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People often wonder if we can have memories of this life—of the people we've loved, the joys we've experienced, and the meaning that we have discovered—that live beyond our physical death. I know I want it to be true. I just want some choice in which memories I carry with me. I also know: it's illogical. Memories are adaptive and necessary for survival at a biological level only. And they change every time we recall them. If you want to preserve a memory, don't recall it.
So which version of a memory would persist in the afterlife?
Memories are not reliable. Eye witness testimony is bunk. Researchers have created false memories in participants. And these participants are convinced that these memories are real. And yes, they are just as vivid and detailed as actual memories, but they're still false. Do you ever wonder what false memories you hold? What have you convinced yourself is true? I think about this often.
No memory is a pure recording of history. It's not. So which memories would survive in an afterlife? And why would they?
The capacity to make and store memories is there to improve our survival. Playing Devil’s Advocate: So, would procedural memories of our ability to type or our ability to drive a standard transmission survive in an afterlife? Why would it? Are we just talking about the Episodic Memories of our 21st birthday or of our wedding day? Do we get to choose our memories from a Rolodex of good and bad? What is good and what is bad is often determined by the tincture of time—the proximal or the distal consequences of an event? Simply stated, time changes the way we see things. All of us will have losses and trauma, but it's our relationship to it that matters. Trauma can be transformed into meaning once processed. So, what parts of this thing called "self" do we keep in an afterlife?
Episodic memories are there to help us string together the autobiographical narrative of a self (victim or hero archetypes). These memories and stories give meaning to our lives. We share stories. We have oral traditions that date back thousands of years. Memories and stories of the Hero's journey is adaptive. We need to live that story. Meaning is critical for our survival. It’s the most important protective factor that our psyche constructs.
Anterograde and retrograde amnesia puts an animal and her progeny at great risk. If I can’t remember friend or enemy or where I stored or how I captured food—ouch, that would be a very limited survival for me. However, the ability to forget also, to a certain degree, has a selective advantage.
We need our ability to make, delete, store, modify, and recall memories for survival. That's it. Memories help us navigate the material plane. That’s their only function. They help us to live long enough to transfer and protect genetic information (make and protect our babies).
So, continuing to Play Devil’s Advocate, if we could have memories from a prior life, through reincarnation, or memories in Heaven, then why wouldn’t our immune system survive if we were to be reincarnated? Is Heaven filled with the memories of prior exposures to the flu? Hear me on this, the immune system has a form of memories if we characterize memories as adaptive responses to prior events to prepare us for future encounters. The immune systems ability to recall past encounters with bugs is why we only get the measles or chicken pox once.
Well, what about the traits that make up our personality? Would they survive? Think about it, those traits, that we inherited, like openness, neuroticism, etc., improves our survival as well. Do they survive in an afterlife? Molars and opposable thumbs help us too. So, why would personality traits persist in afterlife any more than any other highly heritable feature of the human experience like eye color.
Who or what is the “self” that survives in any other plane of existence? Who are we in the absence of our beliefs, memories, and personality traits? When we die does the 30 year old or 70 year old version of our self live in the afterlife? Self, like memories, is always changing. It needs to change. That improves our survival too.
I've written about this before and I'll say it again, self is a necessary illusion that arises in toddlers and disappears in advance stages of dementia. Self is not static. There is no specific center of you in your brain. It's an illusion. Self and memories are fluid, dynamic and changing. So, what aspects of a self, of our awareness of life, would have a state of being after our physical death? I have some ideas about this. I believe that consciousness is fundamental. I plan to explore it in future articles.
I write this and say all of this so that we can have freedom to rid ourselves of the fixed ideas that our constructions of self can never change. I want us to also have freedom from the idea that the stories of our history are also fixed. People regularly tell me that we can't change the past. I tell them we do it all the time. We change it by choosing to tell it in a different way.
The value of our changing memories and changing selves serves us today, in this life.
P.S.
In future articles, I will address why I think Consciousness is Fundamental and not the product of a material world. I will address issues around Free Will, determinism, and what the research on topics like precognition mean for us. The research is interesting. I will also look at the various Religious traditions and share my thoughts on why meaning is found in the stories of these traditions. I submit that I might be wrong on all of these topics. That's okay. I'm open to the debate. I am open to learning.
