The Persistence of Memory
Part 3 of the Core Concepts series: What becomes of actualizations, and how the accumulated shapes the accessible
Previously, we traced how experience happens: a conscious aperture selects from accessible potential, and that selection event — the Now — is the experience. Not a prelude to experience, not a cause of experience. The selection is the actualization. That’s what it means for something to appear.
But I left something unexplained. I said the micro-boundary condition, Bµ, is “derived from Memory” — from the accumulated totality of all actualizations. And I said each conscious aperture brings a different history to the same constraint, which is why your accessible potential isn’t mine.
That raises obvious questions: What is Memory? Where do actualizations go? How does accumulation constrain without collapsing into determinism?
What Doesn’t Vanish
Here’s something Part 1 established: experience makes a difference. If something appears, reality is different than it would have been had that appearing not occurred. That’s not a claim about importance or meaning — it’s a structural point. Actualizations aren’t epiphenomenal wisps that flicker and disappear. They count.
But count toward what?
Every actualization persists as Memory. In TNT, we use the symbol M — and it’s important to distinguish this from “memory” in the everyday sense. When you try to recall what you had for breakfast, that’s phenomenological memory: a current experience that references past experiences. That’s not what M means.
M is the structured accumulation of all actualizations. Every actualization (Tₐ) that has ever occurred — across all conscious apertures — persists within M. Not as replay, not as storage, not as “the past sitting somewhere.” M isn’t a warehouse. It’s the state of what has become actual.
Think of it this way: before any actualization, there’s just unactualized coherent potential (Tᵤ), the domain of what could be experienced. After an actualization, something has shifted. What’s possible isn’t quite the same as it was. The actualization didn’t vanish; it accumulated. M is the name for that accumulation.
How Accumulation Constrains
This is where it gets interesting.
Remember Bµ — the micro-boundary condition that determines which potentials are accessible for selection? Bµ isn’t arbitrary. It’s derived from M. The structure of what’s already actual shapes what can become actual next.
The relationship looks like this:
M conditions Bµ → Bµ filters Tᵤ → AccessibleTᵤ is what remains → Cᵢ selects from AccessibleTᵤ → Tₐ occurs → Tₐ persists as M → M conditions Bµ...
It’s a closed loop. No entry point, no exit. The cycle doesn’t start somewhere and proceed forward — it’s the structure of actualization itself.
This means every experience you have is shaped by the totality of what’s already actual. Not just your own history — all actualizations across all conscious apertures contribute to M. But here’s the crucial asymmetry: while all Tₐ contribute to M, each conscious aperture only has direct access to its own actualizations within M. You don’t experience my history; you experience yours. Yet my actualizations still affect what’s possible for you, because they’ve shaped the Bµ we both operate under.
Think of it this way: we’re all kayaking the same river. The current, the eddies, the obstacles — those are shared. Your paddle strokes send ripples that change the water I’m navigating, and mine do the same to yours. But I’m only ever in my kayak. I don’t experience your ride; I experience mine. Your decisions affect what’s possible for me — the wake you leave, the line you take — but I only encounter those effects from where I sit.
That’s the relationship between conscious apertures and M. All actualizations contribute to the shared structure. Each aperture only has direct access to its own.
The Emergence of Time
Now here’s the move that might take a moment to land.
We’ve been talking about actualizations “accumulating” and M being “shaped by” what’s become actual. That language sounds temporal. It sounds like things happen, then they persist, then new things happen. Before and after. Sequence.
But TNT makes a stronger claim: time doesn’t exist independently. Time is the ordering relation induced by the retention of non-identical actualizations as Memory.
Let me say that again, because it’s easy to slide past.
Time isn’t a container that experience happens inside. Time isn’t a river that carries events from future to past. Time isn’t a dimension that was already there, waiting for things to occur within it.
Time is the ordering. When non-identical actualizations accumulate — when this Tₐ is retained alongside that Tₐ, and they’re not the same — an ordering emerges. That ordering is what we experience as time.
Change is prior. Time is derivative.
This flips the usual picture. We normally think: time passes, and that’s what allows things to change. TNT says: things become non-identically actual, they accumulate, and that’s what constitutes time. The accumulation isn’t happening in time. The accumulation is time — or rather, the ordering relation we call time emerges from the accumulation.
This is why questions like “what happened before the first actualization?” don’t compute. They presuppose time as an independent container. But if time is induced by actualization, asking what happened “before” actualization is like asking what’s north of the North Pole. The question misapplies a concept outside its domain.
Neither Fixed Nor Arbitrary
Any viable theory of consciousness has to satisfy this constraint: experience exhibits coherent structure across instances, yet isn't reducible to a single inevitable outcome fixed in advance. That's Inevitability 5.
If everything were predetermined — if M fully determined what gets selected next — there’d be no genuine selection. The conscious aperture would be a puppet, and the appearance of choosing would be illusion. But that’s not how experience works. You’re not watching a movie of your life; you’re living it.
On the other hand, if selection were random — if M had no constraining effect — experience would be chaos. There’d be no continuity, no coherent trajectory, no recognizable self from moment to moment.
TNT threads this needle. M constrains what’s accessible without determining what gets selected. The micro-boundary condition narrows the field; within that field, selection is genuine.
It's like being that kayaker on the river — you don't choose where the banks lie, that's the constraint. But you choose how you navigate, that's the selection. The banks shape your options without dictating your moves.
This is what it means for actualization to be neither fully fixed nor arbitrary. The accumulated shapes the accessible. It doesn’t author the actual.
Identity as Trajectory
One more piece.
If time emerges from the accumulation of non-identical actualizations, what does that mean for identity? For the sense that you’re the same “you” across experiences?
Any viable theory of consciousness has to account for this: identity persists through continuity, not through some unchanging thing underneath. That's Inevitability 6.
Here's what that rules out: that there’s some unchanging substance — a hidden observer behind the scenes — that has experiences while remaining untouched by them. That picture puts identity in the wrong place. You’re not a static thing watching experiences go by.
What you are, in the everyday sense of “you,” is the whole package:
A + (Cᵢ + interface) + M
A conscious aperture operating through an interface, accumulating a trajectory, all within Awareness. The ego — the narrator, the self-model, the “I” that appears in experience — is a pattern at the interface level. The interface terminates; the trajectory in M persists.
The continuity is real. It’s just not the continuity of something frozen.
So what makes these experiences belong to the same trajectory? Each conscious aperture has direct access only to the actualizations it produced — that’s what makes a trajectory yours rather than someone else’s. And the “you” of everyday experience — the ego, the narrator — is that trajectory playing out through an interface. Not something separate having the experiences, but the accumulated path itself.
This explains why identity feels both continuous and changing. Your trajectory has shape — that’s the continuity. But each actualization is genuinely new — that’s the change. You’re not the same in the sense of being static. You’re the same in the sense of being this trajectory rather than some other.
What We’ve Got So Far
Part 1 gave us the ground: Awareness as the primitive substrate, the Field of Infinite Potential containing everything that could be, B₀ carving out what’s coherent from what’s forever incoherent. The static foundation.
Part 2 gave us actualization: conscious apertures selecting from accessible potential, the Now as the indivisible selection event, actualization as experience itself. The dynamic process.
Part 3 gave us Memory: Memory as the structured accumulation of all actualizations, Bµ derived from M, the emergence of time as an ordering relation, identity as trajectory rather than substance. The accumulation that shapes without determining.
Together, these pieces explain how experience can be both constrained and genuine, both continuous and novel, both individual and interconnected. Your accessible potential is yours — shaped by your trajectory. But it exists within a coherence structure shared across all conscious apertures, carved by actualizations you never made.
I keep saying “coherent” and “constrained” and “shaped.” These are relational concepts. They imply structure, extension, position. We’ve talked about time emerging from the ordering of actualizations — but what about space? If time isn’t fundamental, is space?
We’ll discuss that, next time.
Next: “Where Is Here?” — why spatial extension depends on temporal ordering, and what that means for the world you see.