Remembering
I’m reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins at the moment in which he posits a model of how the human brain works. His theory is that what we think of as intelligence is basically memory leading to prediction. I’ll quote the book cover:
Hawkins develops a powerful theory of how the human brain works, explaining why computers are not intelligent. The brain is not a computer, but a memory system that stores experiences in a way that reflects the true structure of the world, remembering sequences of events and their nested relationships and making predictions based on those memories. It is this memory-prediction system that forms the basis of intelligence, perception, creativity, and even consciousness.
I was struck forcibly while reading how often the Bible talks about remembering. We are told to remember God’s covenant, his mercies, and many other things. God too is depicted as remembering his promises. Jesus asks his disciples to remember his words and his miracles. At the Last Supper the apostles were told to “do this in memory of me”.
If Hawkins is right that memory is the foundation of intelligence, then it sounds as if it is the foundation of faith too. Forgetting is the way to lose faith, and consequently spiritual intelligence.
Si Fractus Fortis
in Bible, Daily Life, Prayer, Sanctity
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One of the chief beauties of the Catholic Church is her corporate memory. One of the great weaknesses of protestantism is a corporate forgetting which causes it to repeat its own history as it has done since its founding and continuing to today when we see new sect after new sect.
And this corporate memory has enabled the Catholic Church to renew itself constantly. One of the things that impressed me strongly about the Catholic Church even when I was a Protestant was that it was the only organisation I could think of that over and over again has renewed itself both from "the top down" and from "the bottom up".