This is inspired by a recent thread about teleportation.
Say that all the physical information about everything that is your body was transmitted as information to another place, and you were rebuilt. Would you have all the memories and knowledge that the original you has?
I guess what it boils down to is: are the things that one knows inscribed into one’s brain as organic, phsyical one’s and oh’s?
Because… That’s the only way that kind of teleporter would transmit you without turning you into a dumb, drooling vegetable. Right?
We don’t really know much about how memories are stored in the brain, but as a start, check out LTP (long term potentiation) as a possibility. One of last years Nobel Prize winners in Medicine and physiology, Eric Kandel, has done a lot of work in this area.
The short answer is ‘yes’, on some level memories are stored in the brain using a physical mechanism. It probably is not as straightforward as coding ones and zeros, but as in the LTD model Wiwaxia cited, memory seems to involve the reinforcement of particular neural synapses by chemical means. The enzyme CAM-kinase 2 is noted as being capable of modifying receptors in the linked article.
Either our knowledge is stored in our bodies in a physio-chemical way or, if it is not, the alternative is some sort of soul or spirit with no physical support. I tend to think the former is true based on the fact that if you put a bullet through someone’s head, he tends to forget most of what he knew up to that point. Other people believe he doesn’t really forget it, his soul just wanders of and still knows the same things except it knows them somewhere else where they are useless anyway.