Hi Bert;
I've been trying to answer some of my own questions about all this today …
I agree that we just seem to be the product of stored memories. All functions, including consciousness itself, seem to have memories of some form or another, at their core.
But why is that ? What is a memory ? What is more fundamental than memory ? It seems to me, that memories are kind of events embedded in some kind of process (you mention our brain/nervous systems), which get ordered, then manifest themselves, somehow, into something like consciousness. But the order is important. More fundamental than memories, seems to be an all encompassing mechanism for establishing the sequences of those memories. Sequencing implies
time.
I mention I've been snooping around and doing some reading today. I found a
very interesting article about our circadian clocking mechanism and they're only just starting to figure out how it works. It is intrinsically interwoven into our nervous sensory perception framework. It seems that it maybe centred within the brain’s suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). They've also found that circadian clocks in multiple brain regions, and many peripheral tissues such as the liver and kidneys. The retina's clocks can also function completely independently when it comes to visual processing.
It seems that we are beings fundamentally geared as clocks .. to keep track of one thing .. time !
Are we the embodiment of a delusion we call time ?
Cheers