In a very loose interpretation, a person can make decisions to do things without any "conscious" recall of memory. They can eat and do mundane things for themselves. But underlying the reality, memory exists within the subconscious mind for those individuals (brain damage).
I'm going to define "thought" as: a conscious process that is directly linked to being self-aware.
I'm going to define "instinct" as: an involuntary response to a stimulus; it may be modified by thought, but its process is instigated without thought.
Involuntary actions therefore are defined not to be a thought process. So touching your finger on the stove causing a recoil of your finger is not a thought process.
This does NOT mean that memory must be innately present within a being to have thought. Memory can be external to the being which results in a thought process. For instance with ants, their environment over thousands of years changes their genetic coding which causes them to act in intelligent manners to adapt to their new environmnents. They do have memory within their small brains, but their environment is part of their thought process.
No, strictly speaking, memory and thought do not seem to be separable.
However, we are humans and in 1,000 years we may understand things in ways we can not currently imagine;
* like "quantum computing" where an infinite number of computations take place in a moment of time and entire civilizations exist within that computing environment
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/jamesbdunn2?p=... * "computation across dimensional boundaries", other dimensions exist (confluence of Unified Field Theory properties) where thought processes may exist as a consequence of UF confluence
* much much more that we as yet have not imagined
In our current understanding, a thought is a consequence of memory states. There are many other factors in a human thought than just memory (hormone levels, electro-chemical interactions, ...), but without a method to store information from one event state to the next event state, there can be no thought.
Notice I did not say from one moment to the next moment. Thought is not a function of time, time is simply a human concept of measurement that is a consequence of the states and conditional environment related to thought.
However, thought processes can be disrupted by any number of things. So thought modifiers are not required to have memory. And strictly speaking those extracellular thoughts can exist physically separate from memory, but they are still a consequence of memory.
I believe our soul and afterlife are of this nature. This is only a hypothesis related to current findings in physics and applying the potential applications to the possibility of physically working with our soul.
How the Soul Works
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/jamesbdunn2?p=... In such a scenario, thought exists as an intelligence super-imposed over dominant thought processes. Shared amongst many processing engines through a property in physics called quantum entanglement. To implicate memory in the states of thought is currently beyond my ability to comprehend.
Ultimately, we have no absolute knowledge of anything! But based upon our current understanding of intelligence processes,
NO, thought and memory are not separable.
Wikipedia has a very simplified model of a thought process that might be helpful in understanding why memory is a necessary ingredient for thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_...
