Consciousness and Memory: A Transactional Approach

Essays in Philosophy ISSN 1526-0569 | Essays in Philosophy is published by the Pacific University Libraries Volume 19, Issue 2 (2018) Consciousness and Memory: A Transactional Approach Carlos Montemayor San Francisco State University Abstract The prevailing view about our memory skills is that they serve a complex epistemic function. I shall call this the “monistic view.” Instead of a monistic, exclusively epistemic approach, I propose a transactional view. On this approach, autobiographical memory is irreducible to the epistemic functions of episodic memory because of its essentially moral and empathic character. I argue that this transactional view provides a more plausible and integral account of memory capacities in humans, based on theoretical and empirical reasons. Memory, on this account, plays two distinctive roles. The episodic memory system satisfies epistemic needs and is valuable because it is a source of justification for beliefs about the past. Autobiographical memory satisfies moral and narrative-autonoetic needs, and is valuable because it is a source of personally meaningful and insightful experiences about our past. Unlike autobiographical memory, episodic memory is only weakly autonoetic. The relation between these two roles of memory is captured by the tension between a narrative and an accurate report. Essays Philos (2018)19:2 | DOI: 10.7710/1526-0569.1612 Correspondence: © 2018 Montemayor. This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Essays in Philosophy Volume19, Issue 2 1. Introduction Nelson Goodman described a tension between the cognitive functions of reporting and narrating.1 The cognitive function of reporting is best understood as epistemic. Its purpose is to provide reliable information about events. A report, if accurate, can be used as evidence. The cognitive function of narrating a story is different. Its main purpose is not necessarily to provide accurate information, but rather to make events cohere in an insightful manner. “Insightful” here is best understood in terms of moral or aesthetic relevance. The narrative must rank events in an order of importance that is not epistemic—a ranking of events from the most valuable and consequential to the more peripheral—independently of their being accurate or fictitious. Memories of an event (e.g., the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, or the drowsy experience produced by intense sunlight as one stands on a beach) may vary in degrees of accuracy but preserve the event’s value and significance. Generally, the truth of a description concerning an event, even if satisfies the highest epistemic standards, is not relevant to its narrative significance. What truly matters for narrative value are the essential insights one can draw from the event. Frequently, by turning a narrative into a mere report we lose its insightfulness. Likewise, by turning a report into an interesting narrative we lose some of its accuracy and strictly epistemic value. Although Goodman did not apply this analysis to memory, I argue that this tension between reporting and narrating is crucial for understanding how human memory capacities work. This is a natural extension of Goodman’s distinction. Reports and narratives are the subject matter of history, and it is a notorious difficulty to interpret the narrative relevance of accurate documents or even of entire archives. The task of the historian can be understood in terms of the creation of collective memories that identify critical events as the most momentous and valuable ones, thereby establishing a ranking of all accurate events. This ranking of events must emphasize why something that occurred—and which was witnessed by reliable historical figures—matters for the integration of a larger narrative that humans should care about. Presumably, the origin of the two distinctive cognitive functions of reporting and narrating is the way in which human memory works. An analysis of this distinction in the context of human memory, I propose, yields important new insights that can help explain findings in psychology. This distinction, I shall argue, also has broader implications for the nature of conscious experience. 1 Nelson Goodman, “Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony,” In On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Michell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 99–115. 2 | eP1612 Essays in Philosophy Montemayor | Consciousness and Memory One view of the content of a narrative is that all of its cognitive aspects ultimately depend upon the degree of accuracy of the events it describes. This reductive view, which collapses the narrative elements into descriptive ones, is implausible in general. For instance, the moral insights of fictional tales are extremely powerful, and a substantial part of their potency lies largely in being independent from the contingencies of concrete facts. Cultures around the world teach about their moral values through this type of fictional narrative, even though the events described in the stories are intentionally allegorical. Similar considerations apply to literature. The tension between description and narration finds interesting limit points in genres such as biographies, autobiographies, and journalism. If one considers aesthetic value, instead of moral value, the reductive view is even more implausible. The aesthetic value of a painting (e.g., a landscape or a portrait) in no way depends on the accuracy of the depiction. If we want to analyze the moral and aesthetic dimensions of narrative, we must adopt a nonreductive view, according to which narrative value is not reducible to descriptive accuracy. Although giving a full account of moral and aesthetic value is a complex matter that I cannot pursue here in detail, it suffices for our purposes to understand Goodman’s distinction in terms of the irreducibility of the ranking of events or experiences, in terms of their narrative value, to their accuracy. With respect to memory, however, the reductive approach is quite plausible and, in fact, it is the prevailing view. The reductive approach correlates with the view of memory that I shall call “monistic,” and the nonreductive view corresponds to the transactional view defended in this paper. The monistic view states that memory is “personal” by virtue of the reliable information provided by episodic memory about events in our past, which we use to reliably plan for the future. On this view, episodic memory is what allows us to have autobiographical narratives. The alternative view I defend here, the “transactional view,” proposes the irreducibility of a personal narrative to mere informational access and accuracy. It is “transactional” because the epistemic and narrative functions of memory constantly interact with each other in order to balance accuracy and narrative trade-offs. Briefly stated, the challenge presented here against the (...truncated)