My current view is that we’ve discovered a kind of natural universal memory phenomenon that’s a property of all matter, living and non-living. A natural tendency of information to get tangled up with space, time, and matter that allows it to become experientially self-reporting. It’s weird to think of memory outside of the context of living beings ... See more

the account given of the oracle of Trophonios by the ancient historian Pausanias. Those who sought the oracle’s wisdom underwent an elaborate ritual, which included drinking from two fountains: one bearing the Water of Lethe and the other bearing the Water of Mnemosyne.2 The goddess Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory and, not incidentally, the mot... See more

In the Sunday Liturgy, Orthodox Churches that follow Slavic practice, sing, “Remember us, O Lord, when you come into Your Kingdom.” There is within that prayer the subtle suggestion that such memory is the only one that matters.

And They Disappeared – Extreme Humility Fr. Stephen 4.3.2025

most of the memory a system uses isn’t its own. ... The same is true of humans. Language, culture, norms, rituals, documents—all of these constitute a collective memory space we navigate constantly. Our own memory is just one small node in a vast network of external scaffolding—books, browsers, friends, feeds. ... Shared memory is the terrain; boun... See more

intelligence is not defined by what a system stores or how it computes, but by what it can access and stage into use under constraints of cost, availability, and time. Storage is cheap. Computation is cheaper still. The real bottleneck—the hard part—is memory access. And where the cost is, intelligence is. ... What remains expensive—financially, te... See more

I’m only beginning to dimly grasp the contours of this unfolding transformation, but some axioms for my personal philosophy of it are already clear.

Text and static images, “objectively” manipulated using chat-like tools, are relatively weak entry drugs for creating strong hive minds; much more potent stuff is coming

“Intelligence” as such does not... See more

As a matter of fact, to translate this into the language we use, which is a faculty psychology language – the two key faculties which stand between the objective and the subjective are memory and imagination. These are terms that go back again, as we mentioned before, to Leo the Thirteenth and nineteenth century. This was his promotion of Thomas Aq... See more

This communal meaning-making through cycles of abstraction and concretization is the oil in the machine of language itself. In conditions where more knowledge remains embodied in memory than in written archives, there’s a greater need for modular linguistic fragments that signify highly situational, nuanced meaning. To illustrate this, cultural ant... See more

every livestream has the potential to generate lore. [through three main activities]... [1]Forming a semiosphere: developing a vocabulary of memes and shared references that became the semiotic ‘world’ of the livestream. This vocabulary wasn't just limited to concrete objects or templatized phraseology. It included complex abstractions and bespoke ... See more