Self-improvising Memory: a perspective on memories as agential, dynamically-reinterpreting cognitive glue

Abstract

Many studies of memory focus on the material substrate in which data can be stored and reliably read out. Here, I focus on the complementary aspects: the need for agents to dynamically re-interpret and modify memories to suit their ever-changing selves and environment. Using examples from developmental biology, evolution, and synthetic bioengineering, in addition to neuroscience, I propose that a perspective on memory as preserving salience, not fidelity, is applicable to many phenomena on scales from cells to societies. I focus on continuous commitment to confabulation, from the molecular to the behavioral levels, as the answer to the persistence paradox as it applies to individuals and whole lineages. I also speculate that a substrate-independent, processual view of life and mind suggests that memories, as patterns in the excitable medium of cognitive systems, could be seen as active agents in the sense-making process. I explore a view of life and agency as a diverse set of embodied Perspectives – nested agents who interpret each other’s and their own past messages and actions as best as they can (polycomputation). This synthesis suggests unifying symmetries across scales and disciplines, of relevance to research programs in diverse intelligence and the engineering of novel embodied minds.