I'd appreciate some feedback on a speculation concerning the relation of action theory and the physiology of memory in the brain. There has long been an intuition in historiography that a consciousness of the past is a keystone of liberty and in biology that an organism''s novel action depends on memory or hysteresis. In the last two decades, there has been rapid progress in understanding the brain, and I'm trying to reconcile it with action theory.

I get the impression that today memory refers to an emergent system effect---that is, a result of complex interactions between different brain areas. Memory apparently falls into two broad classes: semantic memory and an implicit memory. The latter appears to be is a set of rules (habitus) for stimulus-response relations. Further, I get the impression that both classes of memory are constructed as emergent effects of sensation and learning and are essentially static in that changes in them are extrinsic in origin (the possibility of long-term epigenetic biological inheritance seems marginal to the question I'm raising).

If this is a fair representation of current views, then the problem I need to address is that, if action is always innovative in the sense that it produces a novel state of affairs, one that is counterfactual in relation to semantic memory, then there has to be a constraint upon semantic memory that makes the circumstances represented in it acquire possibility (an alternative state of affairs is possible) and potency (change is possible), or their combination as a probability distribution of possible outcomes of action in relation to the state of affairs represented in semantic memory.

It seems to me this sense of possiblity and potency can't be embedded in the executive function, for some knowledge of a probability distribution is not consciously learned. For example, pre-conscious learning about causal relations from the haptic sense. This suggests to me that possibility and potency are ontologically real rather than just epistemological tools. That is, I'm not inclined to embrace the curious Enlightenment doctine that the mind has a supernatural creative power that is ontologically independent of external determinations, as an Olympian capacity to generate hypothetical counterfactuals, among which it freely chooses, perhaps employing epistemological criteria such as tests or saving the data.    

I'd appreciate knowing if it is possible that knowledge of potency and possibility might be acquired by the class of implicit memory that establishes rules to constrain how intentional action links with semantic memory. That is, action must draw upon semantic memory to represent the context for action and it looks to the executive function to focus that action, but it also might look to implicit memory for the rules that add a probability distribution to the circumstance represented in semantic memory. Is this possible, reasonable, or probable?

I have had trouble finding literature related to how the ontological implications of action might be handled in terms of brain functionality. 

Haines Brown