Theory of Consciousness: Memory and Imagination.

This article is the third in a series devoted to the consciousness of the human observer. Within the Theory of Consciousness, the human observer actualizes the light of consciousness through a cycle of self-cognition. In preceding papers, this cycle was investigated with respect to external sources of distinctions and internal sources of distinctions — emotions. The present article formalizes the two remaining fundamental modes through which the observer operates with already actualized knowledge: memory and imagination. Memory is defined as the totality of stabilized particles of knowledge that differ in their degree of persistence, ranging from working memory to procedural memory. Forgetting is formalized as the irreversible degradation of knowledge. Imagination is defined as an internal intention directed not toward external light, but toward the space of already existing knowledge. It is shown that imagination produces ontologically new distinctions inaccessible to either perception or memory. Creativity is formalized as a mode of imagination in which new closed cycles of coherence emerge through the recombination of existing ones. The relationship between memory, imagination, and the states of the observer is established.