Abstract
In this paper I discuss philosophical and psychological treatments of the question “how do we decide that an occurrent mental state is a memory and not, say a thought or imagination?” This issue has proven notoriously difficult to resolve, with most proposed indices, criteria and heuristics failing to achieve consensus. Part of the difficulty, I argue, is that the indices and analytic solutions thus far offered seldom have been situated within a well-specified theory of memory function. As I hope to show, when such an approach is adopted, not only does a new, functionally-grounded answer emerge; we also gain insight into the adaptive significance of the process proposed to underwrite our belief in the memorial status of a mental state (i.e., autonoetic awareness).
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Notes
The view that memory is reconstructive characterizes “academic” psychological research, not psychological research in general. Among clinicians and neuroscientists memory is just as likely to be taken as a stable transcription of events as they originally transpired. Despite (a) Freud’s realization that what initially he believed were patients’ “true” recollections actually were fantasies (e.g., Schimek 1987), and (b), that after nearly a century (e.g., Penfield 1952), neuroscience finally appears ready to entertain the possibility that memory may not constitute a fixed transcription of the past (e.g., Schiller et al. 2010), the belief that recollection is underwritten by verdicial records still is the norm among these two disciplines.
Interestingly, in antiquity memory was not taken to be a stable record of the past (e.g., Rubin 1995). It only was with the advent of transcription technology (e.g., writing, printing, cameras, tape recorders, computers, and so on) that the metaphor of permanence became part of our conception of the nature of memory (for discussion see Danziger 2008).
The expanded temporality of the specious present represents time as moving toward the future as well as receding into the past (e.g., Husserl 1964; James 1890). On this basis, one might be concerned that I arbitrarily have chosen to focus on the future aspect of the specious present while ignoring its equally salient past aspect.
Two considerations inform my temporal focus. First, the principles of evolutionary functionality discussed earlier (see also Klein 2013b) argue that memory is shaped by selective pressures to deal with the oncoming contingencies, and thus oriented toward the future. In addition, the 2nd law of thermodynamics entails that physical laws are not symmetric to reversal of time’s direction. Put simply, there is an “arrow of time” and it points in the direction of the future. Thus while past and future both are constituents of the specious present, the future aspect is accorded a privileged position in virtue of its relation to the law of cause and effect, entropy, etc.
In short, the contingent necessities of life as well as physical laws support my contention that the temporally relevant direction for a behaving organism (and hence for memory) is the future, not the past.
A discussion of relation between future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) and episodic memory would take us far afield. However, a few remarks will be helpful.
Despite clear theoretical argument and empirical demonstration that the future-oriented aspect of episodic memory is not the sole memory-based contributor to future-oriented temporal projection (e.g., Atance and O’Neill 2001; Klein et al. 2002), until recently FMTT research has been almost exclusively focused on the episodic aspects of FMTT. Only in the past few years have the contributions of semantic memory (as well as those of other cognitive mechanisms – e.g., Suddendorf et al. 2009) been recognized as critical aspects of future-oriented thought (for recent reviews, see Klein 2013c; Schacter 2012).
Accordingly, there is no reason to suppose that episodic memory bears a special relation to future-oriented cognition. Even when projective acts are self-referential (as opposed to impersonal imaginations about the state of the future), it now is known that patients lacking complete access to episodic memory can perform imaginative acts that entail the involvement of self in a future scenario (a recent summary of relevant data can be found in Klein 2013a, c).
What is special about episodic memory is that it alone among systems of memory is capable of directly presenting its owner the feeling that she or he is re-experiencing events from his or her past (more on this in Section 5). For remainder of this paper I will be concerned with this unique property of episodic memory. A more detailed treatment of the arguments for autonoetic functionality presented in this paper and their comparison with arguments of adaptive functionality that trade on the presumption of autonetic contributions to planning will be the subject of a forthcoming paper I am working on in conjunction with Endel Tulving.
There has been recent movement to incorporate the future-orientation of memory into the mainstream research agenda (e.g., work on adaptive memory; for review see Nairine 2010, and future-oriented mental time travel; for reviews see Klein 2013a; Schacter 2012). These new approaches, however, remain exceptions to the received view that memory primarily is about the past.
Note: It is very important to keep in mind that episodic recollection is a subset (albeit a salient one) of the activities associated with episodic memory. The recollective act reunites the individual with his or her past. Other functions of episodic memory (e.g., foresight, simulation, self-projection) have a decidedly future orientation (for recent reviews see Addis and Schacter 2012; Klein 2013a). However, these functions are not unique to episodic memory. The recollective act, by contrast, is.
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Klein, S.B. Autonoesis and Belief in a Personal Past: An Evolutionary Theory of Episodic Memory Indices. Rev.Phil.Psych. 5, 427–447 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0181-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0181-8