Moments of Memory: An address is not the past

A memory is not a stored thing that gets read back. It is an address left by a past self for a future self to rebuild. The rebuild happens in a system whose substrate, context, body state, and goals have moved on. This paper takes one principle from a larger program, meaning is the event of reconstruction by an independent system, not a property stored in the mark, and relocates it from communication between two minds to one mind across time. The brain is its own across-time receiver.

Reconstructive memory, predictive perception, and public convention are not new claims. The contribution here is the relocation: the past self leaves an address, the future self rebuilds it, and neither private confidence nor outside instrumentation can certify the rebuild as a faithful replay of the lived original. External evidence can check factual overlap with a past event. It cannot certify the remembered experience as a replay, because the original experience was never stored as an integral copy. What persists is better described as a ledgered gradient: a changed field of future reconstruction, not a file. What validates meaning is not possession, but convergence on a public net. The paper follows that firewall through ordinary forgetting, cueing, tip-of-the-tongue states, internal self-monitoring, artificial reconstruction, surprise, and finally the conventions a person measures against: the body's, the culture's, and the one they author for themselves.