Memory, Knowledge, Imagination and Cognition

From: Joe Dees (joedees@addall.com)
Date: Wed Dec 12 2001 - 06:05:58 GMT

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Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 22:05:58 -0800
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From: "Joe Dees" <joedees@addall.com>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Memory, Knowledge, Imagination and Cognition
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    ('binary' encoding is not supported, stored as-is)      Memory and Knowledge both have their sources in perception, but knowledge is the wider class. Memory is restricted to the reproduction to some degree of a segment of past perception, complete with a spatiotemporal perspective; memory is thus diachronic and positional. On the other hand, knowledge of a datum would not entail that we be able to reproduce, in memory, our experience of learning it; thus knowledge is synchronic and apositional. Imagination and cognition, in this view, extrapolate possibilities from the actualities grasped in perception and those preserved in memory and knowledge, by deconstructing them into their constituent elements and recombining them in novel ways. In other words, perceptions, and their preserved entities in memory and knowledge are utilized, but the gestalt integrity of individual perceptions, memories and knowledge chunks may be fragmented so that some componenets are used while others are not. However, imagination is restricted t!
    o a generation of possible perceptions from particular spatiotemporal perspectives and is diachronic and positional, whereas cognition is synchronic and apositional. Although they are all to some degree autonomous with respect to present or past perception (knowledge and cognition more so than memory and imagination), they are all directly or indirectly grounded in perception, and recurse to inform it. Forgetting needs to be mentioned also. If we consider memory to be a text of experience, and subsequent experience to be continually inscribing upon the same neural parchment upon which they have previously been written, the minor details and routine experiences would become obliterated first; thus broad outlines and the unusual would be retained and available to be remembered longer. Finally, the experiential context would be destroyed, and that which remained would no longer be memory, but knowledge.

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