Reddit reviews The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory: An Introduction

• reddit is not marshallp's personal blog for blabbing away about his own independent research.
  
  
• Episodic Memory is understood and clearly defined in all modern neuroscience texts.
  
  
• Chapter 6.1 from the Cognitive Computing Research Group elaborates at length about the role played by Episodic Memory in Action Selection and Attentional Awareness.
  
  
  
• Episodic memory is a major topic in the neuroscience of memory of laboratory mice. And numerous experiments have been performed showing that the hippocampus plays a major role in the processing of Episodic Memory of mice.
  
  
• Ben Goetzel has spoken about Episodic Memory in lectures and has written about it in recent blog posts. By "recent" I mean in the last 2 months.
  

Conciousness is not a prerequitite for memory. It simply means retaining information for later use. hardrives do it all the time. The mechanisms for how the brain retains memory are not fully understood, but we have come a long way. If you deny this you are simply willfully ignorant. Although not fully up to date, here is a good review backing up this claim. (more depth can be found here. pdf, if you don't object to piracy). This is not arbitrary gospel, if you give me good reason why all the existing evidence might be wrong, I will reconsider. But just saying 'Buddhists reckon maybe we can remember past lives' will not cut it.

As for conciousness, you are right, it is a tougher nut to crack. I however have made no claims of knowing its origins or limitations, only that it is not worthwhile to, in the name of openmindedness, spend time and effort on every baseless theory that flies in the face of what little we do know. Progress is made by building on previous knowledge, otherwise you just end up reinventing the wheel a million times over.