While reflecting, I stumbled across an old memory.

What exactly are memories? Packets of information about the past, yes, but memories can also elicit feelings–feelings we feel in the present. So memories aren't singularly from the past: there are therefore both past and present aspects to memories.

Memories aren't necessarily rooted in the past, either: we can overwrite memories and misremember aspects, even if we used to be able to remember those aspects properly. Following this line of thought, memory is more rooted in the present, then the past, since memory elicits feelings in the present and is rewriteable in the present. We live in the present. Perhaps memories could then be better considered as an accumulated architecture of living, a sort of genetic code for experience. We selectively write the genetic code of our experience filtered through perception and intent, and the genetic code has been built up over time, but it exists in the present. Memories exist in the present. That's all I was getting at. And this genetic code of experience–also known as memory–which may represent the past but can be altered in the present, I'd argue is actually not rooted in the present, but is atemporal. It may exist in the present, far as we know, but the memory database itself has no regard for temporal distinction. School learning shows that: we don't remember the alphabet in the past tense. It just is, independent of tense.

So memory is atemporal. Perhaps we could form memory not by storing a succession of present moments filtered through awareness, interest and etc., which are then later regarded as "the past," but by storing that same selection of present moments in consideration to the future. It's a simple idea, an outlook–but one never taken, as far as I know. People regard memories as past moments, not as things which are yet to be."I put a seed in the ground" vs. "in some time there might be a tree." "I built the playground" vs. "In fifty years children may enjoy playing here." What you have done is not intrinsically relevant and is made so only for what may be as a result.

Throw in a language and culture built with this kind of future outlook in mind, maybe you'd get a whole new kind of human being. Maybe we're not built for extrapolating like that, but I think it's possible. We learn by receiving feedback, no? Instead of a child thinking "I won't do that because it resulted in this" the child could think "I won't do that because the output will be this." Memories would be the study of effect, and "past" memories would be atemporal in the same way the alphabet is: because I've learned doing a suggests b, this may be. Not because I remember this happened, a could be b. Very little recollection of past experience and the study of cause. Life would be spent one foot in the future.

Very scattershot. In any case, I like the idea of planting a seed for the tree one hundred years from now.

Getting back to that memory I mentioned at the top.

The memory was about motivation, the channels along which I operated as a child. If my memory was (is?) correct, I was (and probably many others were) motivated by the state of the community. By community I just mean the social spaces in which we were currently present. The dinner table, sitting in a circle at school, talking with two kids on the playground and so on. There was often a desire on my part to alter the social space: make it more intelligent, stimulating, energetic, violent, silly or stupid, and often more about me. That was childhood!

There was also an overarching social space–the 'world,' I guess. That overarching sense made me want to do better as a child, live up to the intelligence, comedy, grandness and goodness that I perceived, that was my conception of life. Interaction with that sense while living formed my expectations and predilections on how to act in life. Become this and that in order to do well by your environment, live up to the precedent of goodness. It's tattered these days, but I hope that overarching sense will become whole and great in the future.

Going back to the smaller social space, the social event, I got thinking on a train I can't recall that it might be nice to have a language, one not of words or mathematics but of ideas in a social space. We are a social species, and are capable of noting things like comfort, interest and energy in a social environment. We've developed ideas like harmony and balance. But conversations are often messy despite this. They can be boring, awkward. What I'd suggest is a grammar of approaches to pursue based on our reading of a situation. Maybe this is called being well socialized. Alas, here I am. But really, even among the well socialized, a language of sentiments to pursue could help make conversation be more productive. Easily, we could build conversations into more interesting, stimulating, responsive and empathetic forms of communication. Someone expresses a certain type of sentiment, but I feel this, want to do a and b to a conversation? No problem. By guiding our language with a 'meta-language' I think conversation would be much more satisfying, and push us to reflect more on communication itself. Culture creates a loose form of this, but I think a major strength of language is clear definition: the difference between pictographs and logographs. Consider what language has done for speaking, mathematics and music: what could it do for conversation? This could, more broadly, help humans think in raw concepts, too. In my experience, ideas are sensations before they are words, bundles of feeling that immediately convey–with startling clarity–information that is made complex and slow-to-parse by spoken languages.