Is life just memories?

[Talon]

What is a life?
Is it the things you experience?
The things you remember?
The things you dream of?
The present?
The past?
The future?

Is life just memories? If you couldn't remember anything, literally nothing, would you actually be living? Would you even know it?

I firmly believe that life is just memories. Taking into consideration that you technically live in the past, doesn't that mean that everything you are seeing is just a memory of what has already happened? So present life is actually just a memory saved in your brain? Or does present life not even exist?

 

[Tek]

My understanding of time is that the present is the only time that actually exists. This is because the now moment is the only time that you directly sense; you do not ever hear a past sound or a future sound - you only experience the present.

We imagine that the past is a real place to which we might travel, but the way I see it, the past exists here and now as a memory. Likewise, the future exists here and now as an expectation.

So I would say life is that which you directly experience, with the "past" and "future" existing right now as memory and expectation.

 

[Leviathan]

To quote a certain Time Lord, "We're all stories in the end."

Hope you don't mind me starting off on a morbid note, but let's be real here; from the moment we're born, we're already dying. Could be that our card will be punched in infancy, teenage years, maybe even later in life. What matters is that we're finite. Constrained to limited lifespans which fluctuate wildly given lifestyles, genetics or bad luck. What we perceive as the here and now is the daily whirl that surrounds us, a largely uneventful series of comings and goings that are on occasion hallmarked by moments of note.

Moments that are worthy of being considered memories.

But what is a memory? What makes it special from recalling what you did earlier in the day, or how you went about your 'comings and goings.' No matter what we do, we'll all bite the dust at some stage. That's 'the only certainty in life.' The only thing you 'have to' do. Perhaps memories exist so that we'll have something to comfort us when the end comes, the 'hallmarks' of a life of drudgery, years and days and hours and minutes and seconds spent outpacing The End until it caught up with us.

Then there's life too. How do you define that? Is that the ambiguous label applied to all organisms that have a pulse and/or thrive? Do you find yourself saying "This is living" or "This is going to and fro until night falls and rest (whether peaceful, antagonistic, or final) is mine."?

In a word, I believe that the aforementioned thread title question is right and wrong. Life is memories and life isn't memories. We can fondly recollect memories past whilst can't or choose not to. We've got a temporary tenure on this planet, and in my case at least I intend to find some 'hallmarks' of my own to look back upon when I'm old and grey haired. I simply haven't quite fond my feet yet in society to make noteworthy memories, the final companions in your waning hours.

so ends my ramble-y piece -- sorry! *sinks back into the shadows

 

[twocows]

Without overthinking it too much, I would say that your life is who you are at any given time. I believe that the two major factors that determine who you are at any given time are your past experiences and your biology.

 

[TRIFORCE89]

What do you mean? I technically live in the past? O_o


Anyway, memories are important. Memories are your history. They are important parts of your life, and they're not all pleasant. They conjure up emotions and thoughts and make you wise.

But life is not just memories. I cannot remember the future, but I will experience it. And that thrill of living in the present is life. Memories are powerful photographs.

 

[Oryx]

You can have a life without memories, but that depends on how you define memories. If, for example, I can never remember from second to second that I'm typing something and have to re-read it to come up with the rest of the post, never finishing it because I can't finish reading it in a second and I forget it, then my life will kind of suck. But it will be life. Most likely I'd just be a baby my entire life, unable to do more than live in that present moment with no language capabilities, no way to communicate, and no idea who anyone is or what's happening.

You're going to have to back up that "taking into consideration that you technically live in the past" that you threw out there as if it was fact. That's not a given. Especially considering the following sentences presume we live in the future and the present is a memory, not that we live in the past.

 

[obZen]

I've pondered this before

If someone were to eradicate the planet, did Earth really ever exist?
If you were given ECT, do you even have a past?

Without memory, to me, my past woudn't even exist. Forming new memories from past and current experiences shapes who we are as people

Think about this:
You work 5 days a week, make money, pay for necessities, go out on the weekends, rinse and repeat
Is there anything being done? To me, that's an endless cycle of nothingness

Also, when you do something "fun" or that "feels good," you experience pleasure. However, that pleasure does not magically last forever. Our fond memories of a great vacation, for eg., keep the joy alive.

Memory and experience come off like smell.
Smell is the only sense iirc that does not pass through the Thalamus, and it passes through the Limbic system
This gives us strong emotional attachments to nostalgic odors, such as a baked pie that your mother made or something

A smell only lasts a certain amount of time, but the memory (hopefully) lasts forever.
The joy started with the experience, but lives through the memory

That, to me, is the essence of life

 

[Talon]

You're going to have to back up that "taking into consideration that you technically live in the past" that you threw out there as if it was fact. That's not a given. Especially considering the following sentences presume we live in the future and the present is a memory, not that we live in the past.

Well, when you think about it, you kind of do. You can not see the exact present, due to the time it takes for your mind to process all the sounds, images, and other senses it receives. You live on what you see, hear, taste, and feel. All of those senses come from present events, but are experienced in the past. So in a very technical and theoretical way, you do live in the past.

Not to say that I'm 100% right on this, clearly I could be wrong, and knowing me I probably am. I didn't mean to state it the way I did, but I guess my mind was just flowing, and it just came out how I thought it, and not how I meant it.

 

[Tek]

You can not see the exact present, due to the time it takes for your mind to process all the sounds, images, and other senses it receives. You live on what you see, hear, taste, and feel. All of those senses come from present events, but are experienced in the past. So in a very technical and theoretical way, you do live in the past.

If I understand correctly, you're saying the present moment happens, and then must travel to reach you, thus you experience the past. Similar to how sunlight is nearly ten minutes old by the time it hits the ground. I agree that this is theoretically true. But it's not actually true. Let me explain.

Talking about this brings back a high school memory. I was walking to class and wondering just how big the present moment was. The more I looked for it, the smaller and smaller it became. I tried to find where the present became the past. The boundaries of past and future kept closing in until the present all but disappeared. Today, it reminds me very much of trying to find the smallest unit of measure: you split an inch or a second into smaller and smaller halves... on into infinity.

The thing is that inches and seconds - or in other words, space and time - are mental representations of concrete experience. Questions like yours arise when we treat these things as if they exist out there in the world, instead of inside our heads. The present disappears when you look for it because "present" is a concept we create to represent what we actually feel.