Notions of Everything and Nothing

By definition, everything that happens creates a memory, because “something happening” means that relationships among things are changing. Relationships change at different rates with respect to–well, everything–so the current form of a thing is actually a composite memory of  every other thing with which it has or had (or will have?) a significant relationship. Every thing is therefore a memory of a memory of a memory of a memory of–what, exactly?

Nothing. Everything. Whatever. I’ll explore that thought sometime when I feel like being mythological. In any case, every thing is an imperfect memory of whatever it’s a memory of, almost by definition; it only references the significant relationships it has with other things, not all the relationships that define those other things.

I’d like to quickly stress that memory is not a time-dependent concept; things can change with respect to anything. It is easiest, however, to think of memory with respect to time, so I will continue with that in mind.

A change in a thing–that is, a memory, itself a thing–lies somewhere on spectrum between impermanence and permanence. (I avoid “temporality” because it does imply time.) Processes regulate their identities insofar as they are capable, so that their memories are erased or made uninfluential to their thing-ness as quickly as possible. This is just another way of saying they try to prevent unwelcome changes in their relationships. Not all memory can be erased, however, just as not all unwelcome relationships can be avoided or undone. A rock has no means to regulate the memory of it being broken; that memory is permanent, notwithstanding fantastical intervention.

On the one hand, memories are changes in a thing, and changes threaten persistence. On the other, those changes might strengthen its ability to persist at the cost of no longer being the same thing. It’s a common conundrum, and the strategy for its reconciliation is always the same: create an imperfect memory of the memory, then erase the original. In other words, archive.

The method of archiving is to create an insignificant (to both the thing’s identity and every other thing’s identity–thus “internal”) new relationship that defines the original memory, then undo the original memory by repairing, as much as possible, the significant relationships that were originally changed (by referencing yet another internal memory of what those should look like). The new memory, being both insignificant and wholly–well, mostly, depending on the thing’s complexity*–internal to that thing, is less likely to be influenced by another thing. The practical upshot of which is that the damage of the original memory is repaired while useful properties of that memory are preserved to strengthen that thing’s ability to persist to find an answer to the ultimate question of what to do next. (I swear I get out of breath just eyeballing my own sentences.)

I say the word, “damage”, because I’m talking about changes in significant relationships, which identify a given thing. Breaking your leg significantly changes your relationship with the world. The damage is eventually repaired, but you learn not to jump off the swing set, because you have archived the memory of a particular significant relationship your leg had with the ground.

Not all memory is damage, of course. Changes in insignificant relationships happen all the time, such as in perception; they come and go so fast that we don’t think of them as damage. Nonetheless, there is a process that must change (receive damage) to detect a difference in the environment, optionally create a new internal memory outside the detection mechanism, and then change back so that it can detect difference again.

Every thing is a memory, and every memory is a thing. Every thing is a process. Every process changes so that it can persist, and every change is a change in memory. Nothing can happen without a risk to the fidelity of memory, as the process of repairing a memory–itself a memory–can also change. The only perfect memory is a memory that can never be accessed. The only such memory would be a memory of a thing without relationships to anything else, and the only such thing is Nothing. Or Everything. Maybe that’s all we are–memories of perfection.

I started feeling a bit mythological after all.

* A complex a process can create more and better-sequestered archives than a simple one. I hope this will become apparent in my next post about free will, however, so I won’t linger here.