Memory as System Depth: Ancestors, States, and Survival on the Long Horizon

"Ancestral memory functions as a system-state parameter, not an archive: it constrains admissible transitions, maintains identity coherence, and extends the system's internal time horizon. From anthropology through formal state-space to a three-level MCP architecture".

Abstract

Across cultures — from Confucian China to Zulu Africa, from Slavic rituals to the Khanty North — memory of ancestors was treated not as sentimental reverence but as a structural necessity for communal survival. This work argues that ancestral memory functions as a system-state parameter, not an archive: it constrains admissible transitions, maintains identity coherence, and extends the system's internal time horizon. The analysis proceeds from anthropological evidence through a formal state-space framework to a three-level memory architecture (Machine–System–Human), demonstrating that structural memory — not physical continuity — determines long-horizon viability.‌⁠‌‌⁠‍‌‍‌⁠‌‍‌⁠⁠‌‍⁠‌‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠‌‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‍‌⁠‍‌‍⁠‌‌‍‌‌⁠⁠‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠‌⁠‍‌‌⁠⁠‌⁠‌‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠‌‍⁠‌‌‍‌‌‍‌‌‌⁠‌⁠‌‌‍‍‌⁠⁠⁠‌⁠‌⁠⁠‌⁠⁠‍⁠‌⁠‌‌⁠⁠⁠‍⁠‍⁠‌⁠‌‍⁠‍‌⁠‌⁠

Ghosts That Do Not Leave

When a person remembers ancestors, this rarely has direct practical meaning in the "here and now". Memory of a grandfather does not increase income, does not change the air temperature, and does not affect the laws of physics. From the standpoint of the material world, the ancestor's body has decomposed, its atoms have mixed with soil, water, atmosphere. Entropy has done its work. The physical object has disappeared.

And yet in all cultures, memory of ancestors was considered not a secondary emotion, but a foundation of stability. People preserved genealogies, told stories, performed rituals. This was not sentiment. This was a survival mechanism.

In the Confucian tradition, the spirits of deceased elders were considered active participants in the life of the family. The Qingming Festival (清明节) is not a formal ceremony, but a renewal of connection: families come to cemeteries, "feed" the ancestors, honor them. For the ancient person, this was the preservation of the structure of clan identity: commonality with forebears meant that the efforts of ancestors continued to work through time.

Among the Zulu, the spirit of an ancestor returns to the settlement as a benevolent spirit, and myths describe the reincarnation of forebears in descendants — the continuation of their strength in the lineage. In Khanty culture, "in a moment of crisis, the memory of ancestors acquires exceptional value, as it allows the preservation of cultural-historical identity and the finding of reference points in a rapidly changing world".

The common pattern is one: ancestors have not simply died — they continue to be part of the community. Through them, the living generation maintains a connection with something greater than the current moment.

The modern person often perceives memory as a psychological option: pleasant, touching, but not obligatory. In an industrial metropolis, the "altar of ancestors" may turn into a couple of photographs in a frame and the celebration of a great-grandmother's birthday once every ten years. Online albums and memorial websites provide a new form, but do not always revive the deep awareness of continuity: these forms are easier to edit — or delete.

Previously, memory was a structural necessity. Because ancestors did not continue to exist as bodies — they continued to exist as configurations of meanings, constraints, and decisions.

Two Layers of Existence

If one divides what is happening strictly, two levels can be seen:

Physical: the body decomposes, energy dissipates, the state of the system loses local orderliness. Gases from a shattered amphora will uniformly disperse throughout the room. Traces will disappear. This is the second law of thermodynamics — the directionality of the arrow of external time.

Structural: patterns of behavior, values, methods of decision-making, notions of the admissible embed themselves into subsequent carriers. Here what operates is not thermodynamics, but the dynamics of states. The ancestor no longer exists as a physical system. But his configuration of behavior has become part of the descendant's state. This is not a mystical "wave". This is the transfer of structural information.

Just as a note in a harmony does not exist by itself but depends on the other notes of the system — so too the "image" of the ancestor lives in the configuration of the descendant's worldview, in his associations, values, expectations. If the system changes its tuning, this note may fade or intensify.

The material world of forgetting and the world of structural remembering follow different laws. Entropic decay is inevitable in the first. But systemic memory maintains low "entropy" in the sense of uncertainty of identity, retaining coherent elements of the whole.

The physical disappears. Structure can continue.

Memory as State, Not Archive

The key turn: memory is not an external "wardrobe" in the brain. It is an internal parameter of the system's state. As Ross Ashby noted, the term "memory" is not an objective attribute of a system, but a construct used by the observer to describe the behavior of a system on the basis of unobservable internal states. The observer, seeing the reaction of a descendant, interprets it through past states, although the system is now already a different composition of parts.

Minimally formally, this looks as follows. Let the state of the system at time t be denoted as S(t). Without memory, the evolution:

S(t+1) = F(S(t), E(t))

where E(t) is the environment. This is nearly a first-order Markov process: the future is determined only by the current state.

If historical constraints H (memory) are embedded in S(t), then:

S(t+1) = F(S(t), H(t), E(t))

Memory here is not the past as fact. It is an additional constraint on admissible state transitions.

A system with memory can be represented as a process with historical dependence:

H(t) = Σ w(τ) · S(τ), where τ from 0 to t

where w(τ) is the weight of the historical contribution. This is structural depth. Without H, the system becomes more reactive and less stable. With H, it acquires depth of internal time.

A person who remembers ancestors is not a point in time, but an extension. His admissible actions are determined not only by current advantages, but also by the accumulated configuration of meanings.

Depth Instead of a Point

This is precisely why ancient cultures ascribed sacred significance to memory. They intuitively understood: the loss of memory is the loss of the horizon. Without the horizon, the system loses the ability to distinguish short-term advantage from long-term viability.

The loss of memory traditions was everywhere accompanied by a crisis of community integrity. In the Far North, the extinction of rituals and the loss of the "fading hearth" symbolized the severing of the connection between generations and the death of cultural distinctiveness. The connection was severed — and the system ceased to be itself.

From the standpoint of systems theory, memory strengthens coherence — the consistency of internal components and the absence of chaotic disrupting loads. Norms and traditions laid down by ancestors constitute the framework of the architecture of values. Memory fixes a certain portion of states as "obligatory", narrowing the available space of options, but increasing internal stability.

This has a reverse side: the system "continues to exist" as the same lineage, even if the formal rules of the ancestors' times have long been forgotten. And conversely: the loss of memory tears the invariant layer, and the new system is often perceived as alien.

The Paradox: Not All Memory Extends

Here a paradox arises. If the system attempted to store absolutely all details of the past, it would lose flexibility. Forgetting is not a defect, but a survival mechanism. It excises inefficient states, preserving dynamic stability.

Depth is not the sum of all past states but the preservation of those that determine the invariant of identity. In long-lived systems, what survives is not maximal memory but correctly structured memory.

As precisely formulated in one of the essays on adaptive systems: "self-awareness is not the sum of everything we have ever been, but recursive coherence passing through what has survived. I am not a static archive; I am a dynamic process of culling and amplification, a living trajectory maintaining coherence while releasing most of what once held".

Applied to the memory of ancestors, this means: significant elements — recollections, rituals, stories — which prove to be strong "anchors" of identity, become fixed. Everything else gradually recedes from the field of vision. A system that remembers everything loses the ability to adapt. What survives is not ideal archives, but those who are inventively selective: they preserve depth (key nodes, traditions, shared values), while superficiality (particular details) dissolves in change.

Memory as an Anti-Entropic Mechanism

From the physical standpoint, memory does not reduce global entropy. But at the level of the system, it reduces the entropy of the decision space.

If the space of admissible actions is denoted as Ω(t), then without memory:

Ω(t) = f(S(t))

With memory:

Ω(t) = f(S(t), H(t))

H(t) narrows the space of chaotic transitions and increases the probability of identity preservation.

This is the key: memory is a mechanism for maintaining identity through time.

A simple illustration. Consider a system with two states {A, B}. In a random process without memory, transitions are equiprobable — the system tends toward maximum entropy. In a modified process, where the system "remembers" the previous state and with high probability returns to it, the entropy of behavior decreases, and the reproducibility of trajectories grows.

The addition of structural memory increases the internal stability of the system in the long-term perspective.

From Ancestors to Long-Living Systems

Now let us transfer this into the context of long-living adaptive systems. Any system oriented toward survival on the long horizon faces two risks:

Structural collapse — sudden loss of integrity.

Slow drift — which does not destroy the system immediately, but gradually changes its identity such that it ceases to be itself.

Of the two, drift is the more dangerous. Collapse is visible immediately. Drift masks itself as adaptation. If the system does not store memory of its key states, it cannot distinguish transformation from replacement. It may adapt so "successfully" that it loses its own architecture — and the loss is undetectable from within, because the very criteria for detecting it have drifted along with everything else.

Memory is the mechanism that makes this distinction possible.

Therefore, long-living systems introduce levels of memory:

Memory of parameters — storage of current settings, weights, operational data. Fast, deterministic, without context. A cache of the present, not a carrier of identity.

Memory of invariants — configurational states and attractors: models, trained networks, accepted protocols. This memory is implicit: it defines the landscape of possible states and maintains the essence of the system's behavior through updates.

Memory of admissibility — knowledge of which transformations are impermissible, which destroy the architecture. Formal norms, control conditions, coherence functions. These rules are themselves products of the system's historical memory of past crises.

Memory of transformations — the history of the system's evolution: what led to catastrophe, what stabilized. These form the basis of self-corrective strategies.

This is no longer psychological memory. This is memory of states. The task of survival is closer to the maintenance of a structural invariant than to absolute memorization.

Three Levels: From Machine to Human

Let us transfer these considerations to three connected levels — Machine, Cybernetic, Personal (MCP).

Level 1: Machine. Memory here is literal: a set of bits, registers, and databases. Fast, deterministic, with high precision and low plasticity. The machine stores everything that has been loaded into it until memory overflows. But without context, these data are meaningless for identity.

Level 2: System. Memory is "woven into" the configuration: the current picture of weights, attractors, patterns, and cycles. This is not simply a file — it is the history of states, invariants, the policy of admissibility. At this level, memory is a structural constraint on transitions. The identity of the system is greater than the sum of machine cells.

Level 3: Human as part of the system. The human stores the interpretation of the system's states. He carries metamemory — memory of why the system changed, which transformations were admissible, and which were not. This is the most plastic and symbolic memory: it admits metaphors, abstractions, emotional connections. It is transmitted through stories, rituals, codes of behavior.

At each level, time and meaning are compressed differently in memory. The machine can memorize thousands of minor operations, but without knowledge of context they are meaningless. The system accumulates key configurational patterns. The human intuitively "extracts" from the entire past several supporting stories that set the direction.

The machine stores data. The system stores structure. The human stores meaning. Together they form the extended memory of a single cybernetic circuit. The human is not outside the system — he is its temporal depth buffer.

Between levels operates a circuit:

The system changes → the human fixes the state → the human's memory influences the system's further decisions → the system changes differently.

Ancestors in traditional society performed the same function: they expanded the horizon of the admissible through memory.

The Architecture of the Future

The sense of continuity and the "immortality" of a system is ensured by structural, not physical memory. It is not external relics that make a culture enduring, but the structure of the world stored in memory.

Memory is not nostalgia. It is a mechanism for maintaining continuity. It is a way of holding identity in the space of transformations.

The physical world decomposes forms. Structural memory preserves lines.

A system that does not store memory of its states accelerates toward decay. A system that stores and interprets memory is capable of distinguishing evolution from self-destruction.

Therefore, the memory of ancestors is not the past. It is the architecture of the future.

Bodies do not continue to exist. Configurations continue to exist.

The key ideas of this work draw upon anthropological studies of ancestor veneration practices (Confucian tradition, Zulu belief systems, Khanty cultural memory), works on cybernetics (Ashby, Wiener), and contemporary literature on adaptive systems, including the concepts of internal time, coherence, and structural invariant.

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