Memory And Time

Greg Bear, Eon (London, 2002).

Pavel Mirsky writes:

"Soon, I firmly resolve, I will gather up my courage and join with the extended personalities in City Memory." (p. 494)

How are they "extended"? We gather that they are incorporeal but, if they are conscious and aware of each other, then they must appear to be embodied in a shared environment. What is their physical basis?

They are "'...personality patterns in the City Memory environment.'" (p. 311)

- but this is not described.

Those City Memory personalities who sympathize with an insurrection help it by overseeing interdicted communications nets. Whatever this means, it implies that they can affect the activities of the embodied. And I think that that is all that we are told about them.

"She vowed to use the physicist's concept of time from here on, with events strung along a line, and no particular breakdown into past, present or future." (p. 134)

We divide time either objectively into units like days and years or subjectively into past, present and future. The physicist's "...events strung along a line..." include, e.g., me typing at 12.00 on 22 August and me typing at 12.00 on 23 August. On 22 August, I regard 22 August as present and 23 August as future. On 23 August, I regard 23 August as present and 22 August as past. Without consciousness, there would be days and years but no division into past, present and future. With or without consciousness, nothing moves along the line of time.