How do we recognize a memory?
Does a memory carry with it some identifying mark which tells us it is a memory?
Let me immediately clarify this: Im not asking whether a memory is automatically verified as accurate. Lets put memory in quotes, to mean an alleged or purported memory, and I can still pose the question Im posing: When I identify something as a memory, how do I know? Whats the difference between a memory of, say, London Bridge, and a mental image of London Bridge? Why is it that confusion between the two is extremely rare?
This is a question in phenomenology. Were able to categorize and discriminate something we (purport to) remember from something we (purport to) have only imagined. (Again, whether were correct about the memory is beside the point. We are still making an inflexible discrimination: Something I (believe I) remember, versus something I (believe I) have imagined.) How are we able to do this? Is there a feature of the mental experience that we single out?
Could it, for instance, be the case that a memory comes equipped with an automatic first-person stance? But surely an imagining does too. No, when I claim to remember something, Im not simply saying Its mine or This is from my point of view. There is some kind of factual claim about the content of the memory itself. Put in the most ordinary language: I believe though I could be wrong that this really happened, because I was there and experienced it. My imagining, in contrast, is something I have invented, and bears no relation to an actual experience of mine.
Something like this is approximately correct, I think, but it gets us no closer to understanding how this happens. Moreover, the question about the accuracy of a memory must now be brought forward. If there is indeed some sign or feature that allows us to distinguish claims about memories from claims about imaginings, then how could we ever be inaccurate? Wouldnt we perceive (or intuit, or whatever it is we do) that the purported memory was false, precisely because it lacked that special memory-feature?
Since this doesnt happen since we can be mistaken about the accuracy of a memory it must be the case that what Im calling the feature is a feature of my experience in the present, as I review the mental image, not a feature to be found in the content, or accuracy, of the memory itself. Its about the presentation, not what is presented. Right or wrong, accurate or not, a purported memory presents itself to me differently than an imagining. It asserts something different from an imagining again, accurately or not. (Notice, BTW, the similarity of this kind of assertion with the more familiar assertion of a proposition. In both cases, what is asserted may be true or false, but it remains truth-apt it remains an assertion -- as opposed to, say, an exclamation or a command.)
So my question is, How does this happen? What is this presentation? What occurs, when an alleged memory comes to mind, that allows me to identify it as an alleged memory? It seems as rock-bottom as identifying something as a physical perception. But can this be so?
Comments (86)
Quoting J
It's a bit of a trite answer, but that it seems in the past. Not that the seeming is distinct from the memory, more that past-ness is a property of having a given memory. Be that recalling a fact {"I remembered that..."} or an experience {"Remember that time in school..."}.
I have lots of visual impressions when I remember things, and lots of visual impression when I visualise or imagine. The visual impressions associated with the memories tend to be less detail rich - blurrier - than my visualisations or imaginings. Moreover, a visual memory of someone's face is far less detail rich than their face when I see it. If I imagine someone's I know well's face, the gestalt in the mental image I get is much more focussed on the locus of my attention than it would be in person - if I am trying to remember what their nose looks like, the visual impressions associated with the memory congregate around their nose and the other details blur.
So something like the resolution of the sensory aspects of the memory being lower than a corresponding perception or visualisation, along with creation of "pastness" in it. I imagine "pastness" comes along with what makes a memory autobiographical? Whatever process gets called in that flavour of recall is going to mark something as "past", even if it's flagged a representation as such wrongly.
The answer is simple - we don't... necessarily. A couple of examples.
It's not unusual for me to realize I can't tell if I remember something that happened to me or something that happened in a dream.
I have a vivid memory of something that happened when my older son was 12 and my younger son was 7. We had left them home alone for an hour or so. My daughter, who is three years older than my older son, often babysat for them both when she was 12. I vividly remember that, when we came home, my younger son was chasing my older one around the dining room table with a butcher knife. It turns out I wasn't actually there, I just remember from being told after the fact.
So, the fuller answer is "context." There are clues in your thinking and your history, but they sometimes aren't enough.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, this "pastness" may be the very thing I'm calling the "feature" of an alleged memory, by which we recognize it as such. But I'm asking further -- what is it? What is the experience of pastness? This may be one of those questions to which the only good answer is, "Oh shut up, it just is." Or maybe not. If I'm asked, what is it about a present sensual perception that allows me to recognize it as such, there are various things I can say in reply. Can similar things be said about "recognizing pastness"? Your idea about the different resolutions of visual impressions could be part of this.
So, what can we say about these usual cases? "Clues in your thinking and your history" would be the sort of answer I'm looking for, but I question whether such clues are enough. I appeal to my own experience here: When something comes to mind and I (instantly, as far as I can tell) recognize it to be a memory, it all seems too fast and too assured to be accounted for by a sifting of thoughts and history. That's why I'm wondering whether there really is some feature we recognize -- not infallibly, but usually.
Another possibility would be that the sifting occurs subconsciously, beneath our awareness (and very fast).
Quoting J
On my view memories are contextually situated, probably within a causal nexus, and this is what differentiates them from a mere mental image.
Granted, memories also have a depth that a mental image or imagining lacks. Memories are holistic in the sense that they often involve multiple senses, proprioceptive senses, as well as teleological states such as hopes, anticipations, and fears. This is probably why confabulation is usually derived from dreams or hypnosis rather than simple mental images. That depth can distinguish a memory from a mental image, but it cannot necessarily distinguish a normal memory from a dream memory, especially in the case of deeply intense or trippy dreams. Still, I think normal memories possess a contextual situatedness that dreams lack. This means that the longer and more complex the dream, the more confusing it will be upon waking (because the more a dream imitates reality in length and character, the harder it will be to dismiss as unreal).
Augustine is very fond of this topic.
(In a more general sense I think it is important to recognize that contextual situatedness can be intuited in a moment. One does not need to survey, analyze, and engage in induction in order to understand whether something tends to be contextually situated and integrated within increasingly large spheres of influence.)
Ruler of the Universe: "How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations, and my state of mind?"
I'm not convinced that it is a mark so much as a kind of intuitional inference.
Suppose you can see the future. A "thick image" comes to your mind. It could be a memory of the past, a foreseeing of the future, a memory from a dream, or a mere mental image. You know that it is not a present experience, in the sense of an experience of the actual world that will in turn form a memory.
If the thick image arrives unannounced you will basically decide which it is through a process of elimination (and determining when a memory is indexed requires the same sort of process). You might do this very quickly and automatically. But memories don't generally arrive unannounced. Usually we call them up on purpose or else they are elicited by an intelligible association or cue. Because memory access is not random, there is usually a reliable process to sort out the different categories of "thick image" (i.e. things involving the depth I noted earlier). The intentional stance with which we approach a memory may give it a "pastness" color that even dyes it either temporarily or indelibly. If this is right then a confabulation probably becomes more solid each time someone surveys it and (falsely) views it as a memory.
There are indeed a lot of different "types of memory," and perhaps "faculties" involved in different sorts. I figure episodic memory is what we're focused on here, although this same thing also applies to crystalized knowledge recall too (i.e. that we can tell facts we have made up, fictions, and lies, from facts that we think we genuinely know).
My favorite book on this sort of thing is Sokolowski's "The Phenomenology of the Human Person." He talks a lot about imagination. In imagining, we can either self-insert or imagine in a "third person" way. One does not have "third person" episodic memories, but this doesn't seem like the key differences.
Obviously, they are phenomenologicaly distinct, and it would be problematic if they weren't. Pace some of the much (over) hyped studies on prompting "false memories," these only really work in vague cases. You might be able to get someone to misremember being lost in the mall when they were three, but you're not going to prompt them into thinking they went to college when they didn't, etc.
I might instead look for the difference chiefly in them being physically/metaphysically distinct actually. When considering the formation of a memory, we are talking about the senses, memory, and intellect being informed by some external actuality. Whereas, with imagination, we are dividing and composing stored forms. The two processes look quite different from a purely physical standpoint (although the same areas of the brain get used for imagining, perception, and memory, but to different degrees).
It would make sense that an actual stimulus would tend to leave a deeper impression than a virtual/synthetic one, and that we would indeed have an anatomy that structures this sort of difference into our experience, since an inability to keep imaginings and memories straight would be very deleterious for human life. Although, if consciousness is purely an epiphenomenon, there actually [I] wouldn't[/I] be any benefit to memory and imagination being phenomenologicaly distinct (another mystery of psycho-physical harmony).
If I were building an android for instance, I would "tag" real versus synthetic experiences so as to keep them distinct during recall to avoid accidents like looking for food that never existed, etc.
For me, what I expect to be lacking with a memory is a good deal more specific than what I'm lacking when I'm trying to imagine something. A gap in the memory is usually surrounded by other memories: there's something very specific that's not there. Meanwhile not being able to imagine something indicates a lack of experience - it's more fuzzy. It feels like the difference between closing in on something, vs. casting out for something.
This is difficult to express. I have aphantasia; I don't get mental images at all. Yet, I can imagine, say, my mother's face. I can't imagine a face I only "know" from a description you give me at all (I can try to draw it and approach it from there). Maybe like this: a memory is something living in my mind, while something imagined is a lattice of details cohering through the act of active focus. The memory recedes into the background; the imagination disappears (but might leave traces as a memory of something I imagined).
I'm not happy with this. It doesn't seem quite plausible, but I can't figure out the exact flaw. I have this vague sense of a memory being bottom-up, while imagination being top-down. A memory starts off from a unique experience, while my imagination works more by getting rid of more and more options until something more or less unique comes out. The gaps in what I'm not paying attention to are literally blank when imagining something; they don't come with a sense of "forgetting" - they come with a sense of "filling in".
Cool question.
So a guy walks in the room. You recognize his face and recall you saw him in the cafe this morning. You heard his name, because someone else yelled it when his order was ready, but you cannot recall his name. You recall it was a strange name you never heard before, but also kind of familiar like Johnup or Jimzy or something.
So in your mind, the guys face is a memory but the sound of his name is being imagined.
What is the difference between them? And how are they kept distinct?
I agree there is a sort of third person feature to a memory that is attributed to it, as you recall a lived experience, but one that was lived. Like me now, with third-person me seeing the guy in the cafe earlier. So you are sort of treating yourself in the third person, placing yourself in a past setting that is in mind through recall.
And recalling the guys face from earlier, you remember for some reason he had a blue tee shirt on, but now he has a white button down on.
So I think another feature of a memory is that, as you seek to recall more and more details, the recall dictates the content of the mental image you are recalling. When you recall something, you are consciously trying NOT to imagine, but trying to find what was already the case. You purposely want to be stuck with what you recall and cant change, just like when you sense something in the present, you have no desire to change the thing either. We inspect memories like we inspect with our senses. The guy walks in the room and you can see that his face looked like that in the cafe this morning (you recall his face this morning), and his shirt was a blue tee shirt earlier. Avoiding evil geniuses, and Kants things in themselves, these facts are not yours to alter. The form of the memory is treated as if third-party, sourcing to the mind-independent world once lived in the past and not subject to your control now as it wasnt in your control then.
Maybe I can sum this up by saying there is nothing creative about a memory.
Whereas when we imagine, we manipulate mental images much like memories, but not by recalling but by some creative function.
Like the names I am trying to recall - I could be completely making them up. Maybe his name is Scott and I am confused with some other now blurred memory of a strange name.
All of the above, which may not be helpful, makes me think of what certain psychosis might involve. If an image appears in the mind (like a memory or an imagination does), but the function that distinguishes this between something creative versus something recalled, that person would sound psychotic, talking about imaginary things as if recalling the past, or talking about things from the past as if they never happened and are just being made up. Or the first-person / third-person feature, if distorted, could seem psychotic. An image appears in mind that is actually a memory, but you think it is happening now causing hallucinations almost, or you think what is happening now is really a dream-like imagination.
I think I basically gave you some puzzle pieces here.
I have a theory that we think and talk of memory wrongly, or mostly metaphorically. Everything is actually always and only in the present. Most of our language about time and the past and memory and recall is metaphor.
We dont search the past. The past is gone. We are presently recalling. Once something is recalled, we havent resurrected it from the past; we have focused our attention on some impression sitting in mind right now all along.
The better metaphor for memory is this: turning our attention to what happened before, is like turning our head to look some other direction, or like closing ones eyes to focus on the sounds in the room. Recall, is like a sense, and only functions in the present on things that are present to it, like senses.
Me when I was 4 years old living in another town is right here, right now, in mind once recalled (in the third person). There is me now, recalling third person me now in another town. This me recalled is here just like the chair in my office could be here if I walked to my office and looked at it. A memory, like an object of sense, is a matter of attention, brought before us by recalling, like seeing.
@Leontiskos talked about context and I think that is a better way of putting it than how I did. Everything in the mind is cross-connected. Memories are not stored in one place. They are connected with other memories of the same or similar events, places, and times. Those connections are non-linear - they're not organized in the same manner we might organize them if we did it rationally, chronologically, or functionally. In "Surfaces and Essences," Douglas Hofstadter suggests they, and all our thoughts, are connected by analogy, metaphor. That is consistent with how I experience the process.
Quoting J
Yes. In my experience this is absolutely true. We don't remember things like we used to look for things in a file cabinet or card catalogue. We look for memories using a mental search engine.
Lively and interesting replies, thanks! A few general responses:
This is one of those questions -- as so often with phenomenology -- that sits on the borderline with psychology. Much of what everyone has written about the brain, about memory processing, about the quickness of interpretation, etc., is undoubtedly true. And where there are aspects we don't understand, that too may be a matter for scientific research, not philosophy.
I think we can still isolate the phenomenological question. I'm asking about the experience of having a memory come to mind. (To keep it manageable, let's say it's an unbidden mental performance that comes up at random, as I go through the day.) It appears to be the case that we can usually identify this mental item as a (purported) memory. My question is, how? By virtue of what aspect of the experience itself? I think my question rules out causal explanations of how memories are formed, though I'm not sure -- unless that causal explanation leaves some experiential imprint on the mental item (as some of you are suggesting?). It may also rule out contextual explanations, such as:
Quoting Leontiskos
This is probably true, but is the kind of differentiation such that it would be recognizable in experience? I'd like to see more discussion of this.
Quoting Dawnstorm
This is particularly interesting, and seems to fit a phenomenological account of the difference between remembering and imagining. I'm fascinated, and rather appalled, by what it must be like to be an aphantasiac. Is it a bit like being asked to translate something into a language you don't speak?
Quoting Fire Ologist
I'm going to think more about this, and the rest of your post. Lots there.
Yes, I think that's a good way of putting it. A memory has a kind of organic embeddedness, a bit like a single strand of a spider's web.
Quoting Dawnstorm
This seems like a fruitful way to approach the question. :up:
Quoting J
I think it's worth noting that this is a very specialized question, at least if what I say is correct (namely that "memories don't generally arrive unannounced" and unelicited).
Quoting J
Well, to continue with the "strand in a spider's web" metaphor, I think it is recognizable. I think a strand-within-a-web is recognized as different from a strand-without-a-web.
You could think of this in terms of navigability. We can navigate from a strand in a web to other parts of the web, whereas we cannot navigate from a strand-without-a-web. Or at least it is much harder. And I don't need to go through a lot of discursive exercises in order to know the difference if I am standing on a strand.
I think modern (Cartesian) philosophy has a desire for clarity which obscures the capacity of the mind for recognizing this sort of contextual situatedness. The notion of navigability is not a binary, not a crystal-clear marker. That's why I said that certain kinds of dreams can be very discombobulating (because they possess their own contextual situatedness, navigability, integrity, duration, sovereignty, etc.). Or in other words, it is hard for the modern to say what they are looking for even after they admit that they are not looking for infallible certainty.
Consider a corollary. It is sometimes claimed that in the moments before death people can have extremely long, detailed, and coherent dreams. If someone had one of these dreams, and it managed to mimic the resolution and duration and complexity of an entire life, then how would the person discern which "experience-narrative" was their real life and which was the dream? On my theory, they couldn't (or else it would be very hard), because each experience-narrative possesses its own robust contextual situatedness. On the other hand, when waking up from a superficial dream we find that it is much harder to "inhabit" that space as real, given its arbitrary contextual boundaries.
Yes, it's hard to know what is typical here. Perhaps I'm given to daydreaming! For whatever reason, the "unannounced or contextless memory" phenomenon is common for me, which is probably why I got curious in the first place about how we recognize a memory.
Quoting Leontiskos
Or another metaphor: Let's say a memory is situated within its causal nexus in the same way as a rock that has been thrown. There it sits, on the ground, having been thrown. Another rock, nearby, is so situated as a result of having been excavated around. So, different causal stories and contexts, but we couldn't tell which was the case just by looking at the rock, or at least not readily. That's the question I was raising -- would the memory (rock #1) still be recognized as a memory if the only thing that differentiated it from an image (rock #2) was its causal context?
Not sure which of these metaphors is more like how it is with memories, especially the unbidden variety . . .
Yes, fair enough.
Quoting J
When I used the term "causal nexus" I was careful to make it secondary, after the more primary sense of "contextually situated." After thinking about your conversation with Count Timothy and the way you view causality in a very specific sense, I somewhat regretted using the idea of causality at all.
So the first thing I would say is that a causal nexus is not merely a causal history, although it could include that. The second thing I would say is that for someone like yourself who has a very specific understanding of causality (i.e. efficient causality), it would probably be better to talk about contextual situatedness.
How is a memory contextually situated? Some ways come to mind: via chronology and via the associations noted (sensual, proprioceptive, intellectual, teleological...). Like a spider's web, if you pull on one thread the whole thing starts to move, because it is a part of an integrated whole. We know what it's like to pull on that sort of thing as opposed to pulling on the silk thread of a larvae. It's different.
Regarding your rocks, a static image or snapshot will tend to lack context. If you see two photographs of two different Christmas parties, and you are not allowed to survey anything other than the two photographs, then it will not be possible to determine whether you were at one of the parties. Only if you are allowed to contextually inform the photographs will you be able to recognize one or both. For example, if you are allowed to recognize a subset of pixels as the image of a person, and you are allowed to recognize the image of the person as the image of your mother, then you can begin to contextualize and make sense of the photograph. Then you will be able to contextually situate the scene from the photograph within your own memory and decide whether or not you were present at the party. But the possibility of remembering will be impossible insofar as we limit ourselves to a contextless datum, whether it be a set of pixels, or a static photograph, or a randomly presented image. A memory is a part of a whole, and parthood cannot exist without context.
This is a different aspect of the memory question, but worth dwelling on, because it suggests to me the "pastness" that @fdrake mentioned. What is past cannot be changed, at least not under the same description -- could this somehow be reflected or captured in the experience of a memory? When I identify X as a memory, am I identifying something about X that is necessarily past, in the sense of unchangeable? Whereas with an imagining or an image, I don't "see" the same intransigence. I dunno . . . I'm still concerned that I'm inventing "features" in a somewhat ad hoc manner.
Yes. My only objection here would be to ask whether this happens fast enough to constitute the complete explanation of recognizing a memory. But as @T Clark and I were discussing, this stuff can happen very quickly beneath conscious awareness.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think I agree with this, but let me clarify: "not allowed to survey anything [else]" means you could look at the photographs but, per impossibile, not allow any associations to form in your mind? And "contextually inform" means respond as we normally do, with a fully functioning mind? If so, then yes, this seems right.
Sure, for example:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
In general I would say that the mind is not as discursive and time-bound as our age tends to believe. I think this is probably a huge underlying issue on the forum, not unrelated to intuition and intellection.*
Quoting J
Yes, that's right, such as the example I gave where you are not allowed to let the pixels coalesce into an image of your mother.
The thesis is that the photograph from the party you attended will possess a different "contextual situatedness" than the photograph from the party you did not attend, and that this is why you remember the one but not the other.
What is your own theory of memory recall or memory recognition?
* Edit: But if you want to think about the fallible "mark" of a memory, this is how I would approach that:
Quoting Leontiskos
A good way to approach this is through shape recognition. If I present you with a triangle or a square, will you be able to recognize the shape immediately, without discursive reasoning? Presumably you can. But a young child who is learning their shapes apparently cannot do this. They have to do things like take wooden blocks and see whether they fit in differently shaped empty spaces. They engage in empirical exercises and eventually come to better understand the notion of shape, which in turn grows into shape recognition.
We might ask, "Is the recognition of a shape a discursive or a non-discursive act?" The answer is both or neither. We actually have the ability to "automatize" complex processes into simple acts, and the fallibility of the act follows the fallibility of the process (i.e. we can also automatize false or invalid processes). Life is complex, and not everything is like this, but it seems to me that memory recognition probably is (yet in an inevitably more complex manner).
(It may be worth noting that this "automatization" is different than intellection.)
"Memory" can be implanted, it seems. Do I remember an actual ice box on our back porch (circa 1950) or is this memory a plant from the recollection of older siblings? I can't tell which it is. It's a visual memory, no other sensations. My older siblings are pretty sure I wasn't there when the ice box was,
Can a memory even be implanted which is multi-sensual--there is a visual image, sound, smell, and maybe touch. There are all sorts of sensations making up memories of swimming when I was young. The smell of the water, it's chill or warmth, the water's color (brown in the crick, blue in the pool) and sounds.
At least sometimes we can fact-check a memory. Other times we just have to go by probability--like it is highly improbably that in 1970 I neither did laundry nor shopped for groceries. But I can't dredge up how these tasks got done. Where was the laundromat? Where was the supermarket?
Quoting J
Why not question whether there needs to be some process of recognition or identification at all. We humans have natural responses we call memories, dreams, and imaginations. This differentiation becomes evident in the stream of life, not by an introspective process of comparing and judging images an individual privately performs to achieve some sort of accuracy.
Norman Malcolm, in Memory and Mind, presents a thorough defense of such a view. Is his chapter called "Mental Mechanism of Memory", he summarizes such a view:
"I do not wish to claim that brute-fact explanations are never acceptable. Far from it. What is objectionable is a maneuver that, in seeking to avoid a brute-fact explanation of memory responses, invents a mythology of mental items belonging to "the present occurrence of remembering," and then accepts a brute-fact account of the relation between those fancied items and our memory responses. If the memory theorists permit an appeal, as they do and must, to what our nature is, to how we are constituted, then it would seem that they have no adequate rationale for generating their philosophies of memory in the first place. Why should they not be content with accepting at face value the connections between past experience and our memory responses, that are verified by daily experience? Why not admit that if a normal person is shown a green object and ordered to bring another of the same color from the next room, he is able to comply without the assistance of a mental mechanism? Why not accept, simply as a fact, that some people are gifted with memory of music and others not, without trying to explain this difference by holding the the former must be guided in their playing or singing by auditory imagery which the latter lack? Why not concede that the influence of past training and experience is frequently direct, in the sense that it does not work its effect producing in us an apparatus of images and feeling, which in turn control our responses? The philosophers have been unable to believe what is before their eyes--that, for example, a person who witnessed an event can later give an account of what he saw. "There must be more to it than that," they think. They cannot accept, as a brute fact, that a person who has witnessed an event is subsequently able to describe it. They feel that there must be a memory-process which explains this ability. But the memory-process, consisting of some complex of imagery and feeling, which they interpose the original perception and the memory response, does not make the ability any more intelligible than it was before. The memory theorist makes a useless movement. He invents a memory process to fill what he thinks is an explanatory gap; but his own explanation creates its own explanatory gap."
I would say that Js question does not reject or question that memory is what it is, it is just looking at what something like connections between past experience and our memory responses really means, or how that brute fact phenomenological moment of recalling a memory might be better understood.
Quoting Richard B
So is this saying there is no way to intelligently talk about memory-process?
Quoting Richard B
I say go for it anyway. Create that explanatory gap by creating our own explanation in the first place.
Quoting Richard B
I just realized, when it comes to pondering the phenomena of memory, are you basically saying we should forget about it? :razz:
Yes, welcome to Wittgenstein's therapy and watch your philosophical problems dissolve away.
Sounds like the opposite of getting high, or drunk.
The warm Wittgensteinian chastisement, correcting the question before it is asked, until I admit, I guess I wasnt really wondering about that.
I think everybody should learn Wittgenstein. He was certainly a genius and explored new worlds making interesting discoveries.
But when I threw the ladder away, nothing really went missing, because I dont think he meant all the things he said (if you can follow my usage.) (Im being ironic, right?)
Many of Malcolm's (rhetorical?) questions pertain to my own worry that trying to find a "feature" of a memory that identifies it as such, is multiplying items unnecessarily. Yet, as @Fire Ologist points out, my OP question comes in at a slightly different angle than Malcolm. I'm happy to agree with most of what Malcolm wants to say about the brute-factness of how memories allow us to do the things we do. But:
Quoting Fire Ologist
I would amend that slightly to say "'brute fact' phenomenological moment of experiencing a mental event that I identify as a memory." I'm trying to slow down and re-examine my own experience of "having a memory" to see if there is some moment of perception or recognition that it is, purportedly, a memory. I think Malcolm would say that there is not, don't you?
So:
Quoting Richard B
My "gap" is a different one. Malcolm's analysis assumes that the remembering subject is already in a position to know the content of his mental experience -- that is, an allegedly veridical moment of past personal experience -- whereas I'm asking how this happens in the first place. If I could converse with Malcolm, I think I'd start by trying to see just what he conceived a memory to be, and whether I was using the word the same way. That might show why our "spades turn" at different points.
Quoting Richard B
Indeed! If only. And the therapy can work, on certain puzzles. I'm not yet sure this is one of them.
I don't think I have one. Certainly not a psychological one, as that's not my field. The phenomenological question I'm posing might lend itself to a theoretical underpinning, if given a convincing answer, but I can barely formulate the question sharply, much less answer it. Hence this helpful discussion.
Quoting BC
I'm fond of this conundrum too. Daniel Dennett, in "Are Dreams Experiences?", (tm70n6786.pdf) lays out the difference between four possible answers to the question "Do you remember whether X was there in the room?":
1. No.
2. I can't recall his being there.
3. I distinctly remember that he was not there.
4. I remember noticing at the time that he was not there.
I'm willing to say that the last two are memories, the first two are not. What do you think?
If I was imagining myself typing on my cell one, that's all it would be about. Yes, I [I]could[/I] imagine a lot of extraneous details, but, unless I'm intentionally doing so, like if I'm experimenting for purposes of this topic, I rarely do.
So maybe we recognize memories of actual events because they have more "weight" than imaginings have.
Also, it's often said we remember things that have an emotional component. The tricks of this one very much applies to me. I was often told I worried about my children more than was "normal" or "healthy" when they were little. Nobody would say keeping a close eye on them in a store was wrong in any way. Child snatching [I]does[/I] happen. But it could be argued that I imagined specific scenarios more often and in greater detail than I should have. :rofl: I would see something, imagine what could happen, and son have an elaborate story in my head. My heart would be racing, and it would take deliberate effort to get out of it. I had to remind myself that it was not happening, and I'd have to force myself to think of entirely other things. I remember one day in particular, about 25 years ago. I saw a young boy with blond hair in a van. I thought, "What if that was Dan? What if he had been kidnapped, and, months or years later, I happened to spot him in a van?" The emotion of it burned it into my memory.
Fortunately, the memory is of the imagining, not an actual kidnapping. Maybe for the first thing. I didn't imagine too much detail of a kidnapping before forcing my thoughts away.
Right. Memory isn't a record we can replay to double check attendance. It's not quite reliable enough.
Way-finding is largely memory based. Some animals (and people) navigate by remembering landmarks of some sort. Some have a less overt memory of turns, distances, direction--memory based, but maybe less conscious. I rarely get lost -- my spatial navigation is fairly good. Some people I know get lost very quickly. Way-finding is so ancient a function it's classified as part of the reptile brain.
Gadgets like smart phones, gps map devices, and the like off-load memory tasks, with the result that really very useful memories of telephone numbers, addresses, way finding, and the like are degraded. Writing itself probably degrades memory, something people worried about around 3 or 4 thousand years ago.
One can improve memory using deliberate practices. People doing classic psychoanalysis learn to remember their dreams (by taking notes immediately upon waking). Gradually their dream-memory improves. Students learning history, German, music, or whatever, also improve memory skills using various systems.
The thing is, a lot of functions combine in our brains: sensation, imagination, dreaming, memory, emotion, proprioception, the installed knowledge base (whatever we have solidly learned), physical drives, physical and mental disorders, etc. But still, memory function can be teased out by various testing routines.
I'm an old man. I've been sorting out stuff, and trying to reduce the inventory of miscellaneous stuff. One of the thoughts I have: This object (say an old shirt) isn't technically useful to me now, but it triggers memories of a time and place. If I get rid of my deceased partner's old shirt, will the memory that goes with it still be readily recalled? On the one hand: Yes, the memory is independent of the prompt. But if I don't have the prompt, how will I access the memory?
Ok, back to whatever we were talking about. :grin:
Well done.
I think there is a mark. There are timestamps too, but those cannot tell whether the related memory refers to a true event at that time or to an imagination at that time. So, back to the mark:
Here's my hypothesis: When I'm saving a present event in my neuronal network, the stored event gets a timestamp and a "true event"-mark. Now when I remember this event, say, a year later, I also remember that associated "true event"-mark. It could be that I remember just 90 % of the event and subconsciously fill the rest with fictitious details. This semi-true data mix will be resaved as a "true event" along with the original "true event"-mark. The mark remains the same but the resaved details of the event may get inaccurate. From time to time I recall-and-resave, recall-and-resave, etc. Each time I do this, more inaccurate data may be added or the entire data package might even get smaller. But the "true event"-mark remains attached.
We know that the data in our brain is fragmented across the entire neuronal network. The event is not stored in "one little box"; the event is fragmented and scattered. There are paths from one location in the brain to another. And when we're sleeping, the paths restructure themselves to become more efficient: Important stuff will be optimized, and irrelevant data will be deleted. In fact there must be a lot of marks to bring all these fragmented parts together when they are needed to restore a certain memory. Without those marks we would be sort of demented, I think.
Maybe there are certain qualia that accompany such marks. When I remember my name there is a certain self-quale that tells me that's really me without doubt. The quale makes the self-detection automatic and phenomenal, just like a yellow-quale tells me that this banana is yellow rather than blue. Similarly, the remembered event is true rather than imagined. It's a different phenomenal experience, just like a yellow-experience is different to a blue-experience.
That's my hypothesis. I may be completely wrong.
P.S.: Can I tell a true event from an imagination at the current time? Yes, I can. The experience of a true event is often more intensive.
Yes, and even more concerning: if the prompt is a photograph, will I come to substitute the face that is pictured for my memory of the beloved's actual face?
Quoting Patterner
I was moved by your story, and appreciate your telling it to us. Beyond that, you raise a point that is often overlooked about memory. What makes something memorable -- indeed, what is really the point or subject of the memory -- may be what we thought or felt about X, not X itself. In your case, the image of the blond-haired boy was quite unimportant, quite unmemorable. But you vividly recall the chain of imaginings and associations that came with that image, so it's become indelible. My guess is that, in some rough categorization of memories, you'd file this under "Time I had a horrible bout of fearful imagining" rather than "Time I saw a blond-haired boy in van."
Quoting Fire Ologist
I've known happier, but thank you. Our new Dear Leader is planning a YUGE military parade on his upcoming birthday, the largest for more than 40 years. That's the sort of memorial we're meant to celebrate now, God help us.
a) to remember where they put their food (some mammals and some birds have excellent location memory)
b) to remember who their mate is (in species where that's important) -- which goose is mine?
c) to remember where home is
d) to remember what is dangerous, and what it looks/sounds/smells like
e) to remember who is in my group, and what their and my rank is
and so on. Luckily, animals don't have to remember when taxes are due, when the next dental hygiene appt is, where to vote, how much the post office now charges for a letter, what brands my partner insists on, did I ever read a book by Nietzsche, or which lies did tell whom and for what purpose? But memory can reliably handle all that, excepts when it slips up.
I don't think we know, yet, precisely how a memory is stored, and where in the brain it rests, nor how we find it 15 years later. But we, geese, crows, squirrels, dogs, and elephants remember what we need to remember. We know what losing the capacity to recall or remember looks like in dementia. Alzheimers demonstrates how critical memory is to being whatever we are.
Me as well. But Ive known worse times. Im sort of a cup by is half full rather than half empty kind of person, even if it seems like its a quarter full.
Quoting Quk
That's a good filling-out of my "feature" idea. I wish I could identify the qualia, though. The problem is that I know what I'm talking about when I refer to a "yellow quale" (controversial though this may be), but I really don't know what the "self-quale" is. Do you have any idea?
For most of my life I thought "mind's eye" stuff was some sort of metaphor. I was in my fourties when I first heard about aphantasia and by extension learned that other people can have visual experiences in various degrees of vividness (up to "hyperphantasia"). I have "visual concepts"; I know what my mum looks like when she's not there, but I can't summon an image. I can sometimes conjur "microflashes"; very short images, like the flash of a camera. It's not worth the effort.
In terms of visual experience, a memory of something is very distinct from something I imagine. If I remember what something looks like I trigger a "visual concept". It's non-linguistic; it just sits there in the mind - something once seen, but unavailable to anything vision-like. When I imagine something, and you ask me for details, I make them up on the spot, one after another. In retrospect, I know realise how those meditation techniques where they have you lie down in darkness and someone narrates something are supposed to work. I always thought it was strange that I was supposed to relax and they made me work. I thought I was just slow. It never occured to me that others might just have visual experience to go along with the narration.
***
After reading this thread, I'm wondering if we're not seeing memories too much in terms of... computers? Something stored; something retrieved. Or the metaphor of storage to begin with: the warehouse of the mind. I think memories are more integrated than that in the daily praxis. A memore of an event that's no accurate is still a memory: it's continuous with how you see things, and you'll have to deal with an error to go on. Sometimes people my deliberately not check up on a memory, so they can go on the way things are. But where do these misrememberings come from; if you remember a detail wrong, is that some sort of imagination? What if the problem was your perception in that moment: that is it's not your memory that's wrong - as it's accurate to what you've experienced - but it's your experience that wasn't accurate to the moment. I think you peel back the layers you might end up with "elementary particles" that inform everything you do. I'm too confused right now to think further down that lane, as there would be no memory without imagination, and no imagination without memory - but it feels like I'm transgressing "tiers" here, and I can't quite make it out.
It's the experience of what it's like to be the owner of this leg or that arm etc. that is attached to my body. It's a specific phenomenal quality that is different to watching that table, for instance, which is not part of my body. I think nobody can describe qualia. I can only hope that you see what I mean. Also, nobody can describe the phenomenal quality of yellow, for example. We just trust that everyone experiences the same quality that we call "yellow". (Someone may experience blue instead. Who knows?)
Oh I don't think so. There have been several interesting points raised (by you, @Dawnstorm, et al).
No, my post was really just about methodology, because here's the thing: as posed, the question is about psychology. @J wanted to get away from that, but then you should really be asking different questions.
And that would be worth doing, because memory is a very deep thing, it is the substrate of our mental lives, the medium within which thoughts grow, the object and enabler of perception and imagination, ... There's obviously a lot for psychology to say about all that.
But what I find particularly interesting is the way memory can suddenly rise up and take control of the whole show, shouldering aside perception and imagination, all the mental work of keeping you alive. Memory refuses to stay in its place as the dependable foot soldier of thought. When the conditions are right (temperature and so on), a certain sort of breeze can throw me right back to my childhood.
It is noteworthy how unbeholden to time our mental lives can be.
I wonder if he'll have the massed missile launchers and tanks, like his comrade, Putin.
ON the OP, the only thing I have to add, is that when an aged relative was in her dotage and suffering dementia, one of the things I noticed is that she lost all sense of when memories had occurred. She would refer to people or events that we knew had happened decades previously as though they had just happened. ('Where is Lynne? She said she would call' - Lynne having died decades previously.) The metaphor I thought of was the index on a hard drive being corrupted so that random pieces of memory were floating to the surface of her conscious awareness without any reference to her current experience (which was, of course, very sad to see, although she did not appeared distressed by it.)
The other general point I've noticed in my own life is the deceptiveness of memory. One can have an apparently crystal-clear recollection of an episode or a scene in your life from years previously (now I'm older I notice this) but then find out that you weren't in that place at that time, or some other aspect of the memory is fictitious.
Convince me that's either (a) not already a theory about how mental life works, or (b) it's a good theory, a reasonable theory.
Quoting J
Yes, yes, but you seem to have the idea that the "mental item" might have causes, and those fall within the purview of psychology, but your identifying the mental item as a memory (or a fancy or a perception) does not, is not itself another sort of mental item, and does not fall within the purview of psychology. I can't imagine why you would think that. Surely identifying a thought as a memory is as much a psychological event as the thought so identified.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
My question here would be: If this is already a theory, could there ever be a phenomenological reduction? What would you propose in its place, granting phenomenology?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
A subtle point. Yes, the act of identifying a thought as a memory is a mental item, a psychological event; it occurs at T1 and is presumably caused, as much as any other mental event is caused. But we're in the habit of making a discrimination here. "Here comes the mental item" is meant to appeal to a cause understood as not within my conscious control. (Again, a reminder that this whole example refers to unbidden images coming to mind.) When we ask for a cause or an explanation, we need to invoke psychology, at least to some degree: Why are memories formed? How and why do they emerge into consciousness? What reliability must they possess? What correlations with brain activity are important? etc.
But the "Why?" of "Why do I identify an image as a (purported) memory?" is different -- unless we are thoroughgoing physicalists. We believe, generally, that an explanation here is going to involve some reference to reasons, to conscious activity. We aren't dealing with a brute fact about neuronal activity, though arguably the reasons must supervene on such activity. Here we're asking, "How is it the case that my experience is what it is?" No doubt there will always be a psychological, causal story that can also be told about this, but it doesn't answer the same question.
This is really a version of my response to your first objection. If there is such a thing as phenomenology, then it must be separated from psychology in some meaningful way. Perhaps there is not. In which case all mental items are indeed on a par, and we shouldn't try to find alternate descriptions of them beyond the physical.
Is this a complete response to the points you raise? I don't think so. But tell me where you see the weaknesses.
He unquestionably will. And I'll bet good money that he'll have the parade route lined with large portraits of himself (held by "private individuals," of course). They are already up on walls, four stories high, and in front of public buildings, in Washington DC, paid for by . . .? https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/22/trump-lincoln-national-mall-usda/
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. This is part of why I find the OP question interesting. It would be one thing if memories were 100% reliable, such that to recognize one was to recognize its accuracy as a memory. But since that's not the case, I'm left wondering what it is that allows the "purported memory" identification. As I wrote, the only thing I can liken it to is our ability to utter a sentence without asserting it. We can recognize that sentence as a truth-apt utterance without claiming that it is true.
Wow. You describe this very well. If you don't mind my asking into it some more: Has this created problems for you in your interactions with people, or does your brain come up with workarounds that facilitate communication?
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yes. It's like the puzzle about what happens when our taste in coffee changes. (I think this is attributable to Dennett?). We used to like Folgers, now we like Bustello and find Folgers bitter. So . . . remembering how Folgers used to taste to us, are we remembering accurately? Or was Folgers a bitter-tasting coffee even then, only we misperceived it?
OK. If there is a "sense" of recollection, though, the philosophical/phenomenological part would be: What is it? What does this actually mean, experientially?
If? Memory is real, hence your reference to it and the fact this entire thread is devoted to it, so, that's already been laid out. That is, essentially, if not word for word, the definition of what the majority of persons (and the entirety of professionals, I believe) would say defines "memory."
Quoting J
Well, as stated, I would argue (or rather numerous scientific texts would argue for me):
Quoting Outlander
Quoting J
Naturally, each man's experience is uniquely his own. So, that would be up to the "experiencer." Part of the joy and mystery of life, I guess. :smile:
I've never had problems with this, other than minor stuff (like the meditation technique I mentioned not working on me; also creative writing exercises... nothing that I couldn't interpret in terms of other failures). I mean, I grew up for 40 to 45 years without realising there was this difference. Even now I'm not completely sure (fairly sure, but not completely) that I actually have aphantasia. It's just that I see myself so much in diagnosed people's accounts, and a lot of little stuff makes sense.
Communication isn't a problem. I don't think a workaround is even necessary: the most relevant topics would be visualisation related; we'd certainly not have been on the same page - but the problem is to figure that out, and that's hard when we end up in a "successful" social situation (such that both of us "get what we want"). I think (and thought so even before I heard of aphantasia) that successful communication is better understood in terms of situational compatibility of individual meanings than in terms of similarity of the individual meanings involved. So if a communicative situation ends satisfactorily, you're not going to realise in what way meanings the people involved hold are different - people are just going to assume similarity (I certainly did).
I'm sort of bad at spacial perception; in intelligence tests I was always tremendously slowed down during those "wheels-and-levers" tests. Not sure if this is related to aphantasia in some way. It's certainly not a necessary consequence, but I did hear that people with aphantasia have trouble rotating 3D objects in their mind, so maybe? I'm certainly bad at stuff like reading maps, and fitting in furniture (I need to measure when it's obivous to anyone else that stuff will fit or not).
I'm perfectly fine the way I am; I never felt anything was lacking. Come to think of it, back after leaving school there was a year where I had three instances of a sudden shift in perception. It went along with some sort of shock, but no re-orientation was necessary. Different but the same. It was weird and fascinating. Some neural anomaly, I suppose?
The first was rain, all of a sudden I saw it more in geometrical terms. The next instance was the face of a former teacher; this one was close to making a functional difference: I'm not sure I'd have recognised him if he'd looked like that to me in the first place - but it switched mid-situation. A sudden shock, a moment of confusion, but I adjusted quickly. The last was darkness in my own house (I'm light sensitive so I tend to not switch on the light if I know a place very well). This is the only one I have absolutely no concept for - I don't understand the difference in terms of anything.
It was just those three instances, and all within one year. I've never had anything like this before or since, and I still don't know what that was. But it served as a quite nice illustration for myself of what it is like to "see things differently". Literally, too.
This is the main thing I find so puzzling about your approach. (You seem to think it's phenomenology, and I think it's rather the opposite.)
Remembering is much like breathing; we do it on purpose, some of the time, and automatically, almost all the time, and we never stop.
That's "remembering", not "becoming aware of a thought and labeling it a memory". If that happens at all, it's probably rare, unusual at least. A thought, if it's a memory, comes to us as a memory, period.
(And I think it must. Consider the alternative: what reasons could you muster to judge a thought to be a memory? What could you possibly rely upon as you worked out the inference that this indeed is a memory? It is the fundamental form of knowledge; you are already relying on memory when it occurs to you to do a bit of conscious reasoning. You've no hope of hauling memory before the tribunal of reason.
Of course an individual memory is open to criticism, as being inaccurate or incomplete, whatever. But not only is there an obvious difficulty in establishing that a given thought is a memory, any steps you take will be entirely reliant on memory, so memory as such simply must escape judgment.)
Now, if you want to ask, what's that like, for something to be present to the mind as a memory? Fine, and that's headed back toward phenomenology. (What we do, rather than how, as my deleted post had it.)
But what we can't do is go looking for criteria that we consciously use to identify memories or distinguish them from other thoughts. There had better not be such criteria, because we couldn't know it and never apply them without already allowing memory to have its way.
This is fascinating, because it's so contrary to my own experience. Yes, I'm familiar with the idea of a conscious "remembering" when we try to remember something, on purpose, or else it comes to us automatically because we're in a context where we expect a memory. I agree that presents a different, if overlapping, set of problems. But I am constantly being bombarded with unbidden mental images, randomly, and often triggered by things I'm barely aware of. Far from unusual, it's much more common for me than deliberately seeking out some memory, or expecting one.
So there we are. I suppose you've had this happen sometimes, at least? My question would then be, When it happens, are you instantaneously aware, as best you can tell, that the thought/image is a purported memory? And if so, how?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well, exactly. "Reasons" doesn't sound right, nor does "inference," and yet we make the identification. You want to say that this is a kind of reductio of the idea that we do anything when we recognize a memory: "It is the fundamental form of knowledge." And so it may turn out to be, but I'm not yet sure. Or are you perhaps wanting to say that when we recognize a sensual perception as such, it is also a fundamental form of knowledge?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think phenomenology can also handle what I believe is a previous question, namely whether something occurs for us between the image and the identification. I'm asking, What's it like for something to be present to the mind before it is recognized as a purported memory? I hope you can agree that, at least sometimes -- rarely for you, frequently for me -- that is a thing that happens.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This is quite possibly right. I rather doubt the process is conscious, which is part of why I raise the question in a phenomenological, "what's-it-like" context. We may decide it's like nothing at all.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yes, good observation.
This is difficult. I think there's a twofold meaning involved here: memory vs. imagination as a psychological function, and remembering vs. imagining as an action. You can't remember stuff without involving the psychological function of "imagination", and you can't imagine stuff without the psychological function of "remembering". For instance, if I tell you to imagine a starfish, you'll need to remember what one looks like, or you won't be successful. And if I tell you to remember a starfish, you need to be able to "imagine" a past situation (since it's not here right now). Now if what you're doing is "associating" (or something), situations might occur in which it becomes relevant whether the content of the association "really occured, was experienced, etc." or not. And it's going to be hard to figure this out precisely because the psychological functions of imagination and memory are both going to be involved to some degree or other. Embellished memory? Memory-inspired vision?
How you can tell will differ depending on why this distinction matters. If it doesn't matter situationally, you're likely dealing with some sort of reification or other, and the cunfusion's going to be chronic.
A common example would be a composer composing a piece of music and then finding out it sounds like something else. Accidental similarity? Unconscious plagiarism? Note that this distinction makes sense in a particular social context. A lot if the lawsuits I've heard about, for example, I find... silly. I hear the similarity, but in most cases being caught up in western music theory promotes certain similarities. For example, an organ run in Webber's Phantom of the Opera, and Rick Wakeman's instumental Ischariot sound very much the same; but they're basically just walking up and down a scale in half-steps. I imagine you could find similar movements earlier (Bruckner maybe?). Yet, if this goes to court a decision is forced. And to the extent that institution "court" is supposed to be meaningful, a decision should also be meaningful, and (partly) because of that the distinction between "memory" and "imagination" becomes relevant. And the composer might ask themselves, "did I get it from there?" So:
Is a sudden, unbidden image a memory or an imagination? It's probably to some degree both. Can you figure out a ratio? What's the expected certainty you can reach? And is the effort needed proportional to the situational importance of the distinction? The result will never amount to more than a provisional classification, though.
Basically, cognitive activity is always going to involve more than one cognitive function, and confusion may occur when we use the same word for the activity as for the function; such as memory in general, and "a memory", or "remembering". You can create an analytic category but should be careful not to reify it beyond it's situational occurance. If you do treat a sudden unbidden image as either an image or memory that treating it as such will become part of what constitutes its status - and it's a status which can be contested by others, and that being contested is something you can anticipate, and that anticipation can feed into your classification and further behaviour... If you treat something as a memory and it turns out things didn't happen like this in some detail or at all, what you'll have is a "false memory" - because of the way your treat it. All the while, it is what it is. You can always sidestep the issue and call unbidden images with a defined trigger an "association", and you might be happier for it. One can get trapped in dichotomies of ones own making.
The first question is, fundamentally, empirical ? not just about me, but in general: is this an experience people have? The second question is still empirical, because it falls squarely within the domain of (cognitive) psychology.
? ? If you want my take on the psychology, it's worth as much as you're paying for it: I would expect that thoughts are "categorized" on the fly, as needed, and only as much as needed, and that overwhelmingly this process of categorization is not something you do consciously. "At bottom" there's whatever makes it into your awareness, and that's just some bit of content, probably itself underspecified, and then there's what it gets taken as ? memory, fancy, perception, whatever. The content present might not get characterized to any particularly sharp degree, if it doesn't matter for the rest of what your mind is up to; if it matters, there might be some effort put into it. In short, I'd expect that the difference between memory and imagination is "constructed"; I'd say the same for perception, and I think there's reason to, but I suspect it's a slightly different process since there's enormous specialization for perception in the brain, which might make a difference. It is nevertheless true that people believe they see things that they are in fact imagining, and vice versa, so clearly the same applies here: the difference is negotiable, how something is categorized is not "what it is".
And that's what I am gesturing at when I say that we don't consciously decide whether the content in our awareness is remembered or imagined; in some sense, yes, there's a decision being made about what it is, very much so, but I think that "decision" is mostly made without your conscious involvement. Obviously there will be exceptions.
That's all just blather, though, my guesses based on my reading and that's all. ? ?
Roughly speaking, I think none of this is any of philosophy's business. In the 18th century, before we could do the sort of research we can do now, it may have been acceptable to speculate about how the mind works and how we distinguish perceptions from memories and so on, but it's rather foolish in the 21st century.
There are still some things for philosophy to talk about, I think, just not this, at least not in this way.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yes, and this is what you'd expect to be the rule rather than the exception. But this topic puzzles me because in fact we find the opposite, most of the time: If I suddenly get an image of my grandfather walking beside me in Manhattan, I know it's a purported memory. And if I get an image of a snark, I'm quite sure it isn't. At the risk of repeating myself, I ask again: How do I know these things? (And see below for some explication about what I mean by "how".) Of course we can make a mistake, and of course a purported memory may be inaccurate to a greater or lesser degree, but that's an outcome that's subsequent to the problem I'm raising: How am I even able to make the "mistake" in the first place? Or to put it differently: What is it about a purported memory that is, evidently, the same to us, regardless of whether the memory is accurate or not? Why does it get recognized as "purported memory" at all? We agree that its accuracy can't be the reason -- so what is it?
Quoting Dawnstorm
I like this. As a musician myself, I know that subconscious stealing happens all the time. (And yes, if a court convicts you of using a chromatic scale that "belongs" to someone else, we're all in trouble!) I agree that, when a meretricious theft occurs, and assuming it isn't a deliberate rip-off, then something like a confusion of memory with imagination is taking place. Does this tell against my assertion that we almost always know the difference? It might, if the composer had genuinely attended to his musical phrase as he wrote it, and was still in the dark. But we know this isn't how composition works. It's much more rapid and subconscious, and then once it's done we grow attached to it. I'm afraid a certain degree of self-deception and wishful thinking is involved when a composer doesn't identify a musical "memory." The solution, of course, is to play it for somebody else who knows the repertoire.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That might be true, so let's say it is. Would we want to also say that, because of the subconscious quality of the "decision," it has no phenomenological character at all? That isn't "isn't like anything"? (I don't mean to press a particular meaning of "phenomenological" on you. Whatever term you'd choose to describe attending to our conscious experiences is fine, and will be what I mean here.) I'm not disputing that, in fact I think it more and more likely. But I need to be convinced that we really have done our "bracketing" as carefully as we can, and really considered what the experience is -- or isn't! -- like, apart from what we think it must be like, based on some psychological theory.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'm sympathetic to curbing philosophy's enthusiasms, but I think this goes too far. Or perhaps I still haven't made clear what I mean. I'm really not interested at all in "how the mind works." (Not in this thread, that is.). Asking, "How do I know that a mental image is a purported memory?" is not a "how-the-mind-works" question. It's a question about my relation to, my experience of, how the mind works.
Now you'd suggested earlier that this is a false distinction -- that "my experience," even if up one level from the content of that experience, so to speak -- is still a question about how the mind works. And a hardcore believer in scientism can construe it that way. But I don't think you replied to my objection to that: Are you saying, then, that there is no question we can ask that separates phenomenology from psychology? Earlier, you talked about "what's that like, for something to be present to the mind as a memory? Fine, and that's headed back toward phenomenology. (What we do, rather than how)" -- so I assume you do think some distinction is valid. Indeed, when you say "what rather than how," that's very close to my own dubiety about "how". So why may I not draw the distinction as I do, leaving first-level "how" questions to psychology? Phenomenology has to start somewhere!
In any case, if my use of "how" has misled you, I'm sorry. I mean the "how" to translate as "by virtue of what experience".
Quoting J
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
From the perspective of the embodied and embedded mind, memory and recollection are not seen solely as private, internal processes occurring within the brain. Shaun Gallagher, for example, argues that memory is an active process arising from the dynamic interaction between individuals and their bodily and social environments.
Memory is not a single internal event but rather the culmination of the process of the lived experience, including bodily sensations, perceptual cues, and the practical context. For instance, seeing a particular place, handling an object, and participating in social activity can together form a complex, multi-relational enactment of memory. Although the act of remembering involves an implicit self-awareness that this is something from my past, any element within this process can take the lead and trigger recollection. What might appear to be a single mental snapshot actually represents a broader, interconnected complex.
That's close to where I'd find room for philosophy, but it's tricky.
Consider emotions. The average person is under the impression that an emotion wells up from within them more-or-less fully formed, and that it's a definite thing. What's interesting is that people in the post-Freud world also accept that they might misunderstand or misread or misinterpret their own emotions ? hence the sitcom joke of angrily shouting "I'm not angry!" But the assumption here is that there is a fact of the matter, in the sense that your emotion is something definite itself.
Thing is, it probably isn't. We have whatever feelings we have for whatever reasons (that is, causes) and then "we" ? our minds ? construct for us a story in which we are angry or happy or whatever. The inputs for those stories are manifold, notably including social as well as internal elements, but there's no pure internal emotional state to be represented. Emotions are thoughts and constructed like all thoughts.
Roughly speaking, my expectation is that what we're talking about is similar: along with the content of your awareness there's a little story, often quite vaguely sketched, about this being a memory or a fancy.
So I think in a way there is an answer to "Why do I think this particular thought I was just having is a memory?" and the answer is because your mind said it was, or some perhaps much more subtle and noncommittal equivalent ? maybe your mind tested the waters a bit in suggesting this is a memory to see if you'd bite, if that characterization of the thought got any traction and we should carry on with that, or if not we should start hedging a bit, maybe eventually admit it wasn't memory at all.
I think the story is probably very similar to emotion, because ordinary people have unearned certainty about both. We all know that memory is pretty much always confabulation, but most people are still convinced that when they remember something their memory is trustworthy; in the same way they are quite certain that their emotions are from deep inside, from their very essence as individuals, and not, for example, shaped to fit the social situation.
So ? coming at last to it, I think ? when you talk about our relationship to our thoughts, I'm afraid a lot of that is already stuff the mind is getting up to. Always busily rewriting the story.
You could, of course, give up talking about our experience of our thoughts and instead spend your time on our concepts of memory and imagination, but I think there's a middle way.
It does, after all, often matter to us a great deal whether we really remember something. That's pretty interesting, that we should care so much about a distinction that isn't all that trustworthy. When we insist that we remember something, we are fundamentally making that up ? a thought just isn't definitely a memory or not, even if your mind strongly encourages you to think that it is. So why do we do that?
So maybe your reason for posting was somewhere near here. We feel one way about a thought if we think of it as a memory, and another if we think of it as fancy. Even though those two toys came out of the same bin.
So yes I would be up for examining what "memory" means to us, why it's so important to us to determine whether a thought is a memory (yours or mine), the role all these reflections and commitments play in our mental lives. But I doubt there's anything worth chasing that would turn out to be the "genuine experience" of memory rather than imagination, because I doubt there's any such thing. Still, we behave as if there is, and that feeds back into our mental lives quite powerfully.
I like Gallagher's perspective, and what you write in your post is reasonable and interesting. It falls under the category that both @Srap Tasmaner (I think) and I would call psychology rather than philosophy. In the quoted phrase above, it's the "implicit self-awareness" that I'm trying to bracket and focus on. Is there anything more that can be said about it, as an experience? I'm reluctant to accept that it's merely definitional of "the act of remembering."
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, I've seen some research about this. Apparently the physical or somatic experience of "this emotion" is much more general than we think. The same physical experience, for instance, can be read as either anger or fear, depending on the rest of the story we're telling at the moment. Even joy and terror, I've heard, may be identical below the level of consciousness. It's all "arousal."
Is this like memories? Are we telling a little contextual story, when an image comes to mind?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Here I worry that bringing in "your mind" is one entity too many. Is this the picture?: An image occurs, my mind says it is a memory, and then some other item called "I" identifies it as a memory? Or when you say, "My mind said it was," does this just mean that I said it was?
This kind of question does help us see how hard it is to work with a term like "mind". Do I want to identify "mind" with some psychological account of how images et al. get generated? Or would it be better to make "mind" equivalent to the "I", the self? Or is it this third activity that can mediate between the first two conceptions?
I actually think your "much more subtle and noncommittal equivalent" is closer to how it is.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
We do? I guess you're thinking of narrative accounts where there's a lot of filling-in. But surely image-memories are reliable, by and large? Or is there evidence that this is not so? Well, the fallibility of witness testimony, I suppose -- but here too there's a story involved.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Sure, this sounds like a good inquiry -- why does it matter so much which is which?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well, that's the question that grounds the OP. I think your suggestion is that we behave as if there is because the outcome matters quite powerfully to us. If it didn't, we might be content with a hazier borderline between memory and imagination. Quite possibly. And yet . . . the plausibility of this account lessens for me when I try to use it to describe what I've been calling unbidden mental images. I persist in believing that, in this context, there is a crucial difference between my experience of a purported memory image and my experience of a fancied image. What is that difference? Quite simply, the different recognitions involved. Yes, the "mental content" is the same, if you like, but I am not aware of adding anything to that content in the process of recognition. The experience of seeing image X and recognizing image X as, say, a memory, is simultaneous, and thus makes the experience different from recognizing image Y as a fancy. I'm not adding anything to some unlabeled or unrecognized image; it's all of a piece.
Of course, as you say, this is how it seems, and this is how we behave. That doesn't mean it's true.
The intent of putting it this way was just to suggest that you might not ever be aware of entirely decontextualized (let alone "raw") bits of content. There's always some story to go along with it, however vague or incomplete or even inapposite that story might be. I really could have said "brain" where I said "mind', but I liked the sound of pitching it more at the level of function than mechanism.
? I will add that I have no idea how to talk about most of this coherently because I don't know what the purpose, even what the use of consciousness is, why we become aware of some of what the brain is getting up to.
Here's a tiny example that just occurred to me in the last day or so, a phenomenon I was familiar with that I hadn't ever bothered connecting to my desultory reading about psychology. You're doing something which goes awry, say, closing a door awkwardly and it looks like you're about to pinch your fingers in it, and you just barely miss getting hurt but you say "Ow!' anyway. I've seen people do this in front of me, and everyone I've talked to about it has had this experience, the needless "ouch!"
It's perfectly clear why this happens, psychologically speaking. Your brain is busy predicting future states of your body and preparing to respond to them, and forming and emitting words takes a little time so it doesn't wait until they're needed but prepares them a little ahead of time based on predicted or expected need. (Every human conversation shows signs of this.) When the moment of truth arrives, the needed "ouch!" is already on its way to being ejaculated, even if it turns out not to be needed.
That means this "ouch!" is not quite the same as the automatic and involuntary scream of surprise pain. So what's "ouch!" for? I don't know, but my suspicion is that it is vaguely narrative supporting, either for your own consumption or others present, if there are any. "And then he pinched his finger in the door, and it hurt." It's a little label on the experience that drags along a little context, probably adds some little tabs that allow it to be in turn slotted into other, larger, probably narrative, contexts. It tells you what that moment means or could mean by telling you what it is or could be. Something like that.
My suspicion was that these glimpsed images that flash through your mind arrive similarly with a suggested meaning or context and prepared a little to be taken up by other uses and contexts. So indeed tagged as a memory, but maybe weaker than that, offered as possibly a memory, and then we'll see if that holds when you (that is, your brain) do whatever you do with it. If it just goes on by, its status is left somewhat indeterminate, but if you do indeed treat it as a memory, next time it comes up it'll be more strongly suggested that this is a memory. (We know for a fact that this happens; Paul McCartney reports that he, like everyone else, had come to believe over the years that he broke up the Beatles, but that watching Peter Jackson's documentary brought back to him what it was really like, and everything that was going on then, and that it wasn't entirely his fault.)
Quoting J
Right, I'm saying I doubt anything arrives unlabeled, whether that label is large and clear or small and hard to read, but that's not because the world itself is labeled but because your brain has a labeling process and you don't see anything until it's been through that process. You get them in consciousness at the same time, but I think they are still distinguishable because you can question their accuracy or usefulness separately.
We can also go backwards now and note that to lay down a durable memory it has to makes sense. People have trouble remembering random bits of stuff, but stuff in sensible patterns they can. That suggests that there might always be some minimal gesture toward making sense of what's in your mind, in case you want to remember it, if it turns out to be important in some way, for instance. (An interesting variation on this is the Columbo method, in which you pay particular attention to details that seem out of place or inexplicable, to be missing part of the context in which they would make sense.)
This is all just psychology, and, what's worse, psychology I'm mostly making up.
I'm glad my attention was dawn (by an AI!) to @Richard B's post, which I had overlooked. Norman Malcolm, who attended Wittgenstein's Cambridge lectures on the philosophy of mathematics and befriended him, seems to introduce a perspective that doesn't rely on representationalist assumptions.
Although I'm not acquainted with Malcolm's work myself (knowing him mostly by reputation), my perspective is informed by the same (or an adjacent) Aristotelian/Wittgensteinian tradition carried forward by philosophers like Ryle, Kenny, Anscombe, Hacker, and McDowell, among others, (and anticipated by Thomas Reid!).
From such a direct-realist perspective, I tend to construe "the memory that P" not as inspecting an inner representation, but as the persistent ability to know that P, where P typically (but not always) refers to a past event or experience. Any accompanying mental imagery (which can be absent, for instance, in people with aphantasia) would be considered acts of the imagination that might help scaffold a recollective process, rather than being the memory itself. This recollective ability is, in essence, a constitutive part of our general capacity to acquire and retain knowledge, particularly when that knowledge pertains to past events.
Furthermore, as Hacker has stressed, memory isn't necessarily of the past. It can also be of the future: for example, when I remember that I have a dentist appointment tomorrow. I knew yesterday that I had this appointment, and I have retained this knowledge today. This act of remembering might be reinforced by an episodic memory of how the appointment was made, but I could forget those details entirely and still remember that I have an appointment tomorrow. Here, memory is the retained knowledge.
Therefore, based on these considerations, I think an answer to J's initial query might productively begin by questioning some of the underlying assumptions about the nature of memory itself.
I think it's possible that there are several levels of reality. Not one single reality but realities at variable intensities. Not to confuse with truth: There is just one truth. That's a logic axiom. Reality, on the other hand, may have a substance, and that substance might be scalable.
A dream, when sleeping, contains little substance of reality. When I'm awake, I'm in a state that contains more substance of reality.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
are you denying that there is any mental representation at all? Or only that inspecting such a representation couldn't result in recognizing "the memory that P"?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
That is what I was trying to get at. Good stuff.
Recall, as a present act, may be the real discussion.
We say we recall a memory, as if the memory sits somewhere waiting to be recalled. But maybe recall is simply a focus on what persists, and recollection is a collection of what is present, knowledge.
Like right now, we are reading and focused on what we see, but, while keeping our eyes open, we can focus on the sounds instead, or while keeping our eyes open and ears open, focus on how comfortable our socks feel or we can recall reading what someone said above and focus on that which persists as the knowledge you have right now.
Recalling a memory, is just refocusing (perhaps widening the focus beyond sensation) on all that is present.
This doesnt really address the OP question to me, but it may provide a new approach to how/what makes remembering uniquely remembering and not imagining or sensing.
And the example of remembering an appointment you have tomorrow is interesting. This shows how past and future are maybe appended after an act of recollection and that the past is not some sort of essential, temporal component to a memory. (However, I do think you could say that when you make an appointment, and later recall it, you are recalling a decision you made in the past; you are not remembering something in the future, but remembering the promise or desire to attend to something. Regardless, nothing exists in an existential way in the past, as it is gone which makes it past, so we cant look to the past for anything, only the present.).
But the next part that is interesting is that we dont need images at all to behold a memory, as recalling an appointment for tomorrow may have zero images attached to the recollection.
I had used the term inspect in distinction from create to point to possible distinctions between how one views a memory versus a unicorn (for instance). I needed to make a memory into this representational type of thing in order for the word inspect to work. But this discussion is probably mired in metaphors that we arent fully conscious of, they are so ingrained in speech and naive understandings of memory.
What may be the case is, when we seek to recollect something, we are seeking, analogically, like when we are presently looking with eyes. Our eyes may inform the color and shape of the object sought (thanks Kant), but nevertheless, we seek something that is not in the eye when we seek with the eyes. We seek a thing in itself. If we see a mirage we look again and again to confirm what is really there apart from our eyes and the light as reflected in them.
If we dont think the thing we recall is what it is because of itself, if we think the thing we recall is constructed merely by ourselves, we wouldnt call it a memory. We might call it imaginary. A memory has to have some sort of independent presence/existence/ontological status/process of verification to it.
Like if I say, I remember seeing that yesterday; it was blue.
And my friend says, No, dont you remember, it was white, and there was this blue light on it that made it look blue until the light was turned off.
And I say, Oh yeah, I recall, it was white.
My ability to imagine the thing being blue and imagine the thing being white is imagination. My ability to correct myself and say I agree that the thing was not blue at all has to do with something besides imagination.
But, although not purely a construction, like an imaginary thing, a memory is still found only within ones conscious mind. When we try to recall, we (metaphorically) look in a specific direction and that is inward. But what we look at are the present existing impressions.
Maybe the analogy is to understand that there is a time lag between when something touches your hand and when the feeling thereby created is felt by you. There is a split second lag between when you are touched, and when you feel it, and that lag starts to lengthen if you were listening to music and didnt notice the touching at first. Recollection is noticing what was just first present an instant ago. And just first present can be a relative term.
Still a curious phenomenon this memory thing
That's what I want to say too, intuitively. And what this thread is showing is that this idea encounters (at least) two major problems:
1. Whatever the IPEOSPoV is, it can't depend on the memory's being accurate. What we verify is that the memory purports to be one; it presents itself as one; not that it's accurate.
2. The IPEOSPoV is a lot to ask, unless it happens very much below the surface.
I'm approaching this problem from a direct realist stance that coheres with disjunctivism in epistemology and in the philosophy of perception. On that view, actualizations of a capacity to know, or to remember, can indeed be construed as acts of representing the known or remembered object (or proposition). What is denied is that there is something common to the successful actualization of such a capacity and to its defective actualization (e.g. in the case of illusion, false memory, etc.)a common representationthat is the direct object being apprehended in the mental act.
By the way, as I was preparing my previous response to this thread, I stumbled upon the entry Reid on Memory and Personal Identity in the SEP, written by Rebecca Copenhaver, the first two sections of which appear to be very relevant but that I'll try to find the time to read in full before responding further.
I'm going to stay with my simple-minded question, because I genuinely don't understand what this means. When an image of my bedroom as a 5-year-old comes to mind, is this a representation? It certainly fits the criteria most of us would use for "mental image". Is this what you're calling "an actualization of a capacity . . . to remember"? If it is that, does that mean it isn't a mental image? If it's only "construed" as an act of representing the remembered object, what would be another way of construing such an image?
These aren't meant to be objections, really. I'm just trying to get clear on your terminology, and how it compares with our more common language.
I've let this settle for a while, because I wasn't sure how to answer this. I don't think you've addressed the more important part of my post: and that's what is "a memory" vs. "memory".
"A sudden flash of your grandfather walking beside you in Manhatten," can be identified as a memory, sure, but even if it is: is this what the memory amounts to? Is that all of it? What about it is memory, and what about it is imagination, and what about the broader topical memory isn't actuallised in the flash?
Do you remember, generally, walking beside your Grandfather in Manhatten, even if it's not actualised in your consciousness? Isn't that "flash" an outgrowth of a greater structure that's your internal sense of autobiography? The flash is the mushroom to your fungal memory?
Do you see what I mean?
Given this, if you get an image of a snark, that would also be some kind of memory, given that you're not making up snarks on the spot. But it's not located in your biography, as it would have been if you'd gotten flash of reading Lewis Carrol. You remember stuff that doesn't manifest as "a memory". If you didn't, no "memory" could manifest.
I do. When we interrogate "memory" in this way, all the questions you raise are important. Are they phenomenological questions, though? I think the actual experience is cruder and less thoughtful than this -- and therefore puzzling to me.
I get the mental image and along with it, some kind of identification. You're quite right that we need to remember many things in order to make up a snark, that every image is almost certainly composed of a palette of remembered colors, shapes, contexts, et al. Yet none of this seems to matter in identifying the kind of memory under discussion, namely the kind that purports to be a) true and b) autobiographical. In other words, it's fine to extend what memory does to include the palette-concept, which makes nearly all mental images partially formed by memories. But I'm asking about something much less general -- that certain type of remembering that's typified by my getting an image of my grandfather on the street. We distinguish that from a snark, even if we agree that we need the concept of "memory" for other purposes as well, and that this is by no means the only correct way to use the term. So . . . can we identify anything in the experience that allows us to make this distinction?
Quoting Dawnstorm
I understand the first part -- it's what I was just discussing, hopefully. But could you say more about why "no 'memory' could manifest"? Do you mean we require the palette-style of remembering in order to have the other, more specific type that satisfies a) and b)?
Think of it in terms of intentionality, then. When you get the flash, what you focus on is influenced by relevance horizon. You don't just focus decontexualiedly on your grandfather's face, for example, which you could, even if the specific look you'd flash in were compatible with that scene. You place yourself into a context with your grandfather, etc.
Meanwhile, imagining a snark has a different sense of focus. As I said, you could flash in a significant moment that involves a snark, and would be memory, but you didn't.
The intentionality of the "perceiving" act is different. The difference between "a memory" and "an imagination" (viewed wholistically as an act) is in the detials: what you focus on, whether or not you place yourself in the memory, and perhaps other things I'm not thinking of now.
The context of this thread abstracts from both in some way, and I think that causes problems, because the difference doesn't necessarily lie in the intentionality of the content; it might lie in the intentionality of the act of "remembering" or "imagining". The reason "imagining a snark" is an "imagination" and not a "memory" is because the act of imagining excludes from your relevance horizon things that would make it a memory. The reason I'd "diving down" is that most of the relevance horizon is pre-consciously given in your day-to-day praxis and only surfaces if problematic.
Quoting J
I'm not sure what you mean by pallette-style. As you live your life, you select details to comit to memory and you do that by integrating them into your memory flow. If we focus on the flash, for it to be - in that moment - a memory of you walking with your grandfather, you obviously need to remember your grandfather. But that's not what I'm talking about. For example, you could forget you ever had a grandfather but still remember the scene. The memory would manifest differently (walking with someone else - substitution; who was I walking with - puzzle...). But for the flash to surface at all something needs to be there to trigger this under the intentionality of a remembering act. Some impetus. And you can remember you remembered that scene and try to remember it again. It's complicated. But if you remember you remembered something you reinforce the memory as memory in the ongoing praxis of your life. It needn't be coherent, and it certainly needn't be conscious. But it needs to be there.
A memory being (a) true and (b) autobiographical is part of the intentionality of the act of remembering, but not of the actual memory - neither the flash, nor its more substantial substratus. It's more of a success-condition, which you can check with other sources (such as photographs, or even other memories), or - probably in the vast majority of cases - just assume.
And memories aren't static. Under certain circumstances you can "remember" having hunted a snark - and it would be a memory, even if it never happened or couldn't ever have happened. The circumstances have a rather high barrier, is all.
I'm using that term to describe an image that doesn't come to me as a memory -- the snark would be a good example -- but which, as you point out, still has to be composed of discrete memories from a palette of colors, shapes, etc. It's an imagined composite image comprising elements I do remember.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Good, this would be a fresh approach to my problem. If I understand you, you're agreeing with me when I can't seem to find any "marker" or "feature" that would allow me to recognize a purported memory. And when I ask, "Yet how can it be that I nonetheless do make that identification?" the reply is, "Because what makes it this kind of memory -- the kind that's purportedly true and autobiographical, not merely images composed from the mental palette -- is a type of intentionality."
I'll give that more thought, to see if I can fit it into my personal phenomenology. The only part I'm leery about is "just assume," which seems to throw it back again onto something brute.
There are diverse philosophical, literary, and psychological approaches that reject the notion of memory as a passive faculty of involuntary recollection or a smooth, automatic flow embedded within routine conscious experience. Instead, they consider memory as a powerful and active force. Marcel Prousts In Search of Lost Time becomes a paradigmatic example of such an endeavour. He explains his method as The truths that intelligence grasps directly in the open light of day have something less profound, less necessary about them than those that life has communicated to us despite ourselves in an impression because it has reached us through our senses, but whose spirit we can extract... I would have to interpret the sensations as the signs of so many laws and ideas, by attempting to think, that is, to bring out of the darkness what I had felt and to convert memory, still too material, into its spiritual equivalent. (Proust, In search of lost time, V.1, pg. 49) Here, memory is a creative force that involves interpreting and translating sensory experiences, impressions, into their spiritual equivalent. For Proust, the past does not exist in a fixed or pre-emptive form waiting to be retrieved. Instead, it must be produced and created anew. Thus, recollection involves a process of deciphering, interpreting, and transforming raw sensations into coherent and meaningful narratives. Therefore, memory functions as a complex interplay between sensation, interpretation, and consciousness, where the past is continually reimagined and reconstituted through the present act of remembering. Within this framework, memory can be clearly distinguished from related mental faculties such as imagination and recognition. Memory functions to maintain the continuity of the present self-awareness. It synthesizes recurring sensory impressions and emotional experiences, retaining repetitive and affectively charged patterns. Simultaneously, memory grounds coherent and intelligible narratives that contribute to the ongoing formation and reinforcement of ones sense of self.
You are remembering your childhood bedroom to be this or that size, to have this or that location in the house, to be furnished thus and so, etc. All of those mental acts refer to your childhood bedroom (or, better, are acts of you referring to it in imagination) and, maybe, chiefly refer to visual aspects of it. But there is no image that you are contemplating. That's why I prefer talking of representing (the object remembered) rather than speaking of you entertaining a representation, as if there were an intermediate object (the "mental image") that purports to represent the actual bedroom.
I think Wittgenstein somewhere was discussing (and drew a little picture) of a stick figure standing on an incline. The image may (somewhat conventionally) suggest that the pictured character is climbing up the slope. But the image also is consistent with the character attempting to remain still and sliding back down the slippery slope. The image can be seen as the former or seen as the latter. If you look at the actual image (as drawn on a piece of paper, say,) both of those are possible ways for you to represent what it is that you see. Actual pictorial representations, just like the perceptible or knowable objects that they represent, admit of various interpretations (you can see a chair as an object to sit on or as firewood). When you interpret it thus and so, this is an act of representation.
Mental images, so called, aren't like that. You can't represent to yourself in imagination a man appearing to stand on a slope and wonder whether he is climbing up or sliding back down. That's because mental images, like visual memories (or any other kind of memories) always already are acts of representation (and hence already interpreted) rather than mental objects standing in need of representation(sic) [On edit: I meant to say "standing in need of interpretation]. And, in the case of memories, they are acts or representing the remembered object, episode, event, or situation.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
It's possible that I haven't succeeded in describing the phenomenon I'm asking about. (I've noticed that several other people on this thread find it rare or at least unusual.) It's this: I'm going about my daily business when all at once, for no discernible reason, a visual/mental image flashes into my mind. Let's say it's the childhood bedroom, as seen from the bed. Now, everything you say would be true, if I were describing how the image is formed. I do indeed remember, or claim to remember, the shape, the furnishings, etc. And yes, these acts refer to the bedroom, or perhaps are imagined acts of reference.
But none of this is what occurs, what happens. All I'm trying to do is to give a phenomenological description, and I don't find any of that. It's almost as if you're giving a transcendental argument for what has to have happened, what must be the case, in order for me to have the experience I do have. And you may well be right. But the actual experience is one of a visual mental image which I claim to recognize as a memory. In fact, let's leave out the "memory" part entirely. When you say, "There is no image that you are contemplating," this would presumably apply to any alleged mental image, memory or not. And this is what I have to deny, based on my own experience.
Now there is one possible sense in which you may be correct. If all our talk about mental images is mistaken, that may be because we misunderstand what they are, or mean, rather like an illusion. But I want to say that the phenomenology doesn't allow us to make this discrimination. If we ask for a phenomenological description of a thirsty person in the desert who believes they see water ahead, we aren't going to be making any reference to whether there is water. All we can do is tell, faithfully, how it seems, how it presents to experience. And so it is with mental images. If you mean by "But there is no image that you are contemplating" the possible fact that this experience fools us in some way, rather as a mirage does, I have no quarrel. But I am using "mental image" to mean what I seem to be contemplating. For this usage I claim general linguistic agreement. And for the fact that I do indeed contemplate such a seeming image, I must insist on my privileged access.
Does any of this make sense to you?
Quoting J
I find that with every question, such as this thread is one question, we immediately stir up ten questions that must be first answered, before we can start to investigate the single question.
Such is the life weve chosen.
Talking about the phenomenal experience of a memory, or of recalling, I brought up:
Quoting Fire Ologist
I dont mean to be asking whether a memory is some independent thing-in-itself somehow apprehended when recalled - no. Thats another question. I also see that we are not asking about the content of the memory, the specifics, as if we need to know if they could be true or accurate, or not.
But lets briefly compare a memory to a sensation and to an imagination.
Memories, like sensations, have something of an independence to them. We dont get to purely construct on our own the shape of a memory or the shape of a sensation. We construct these, for sure, but we dont call them a memory if the construction is more like an imagination, and we dont get to call them a sensation if the construction is more like an imagination.
Taking sensation for granted, a hallucination is more like an imagination than it is like a sensation (although a hallucination is also like a sensation.)
Taking a memory for granted, a sensation is more like a memory than it is like an imagination (although remembering requires conjuring up images like imaginations).
So I still havent pinpointed something, but I raise the independent existence of some other thing as a similar feature to what helps distinguish a memory and a sensation from an imagination.
Quoting J
1. Certainly it cant depend on accuracy. We are not concerned about accuracy, or having someone perform an IPEOSPoV test on a memory, or on anything.
1b. that the memory purports to be one. Yes. That is what I am trying to focus on. Remembering, or just, memory. What makes it, something I am remembering, and not sensing or imagining? I am saying part of what allows one to see that a certain mental image is a memory is the images ability to be subjected to some sort of IPEOSPoV test, regardless of whether that test is ever conducted or is the concern here in this thread.
If its a memory, it involves something other than the one who is remembering it.
All of the pieces of this experience of recalling a memory that connect directly to the one who is recalling, blur and distort and deconstruct the memory - but those pieces of the memory experience that connect the memory to something else besides the the mere act of recalling are the parts that distinguish the memory from an imagination.
Recalling something is more like sensing the thing from the past right now in the present again. The mental experience of recalling is more like re-sensation, than it is like imagining a unicorn could be said to be sensing something.
Independent existence is one feature of the phenomenon we find (or ascribe, maybe) in a purported memory.
It doesnt matter if I recall it is blue and then someone corrects me about it being white. It doesnt matter whether either of us are correct or could be corrected. My point is that, what shows we are talking about a memory, is that we are both pointing to it as something other than what we might only imagine.
Maybe every memory is just an imagination based on a false sensation having nothing to do with any mind independent reality - but we dont think so or act that way towards a memory. We dont distinguish the memory from imagination if we dont assert and assume something purporting to be independently verifiable about the memory.
This may be something like I am getting at above in my comparison of remembering, to sensing, and to imagining. (Its not at all exactly what Im saying, but it seems to be circling a similar observation, or vantage point.)
There is something already in a memory, that is not there in an imagination-representation.
I am saying there is a similar something already in what purports to be a sensation.
And Im saying that whatever this is already in a memory or a sensation, it is not there when imagining a unicorn flying through space on an orange peel.
This is difficult to talk about, without sounding like a naive empiricist/realist, or sounding like an insane person apparently.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Right, and we need to keep discriminating the "what makes it" or "how does it happen" question between two possible meanings. We might give a psychological, semi-causal reading to this question, and try to answer it by describing how memories are formed -- what literally makes a memory. Or we can interpret the question, as I've been doing, to be about how the purported memory presents itself to us, quite apart from its psychological origins. So "what makes it something I am remembering?" here means "how can I tell it's something I'm remembering?"
Quoting Fire Ologist
Additionally, a sensual perception seems to include the same kind of near-instantaneous identification as does a memory; we're not aware of doing a quick mental check to make sure it's really a perception. What you're calling the "already" does seem to be part of this.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Oh, that doesn't stop anyone around here. Say more about the unicorn on the orange peel! :smile:
I just remembered everyone knows unicorns can fly, so she wouldnt need the orange peel, but she might need some sort of oxygen supply, if we are seeking accuracy regarding unicorns. Sorry for any confusion
I am happy to grant you that we have a privileged access to the contents and intentional purports of our own cognitive states, and this includes memories (that may have a visual character or not), including false memories. Indeed, my suggestion (following Wittgenstein) that the contents being entertained by you as the contents of putative memories "don't stand in need of interpretation" stresses this privileged access. But this claim also coheres with the thesis what what you are entertaining isn't a representation of your childhood bedroom but rather is an act by yourself of representing it (and taking yourself to remember it) to be thus and so. And it is because, in some cases, you are representing it to yourself as looking, or visually appearing, thus and so that we speak of "images."
This anti-representationnalist account provides, I would suggest, an immediate response to you initial question regarding what it is that tags the remembered "image" that comes to mind as a (putative) memory rather than something merely imagined. The "image" only is a putative memory when it is an act by yourself of thinking about what you putatively knew, and haven't forgotten, about the visual features of your childhood bedroom. (Else, when you idly daydream about things that you don't clearly are remembering, you can wonder if the things you imagine have an etiology in older perceptual acts. But even when they do, that doesn't make them memories, or acts of remembering.)
This anti-representationnalist account, by the way, isn't non-phenomenological although it may clash with some internalist construals of Husserlian phenomenology. It is more in line with the embodied/situated/externalist phenomenology of thinkers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus, John Haugeland, Gregory McCulloch; and it also coheres well with J. J. Gibson's equally anti-representationnalist ecological approach to visual perception.
Yes, we are making similar arguments. I've read your excellent contributions and I apologise for not having replied to you yet due to time constraints. I'll likely comment later on.
This is fine. I don't think we're disagreeing. That's what I was trying to get at by talking about a "seeming image." All we can do is report what it seems like. Where does the representation come from? Is it somehow formed directly from a memory? Or is it constructed by myself and presented as an act of remembering? All good questions, but not, strictly speaking, questions we could answer based upon the experience itself. Unless . . .
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Here you're suggesting a way we might answer those questions about the origin of the representation, based only on how it presents to us. You're saying, I believe, that we should regard the identification of a putative or purported memory (which was my OP question) as a necessary outcome of the previous process of construction by myself. That previous process is required, on this view, in order for the purported memory to present as such. That is, if I hadn't "thought about what I putatively knew, and hadn't forgotten" etc., then the experience would not present as a purported memory. It would be more like the idle daydream, which lacks that clear ID as "memory."
That is quite ingenious and plausible. But it still leaves unanswered the question: By what feature or fact, if any, do I make this identification? Am I recognizing something about the process of constructing a representation? Or am I merely inferring it from the fact that the representation has presented as a purported memory?
I have to emphasize again how simple-minded my question really is! I just want to know how we're able to do it, in the moment. "How" as in "how am I able," not "how" as in "how (or why) does it happen."
In keeping with my view that remembering things just is the manifestation of our persisting in knowing them (that I owe to P. M. S. Hacker) I understand those cognitive states rather in line with Gareth Evans' notion of a dynamic thought. You can entertain the thought that tomorrow will be a sunny day, the next day think that the current day is a sunny day, and the next day think that "yesterday" was a sunny day. Your thinking thoughts expressible with various time indexicals ("tomorrow", "today" and "yesterday") as time passes enables you to keep track of a particular day and hence repeatedly entertain the same thought content about it as time passes. So, what makes a memory a memory is that the thought that you entertain (and that expresses of a state of knowledge, when it isn't a false memory) refers to a past event or state of affairs and that you haven't lost track of its temporal relation to yourself in the present. However, the obtaining of those conditions entails that what marks a memory as such (and distinguishes it from other forms of the same dynamic thought) is a constitutive part of its content since your ability to locate the thing remembered in time (even just roughly, as something past) is essential for identifying what it is that you are thinking about (i.e. for securing its reference).
Quoting Pierre-Normand
That is, the "past" indexical ("yesterday", etc.) presents with any purported memory. It is not only constitutive, but can be recognized to be so.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Again, this refers to the indexical -- that is what gives me the ability.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
The interesting move here is making "securing its reference" a synonym for "identifying what it is that you are thinking about." Consider two interpretations of "what it is": 1. my childhood bedroom; 2. a memory of my childhood bedroom. #2 requires the past indexical. But does #1? Under that description, perhaps so, but if I were in my childhood and merely looking at the bedroom, it gets a different indexical. Once again we're faced with a possible representation that is abstracted from any feature that marks it as a purported memory. The bedroom is atemporal -- it could even, granted precognition, be a vision of the future.
So . . . on this construal, the past indexical is essential for identifying "what it is that you are thinking about" if we interpret that as #2. I think you're saying that we can't fix the reference at all -- we can't represent "childhood bedroom" -- without the indexical. That would make the indexical essential for #1 as well.
I'm still mulling this over, but before I go further I should ask: Have I more or less understood you?