Inheritance Without Memory: Notes Toward a Biophysical Theory of Biological Archives
| Attributed author | Arthur Valerius Sterling |
|---|---|
| Date | 1972-06-09 |
| Place | Princeton |
| Layer | Hypothesis |
| Provenance | Attributed paper in the fictional Sterling archive |
Abstract
This paper examines whether a demanding possibility can be formulated without confusing heredity with autobiographical memory. Sterling distinguishes physical persistence, inherited differences, altered development or behaviour, and the conjectural possibility of a reportable experience.
Its central difficulty is whether any heritable carrier possesses a writer, a stable code, a mechanism of preservation, and a reader. Sequence, chromatin, regulatory chemistry, cytoplasmic inheritance, and developmental dynamics may form a richer state space, but that state space is not thereby a diary.
Inheritance is not memory; a disposition is not a recollection; a molecular trace is not a readable document.
Editorial note
This paper is speculative and unresolved. No evidence establishes that an ancestral event can be transmitted as a conscious scene, and the paper offers no mechanism for reading one.