Philosophers of Memory

450 BC Parmenides. Italy. That which we experience as a memory of the past, must be in present existence when we experience it. A recollection occurs now. What is experienced as recollection is not exactly the same as what was initially expereinced in the past. A memory is a type of description or re-enactment of a past experience. This entire analysis is centered on subjectively experiences memory, which raises the question, when in the course of history did the idea of unconscious memories arise? Did the ancient philosophers distinguish between implicit (or proceedural) and explicit (subjectively experienced) memories? (See Russell, page 51-52)

400 BC Plato. Athens. Deep into dualism.....perception vs. reason as sources of knowledge and perception vs. memory (See Russell, page 151-52). As we saw above, even prelitarate people distinguished between mental activities like memory and thought. Like a modern digital computer with Von Neuman architecture, it is natural to think of our own minds as containing a memory store and a separate processor that can produce thought by being able to manipulate what is stored in memory. Plato divided the process of thought into four parts: object, perception, conceptualization, and Form.

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The Platonic Memory Model: "Imagine that there exists in the mind of man a block of wax, which is of different sizes in different men; harder, moister and having more or less purity in one than another... and that when we with to remember anything which we have seen or heard, or thought in our own minds, we hold the wax to the perception and thoughts, and in that material received the impression of them as from the seal of a ring; and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced or cannot be taken then we forget and do not know."

"Imagine, again, there exists in the mind of man an aviary of all sorts of birds - some flocking together apart from the rest, others in small groups, others solitary flying anywhere and everywhere. When reaching into this aviary to grasp a particular bird, I may emerge with the wrong one such that when I thought eleven to be twelve I got hold of the ring-dove which I had in my mind, when I wanted the pigeon."

It seems natural for us to now distinguish the object, its perception, the raw and unconscious qualia that produce a primary and implicit P consciousness (Ned Block) from conceptualizations, meaningfullness, and rationalized and explicit A-consciousness. Reaching this point has been slow. When we look at the reality of the brain, be see even greater complexity, a series of mechanisms bridging from the quick and crude unconscious to the slow and refined conscious. Does Art and philsophy "percieve" such a reality bofore or after science makes it explicit? Or is it a long-drawn out process of both of these interacting in order to ititeratively reach the correct conclusion? Certainly in the case of the brain, there has been a long period of blundering around before the required tools for a science of mind were found.

Aristotle. Athens. Attempt to find a compatabilistic compromise between Plato and materialistic monism. Substance dualism: soul as a special functional substance that vitalizes living things.

Democritus or best atomist for coverage of mind.

220 AD Plotonius. Rome. Idea of the perfection of the soul as involving a process by which the soul loses memory of wordly experience and becomes only concerned with pure, abstract(?) thoughts. (See Russell, page 292) Relate to "channeling" and access to "memorie of past lives" and Freudiam ideas: access of childhood "repressed memories, etc.

1725 AD Berkeley. Representative of modern philosophers debating the role of experience in the production of knowledge. Perception producing Memory which is then availabl in thought as a source of knowledge. (See Russell, page 656) Focus on ideas, not physical mechanisms (Jones, 893)

1750 AD Hume. Distictions discussed between memory and imagination in terms of degees of vividness of the thoughts. Hume's argument against the Absolute Truth of empiracle knowledge. (See Russell, page 661)

1818 AD Schopenhaer. Germany. Process by which brains construct our view of external reality is mostly an unconscious response to sensory organ activity that leads us to only be aware of what is seen, not the process by which we see. According to Jones, page 893, Schopenhaer is similar to Berkeley, but more complex. Recognized that although we are only conscious of the ideas produced by the brain, there IS a real physical basis to thought that we are not aware of.A definition of knowledge in terms of that which we can (infer?) about physical reality from our imperfect subjective experiences. What we share with non-human animals in terms of mental capacities is more important than that which is unique to man. "man's reason is more of a liability than an asset" (Jones 894). Spontaneous insights come first (example, Newton's idea of gravity) then the rational mind can express the idea in a formal way (equation). Much concerned with all the error introduced by rational thought. Tried to find a place for philosophy between the purity of "intuition" for reality and the problems caused by mistaken rationality. Focus seems to have been on aplying a type of austere logical analysis as a selection process that will aid our understanding of intuition without introducing the common errors of rationality. If all truth arises from unconscious, then that needs to be properly nurtured and protected form the too often crude desctuctiveness of rational thought. This is an escape from the Platonic view that supposes that it is our conscious rational thoughts that can contact Reality and make it known while the senses and (usually ignored unconscious brain activity) is only a source of error (world of objects in imperfect, world of pure reason can access Ideal Forms and perfect truth).

Wow. Again, like Wittgenstein, struggling with selectionistic ideas independent of understanding the concept of selection.

1950 AD Wittgenstein. In Hallet, page 640, cites Shoopenhaur as source of Wttgenstein's ideas on evolutionof metal capacities. "what the eye is in space and for sensuous knowledge, reason is, to a certain extent, in time and for inner knowledge. Role of complexity in conscious experience, evolved complexity!

"The False Prison" by David Pears provides us with an interesting metaphor for the human condition. A visual metaphor for the false prison is the Klein Bottle, a bottle that at first looks like it has an inside, but upon closer examination we find that even though the bottle is closed (has a continuous, unbroken surface), the inside is continuous with the outside.
A Godelian Strange Loop, if you consciously recognize the importance of the unconscious brain activities which support and can subvert conscious brain activity, then you escape ideas of the infalability of rationality and look towards the need for a careful selective process by which what is correct in unconsciously produced ideas is pure and correct and need only be made explicit in conscious thought without perverting it.

Can we interpret Wittgenstein as the pioneer in "subjective science", a move within philosophy away from the methods of scientific objectification of knowledge, understanding, and theorizing and a return to "philosophical, or we might say, direct objectification from the Solipsistic perspective which recognizes all of human knowledge as originating in personal experience. Development of an epistemology that can return better balance to philosophy by emphasizing the subjective part of human experience that we experience as SELF rather than the "virtual reality" part of human experience which we mentally accept as our awareness of the external world. In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein tried to play the game of philosophy-as-objective-science; he tried to levitate the complexity of human language and thought right out of the human body and into the rarified domain of abstract theory and formal systems. After failing to do so, Wittgenstein then decided to create a new way of doing philosophy "from inside" human experience.

Owen Flanagon