the book in HTML (hypertext markup language) rather than the .doc files of word processors. Of course, many word processors these days have some HTML functions built in.....even glaciers move.  My problem is that I see myself in a predicament similar to that faced by, Charles Darwin. He spent decades preparing to write his book on evolution, and when forced to rush to print, produced an "abstract" that was several hundred pages long! He had no shortage of material, just a Herculean task of trying to fit his huge topic into a digestible book.

Scope, intentions, background
The main theme of these web pages dealing with memory is that memory is fundamental to human existence, yet humanity is only just becoming fully conscious of memory. With our growing awareness of the importance of memory, the Science of Memory is also giving us the power of memory engineering. It has become cliche to observe that as humans, everything that is important to us is made available to us through our minds and our memories. But what happens to this tired cliche when we suddenly have the technological power to control memory? This shift towards control of human memory is as dramatic as the shift from being aware of fire to being able to produce fire. So the scope of this Hypertext Exploration of Memory and Mind is a revolution in the making, a revolution we might call the revolution of Memory Engineering.

This revolution is A BIG DEAL, and while I have attempted to take a comprehensive approach to this project, my exploration is not exhaustive of the memory revolution. There are issues for the future of the Memory Revolution that these web pages hardly touch on. For example, topics such as genetic engineering of the human mind and the prospects for "downloading" human minds into computers are hardly even mentioned here, and all I do is point elsewhere for coverage of these topics. With the coming of the Memory revolution, many authors have come foreward with books about the various technical aspects of the Science of Memory. While it IS my intention to review much of the key material that has been previously put into books about memory, it is not by intention to produce just another such volume on the biology or psychology or any other particular aspect of memory. We now live in an age of specialization. I am not interested in specialization. I am interested in synthesis across disciplinary boundaries.

My intended target of exploration is not speculation about the final grand conclusion of the Memory Revolution. Rather, my goal IS speculation about how we got to the brink of this revolution and what needs to be done to aid in the smooth unfolding of the Memory Revolution.

Is this stated goal not paradoxical? The very nature of revolutions in science is often portrayed as being the essence of shocking discontinuities and chaotic change. Is there any sense to speaking of smoothing the course of a scientific revolution? Ernst Mayr explained very clearly that not all scientific revolutions have the brick-on-glass impact of Einstein telling the world about quanta or relativity. Within biology, revolutions tend to unfold gradually over the course of decades as many disjointed observations are accumulated and then slowly seen to be related in some subtle way. In the course of the gradual evolution of human understanding of biological sytems, biologists often reach "sticking points" or controversies. A good example from the first half of this century (the 1900's) is the argument between Vitalists and Materialists. Eventually, biologists learned how to express vitalistic principles in materialistic terms (for example, the genetic program provides organisms with apparent goals and purposeful behavior) and Vitalism died at the hands of the Molecular Biology Revolution. In the second half of the century conflict shifted to the domain of the mystery of mind and consciousness. The Memory Revolution that I deal with at this web site is and important part of a larger Brain Revolution. The Brain revolution will show us exactly how the human brain produces a human mind, just as the Molecular Biology Revolution showed us how the genetic program of living organisms is stored and expressed through molecular memory. What are the "sticking points" in the Memory Revolution?

To answer that last question is really the purpose of this Hypertext Exploration of Memory and Mind. If we can clearly understand the current revolution in brain science, then we will be able to get past the sticking points and on into the a future that will have been fundamentally transformed from the way people have previously existed. In the past, humans took the brain's powers of memory and thought as unalterable givens, basic constraints on existence. In the future, we will have control of our memories and our minds, we will have new power to alter the meaning of what it is to be human. Now, anytime science drops a new source of power on society, there are major social dislocations and many troublesome consequences.

There are two main classes of sticking points in the Memory Revolution. The first class is mostly internal to the Science of Mind and mostly related to the problem of disciplinary specialization. If we can promote the growth of interdisciplinary cooperation within the science of mind, the work of coming to undersatand how the brain makes the mind will be made easier. I am most interested in the second class of sticking points, those that exist at the interface between scientists and the rest of society. Western Civilization has been rocked by by a series of collisions between new scientific ideas and older pre-scientific beliefs. We look back with awe at the hundreds of years of struggle between Helicentrists and Geocentrists. We are still in the throws of the battle between Evolutionists and Creationists. And now, the Memory Revolution is bringing us to a conflict that has the potential to make those past conflicts look like friendly banter.

What is this new horific conflict emerging from the Science of Mind? Humans have evolved with the belief that there is an immortal and immaterial soul that inhabits living human bodies. Our sense of Free Will and self is associated with our belief in a soul. How will a scientific understanding of mind and new techniques for engineering both human and robot brains impact upon human belief in the soul? Already we face the real prospect of human belief in souls inhibiting the Science of Mind. Genetic engineering of laboratory  mice is the current reality, made possible by the use of mouse embryonic stem cells. Scientists are now being restricted in their use of human embryonic stem cells. The conflict over the soul has begun.
 
So the main goal of this Exploration, is to educate. Once people learned that they had nothing to fear from Heliocentrism, even the Catholic Church gave up on Geocentrism. The Catholic Church has accepted the fact of biological evolution, so the Creationism battle has been largely marginalized to a few extreamist sects of Biblical Literalists. I am a believer in the power of education. Unfortunately, Brain Science is a rather sprawling and complex mess. Humanity has not had time to deal with these complexities and the implications of human control over the nature of the human mind. Scientists need to come out of the lab and start talking to non-scientists. Together we will find a smooth path into the future. If we stay divided, ignorance will dominate the future. We are the recipients of a precious billions of years old heritage of life and mind. We stand on the threshold of having the power to take control of that herritage, to begin a self-generative phase of existence that liberates us from the hands of The Blind Watchmaker. I trust that the truth can set us free.

Note to Specialists.
Only a small part of this web site deals with the small area of the Science of Mind that is my area of specialization. Most of the exploration of mind that you will find at this site involves my attempts to relate the rest of the Science of Mind to my own specialty in order to carry out a process of consilience between subdisciplines. In addition, I have been consciously trying to make this exploration accessible to nonspecialists. I have no doubt that many of my efforts will provoke disgust in the minds of other specialists. A major part of the sickness of our society is due to the continual patroling of the boundaries between science and human society at large. Moat specialists dare not even attempt to synthsize knowledge and talk to nonspecialists because they know they will be persecuted and ostrasized by their fellow specialists. To the legions of specialists who only know how to complain about the errors made by popularizars of science, I welcome your complaints, I know I have a lot to learn from you. To those other specialists who accept that popularization of science is part of the obligation of a scientist, I continue to welcome your cooperation in my effort to make my exploration of the Science of Mind as useful as possible to as many people as possible.