TruthBook Religious News Blog

Double Helix: Religion Requires Memory; Memory-Killing Drugs Inspire Big Questions
By Arri Eisen
May 1, 2009

A host of experimental new drugs interfere with the process of creating memory, promising to help combat sufferers, addicts and others. But if memory is required for the creation of ethics (and religion) and indeed in the formation of who we are, what effect might these drugs have on our identities?
Magic bullet?

Surely you remember Total Recall, the hugely successful 1990 film starring California’s current governor and based on the great Philip K. Dick short story?

But what just happened when you tried to remember whether you remember it?

What if I could block that memory, or insert another one in its place (as happens in the story)?

Todd Sacktor at SUNY Downstate Medical Center is working on the most recent example of a drug that might have been plucked directly from science fiction. When he injects the drug into rats who have learned (that is, retained the memory) not to walk on a surface that gives them a mild shock, they turn right around and walk on it again.

Ethics=Memory?

I teach a class on bioethics to college students. We start the course with the simple question: What are we? Are we are genes? Our memories? A combination? It seems to me we are, in large part, our memories. Not just our individual memories, but also our cultural memories, and our species’ memories. In fact, one whole theory of the evolution of consciousness, by the engaging eccentric Julian Jaynes, posits memory as the initial font of consciousness and even of primitive religion.

Jaynes imagines a primitive tribe sitting around a fire. They have strong memories of warnings from their former leader, who recently died. It is dark, but the leader’s ideas—build a fire, stay together—still have power beyond his death. He is keeping them safe without his being present. Thus soweth the seeds of awareness and the power of things we cannot see or understand.

Whether you agree with Jaynes’ theories (which I’ve greatly simplified) or not, it’s clear that ethics—and its ritualized partner, religion—are significantly shaped and driven by memory: memories of how to do things, why we do or should do things, how those before us did them, how we felt when we did or did not do them.

This is a small excerpt from a longer article, which may be accessed by clicking on "external source."

Labels: ethics, Julian Jaynes, memories, religion, Todd Sacktor

Permalink | Link to External Source Article

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