Analytical argument for the existence of a non-physical personal memory

Titus, if I understand you correctly there are subjective/qualitative aspects of memory and you don't think those can be held in mere physical structures.

But I think there's an additional issue with memory, namely how does any physical structure have intrinsic representation? Here I'm thinking about Braude's Memory Without A Trace.

Also the neuroscientist Raymond Tallis does agree with your argument AFAICTell:

...Neurophilosophers will not be impressed by my objection. The difference between the shock-chastened sea snail and my feeling sad over a meeting that passed so quickly, is simply the difference between 20,000 neurons or a hundred billion; or, more importantly, between the modest number of connexions within Aplysia’s nervous system, and the unimaginably large number of connexions in your brain (said to be of the order of a 100 trillion). Well, I don’t believe that the difference between Kandel’s ‘memory in a dish’ and my actual memory is just a matter of the size of the nervous system or the number or complexity of the neurons in it. Clarifying this difference will enable us to see what is truly mysterious in memory...

...Making present something that is past as something past, that is to say, absent, hardly looks like a job that a piece of matter could perform, even a complex electrochemical process in a piece of matter such as a brain. But we need to specify more clearly why not. Material objects are what they are, not what they have been, any more than they are what they will be. Thus a changed synaptic connexion is its present state; it is not also the causes of its present state. Nor is the connection ‘about’ that which caused its changed state or its increased propensity to fire in response to cues. Even less is it about those causes located at a temporal distance from its present state. A paper published in Science last year by Itzhak Fried claiming to solve the problem of memory actually underlines this point. The author found that the same neurons were active in the same way when an individual remembered a scene (actually from The Simpsons) as when they watched it.

So how did people ever imagine that a ‘cerebral deposit’ (to use Henri Bergson’s sardonic phrase) could be about that which caused its altered state? Isn’t it because they smuggled consciousness into their idea of the relationship between the altered synapse and that which caused the alteration, so that they could then imagine that the one could be ‘about’ the other? Once you allow that, then the present state ofanything can be a sign of the past events that brought about its present state, and the past can be present. For example, a broken cup can signify to me (a conscious being when I last checked) the unfortunate event that resulted in its unhappy state.

Of course, smuggling in consciousness like this is inadmissible, because the synapses are supposed to supply the consciousness that reaches back in time to the causes of the synapses’ present states. And there is another, more profound reason why the cerebral deposit does not deliver what some neurophysiologists want it to, which goes right to the heart of the nature of the material world and the physicist’s account of its reality – something that this article has been circling round. I am referring to the mystery of tensed time; the mystery of an explicit past, future and present.

That remembered smile is located in the past, so my memory is aware that it reaches across time. In the mind-independent physical world, no event is intrinsically past, present or future: it becomes so only with reference to a conscious, indeed self-conscious, being, who provides the reference point – the now which makes some events past, others future, and yet others present. The temporal depth created by memories, which hold open the distance between that which is here and now and that which is no longer, is a product of consciousness, and is not to be found in the material world. As Einstein wrote in a moving letter at the end of his life, “People like me who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” I assume that those who think of memory as a material state of a material object – as a cerebral deposit – also believe in physics – in which case they cannot believe that tensed time exists in the brain, or more specifically, in synapses. A material object such as the brain may have a history that results in its being altered, but the previous state, the fact of alteration, or the time interval between the two states, are not present in the altered state. A synapse, like a broken cup, does not contain its previous state, the event that resulted in its being changed, the fact that it has changed, the elapsed time, or anything else containing the sense of its ‘pastness’ which would be necessary if it were the very material of memory. How could someone ever come to believe it could?