Maverick Philosopher

Remembering Bob Koepp

Robert V. Koepp, long-time commenter at this weblog, died on Leap Day, 2012.  Here is what I had to say about him in 2012.

A Mistake of Memory

Top o' the Stack.

Presentism questioned.

A Mistake of Memory

One mistake we sometimes make is to confuse a memory of a decision to do something with a memory of having done it. "I thought I did that! No, my man, you merely thought of doing it." 

One morning I wasted time searching for an article I had printed out the day before. But I was searching for a nonexistent object. I hadn't printed it out; I had merely resolved to do so. I confused resolve with result.

Memory, then, is fallible. But it is via memory that we know this. The non-veridical memory of having printed the document is known to be non-veridical by comparison with the veridical memory of having intended to print it. So while fallible, memory is a source of knowledge, and generally reliable, although its powers vary from person to person. 

Veridical memory  of wholly past events gives the lie to presentism, the view that the present alone exists. For if the present alone exists, then the wholly past does not exist. But what does not exist cannot be known. Given that some memories are veridical, presentism is false. 

"So what are you saying, man? That the past is real?"

False Memory

Yesterday I intended to print a document, loaded the paper tray, and then got sidetracked by a phone call.  I forgot about the print job. This morning I falsely remembered having printed the document and then wasted time searching for it. 

What philosophical juice might one squeeze from this lemon?

1) Not all memories could be false. If all memories were false, then one could not know, using memory, that some memories are false. But I do know, by memory, the truth that some memories are false. Therefore, it is not possible that all memories be false. 

2) If presentism is the view that only temporally present events exist, and that wholly past and wholly future events do not exist, then the above example shows that presentism thus defined cannot be true. For I now veridically remember yesterday's intention to print the document, yesterday's loading of the tray, and yesterday's phone call. These events occurred, and I now know they occurred; hence they cannot now be nothing.

Memory: Content and Affect

Substack latest.

Memory and Existence: An Aporetic Tetrad

Try this  foursome on for size:

1) Memory is a source of knowledge.

2) Whatever is known, exists.

3) Memory includes memory of wholly past individuals and events.

4) Whatever exists, is temporally present.

The limbs of the tetrad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  To appreciate the logical inconsistency, note that 'exists' in (2) and in (4) have exactly the same sense, and that this is not the present-tensed sense.  It is the tense-neutral and time-independent sense. Something that exists in this sense simply exists: it is one of the things listed in the ontological inventory.  Hence talk in the literature of existence simpliciter.  In both of its occurrences above, 'exists' means: existence simpliciter.

The limbs are individually plausible. But they are not equally plausible. (4) is the least plausible, and thus the most rejectable, i.e., the most rejection-worthy. Rejecting it, we arrive at an argument against presentism given that (4) is a version of presentism, which it is.

1*) Some of what is remembered is known.

2*) All that is known, exists.

Therefore

2.5) Some of what is remembered exists.

3*) All of what is remembered is wholly past.

Therefore

3.5) Some of what exists is wholly past.

Therefore 

~4*) It is not the case that whatever exists, is temporally present. (Presentism is false.)

Boethius and the Second Death of Oblivion: Ubi nunc fidelis ossa Fabricii manent?

We die twice. We pass out of life, and then we pass out of memory, the encairnment in oblivion more final than the encairnment in rocks. Boethius puts the following words into the mouth of Philosophia near the end of Book Two of the Consolations of Philosophy.

Where are Fabricius's bones, that honourable man? What now is Brutus or unbending Cato? Their fame survives in this: it has no more than a few slight letters shewing forth an empty name. We see their noble names engraved, and only know thereby that they are brought to naught. Ye lie then all unknown, and fame can give no knowledge of you. But if you think that life can be prolonged by the breath of mortal fame, yet when the slow time robs you of this too, then there awaits you but a second death.

And why are these engraved names empty? Not just because their referents have ceased to exist, and not just because a time will come when no one remembers them, but because no so-called proper name is proper. All are common in that no name can capture the haecceity of its referent. So not only will we pass out of life and out of memory; even in life and in memory our much vaunted individuality is ineffable, and, some will conclude, nothing at all.

"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." (Shakespeare, The Tempest.) 

Too Many Memories?

Are you bothered by too many memories? Live more actively and thoughtlessly! Enter the diaspora of mundane dis-traction. Lose yourself in the quotidian. Take the drug of busy-ness.

Not my way, but it could be yours.

Memory: Content and Affect

The trick is to retain the content so that one can rehearse it if one wishes, but without re-enacting the affect, unless one wishes.  Let me explain.

Suppose one recalls a long-past insult to oneself, and feels anger in the present as a result. The anger is followed by regret at not having responded in kind. (L'esprit de l'escalier.) And then perhaps there is disgust at oneself for having remained passive, for not having stood up to the aggressor and asserted oneself. This may be followed by annoyance with oneself for allowing these memorial affects  to arise one more time despite one's assiduous and protracted inner work. Finally, pessimism supervenes concerning the efficacy of attempts at self-improvement and mind control.  

Well, welcome to the human predicament.  Buck up, never give up. We are not here to slack off and have a good time. This world is preparatory and propadeutic if not penal. That is the right way to think of it. Live and strive. Leben und streben! Streben bis zum Sterben!  There is no guarantee that the "long, twilight struggle" will open out into  light.   For there are two twilights, one that leads to dawn, the other to dusk. But we live better if we believe in the advent of the first.

Judge your success not by how far you have to go, but how far you've come.

Inquire and aspire.  What Plato has Socrates say about inquiry (intellectual self-improvement) in response to Meno's Paradox is adaptable to aspiration (moral self-improvement).

And therefore we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of inquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. (Plato, Meno, 81a-81e)

Memory

Memory is the brake to time's onrush. Brakes sometimes fail. Do these metaphors fail too?

The Purgatory of Memory

Vexing memories are an earthly purgatory which the purgation of memory, if it could be achieved, would eliminate.

Memorial Relaxation

It is better to relax one's grip on the past than to let it go entirely.

Remembering Bob Koepp

Robert V. Koepp, long-time commenter at this weblog, died on Leap Day, 2012.  Here is what I had to say about him in 2012.

Memory Anchors

Journal entries can serve to anchor memories. Memories anchored are less likely to be embellished or suppressed. 

"I couldn't have done that!"

"But it says right here that you did, and you wrote it!"

One Reason the Present Matters

The present is the matter of future memories. So live that one's memories will not be regrets.

A Use for Ageing

Can I come to see myself as others see me? One way is by ageing: I become other than myself. The old man truly bent on self-knowledge can become as objective about his younger selves as he is about his contemporaries if he so desires. But he had better have an honest journal or diary at his disposal to verify his memories. 

Memory is notoriously deceptive and forgetful.

Victor Davis Hanson on Joan Baez and Abolitio Memoriae

In Our War Against Memory, Hanson writes (hyperlinks added),

How about progressive icon Joan Baez? Should the Sixties folksinger seek forgiveness from us for reviving her career in the early 1970s with the big money-making hit “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”— her version of The Band’s sympathetic ode to the tragedy of a defeated Confederacy, written over a century after the Civil War. (“Back with my wife in Tennessee / When one day she called to me / Said, “Virgil, quick, come see / There goes the Robert E. Lee!”) If a monument is to be wiped away, then surely a popular song must go, too.

[. . .]

The logical trajectory of tearing down the statue of a Confederate soldier will soon lead to the renaming of Yale, the erasing of Washington and Jefferson from our currency, and the de-Trotskyization of every mention of Planned Parenthood’s iconic Margaret Singer, the eugenicist whose racist views on abortion anticipated those of current liberal Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Ginsburg said, “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)

[. . .]

The strangest paradox in the current epidemic of abolitio memoriae is that our moral censors believe in ethical absolutism and claim enough superior virtue to apply it clumsily across the ages — without a clue that they fall short of their own moral pretensions, and that one day their own icons are as likely be stoned as the icons of others are now apt to be torn down by black-mask-wearing avengers.

A final paradox about killing the dead: Two millennia after Roman autocrats’ destruction of statues, and armed with the creepy 20th-century model of Fascists and Communists destroying the past, we, of a supposedly enlightened democracy, cannot even rewrite history by democratic means — local, state, and federal commission recommendations, referenda, or majority votes of elected representatives. More often, as moral cowards, we either rely on the mob or some sort of executive order enforced only in the dead of night.

Why Do We Remember the Dead?

One reason, the best reason, is to keep ourselves face-to-face with the reality of death.  To live well is to live in the truth, without evasion. Trans-humanist and cryonic fantasies aside,  death cannot be evaded.  We remember the dead, then, for our own spiritual benefit. 

Where they are, we will be.  And soon enough.  But people think they have plenty of time.  They fool themselves. Don't put off until the eleventh hour your preparation for death.  You may die at 10:30.

Another reason is because we owe the dead something: honor, remembrance, gratitude, care of their monuments, legacies and intentions. On Memorial Day and every day.

How Little They Remember

A man hereabouts with a passion for chess got my number. We've become friends. 

He told me he took a course in the philosophy of religion way back when.  I pressed him on details. All he remembers is the old professor walking into the room, flipping a switch, and intoning "Let there be light!"

The chess player's forgetfulness reminds me of a story.

An eager young nun and a wise old nun were discussing teaching. The young nun was waxing enthusiastic over the privilege, but also the responsibility, of forming young minds. The old nun took a glass of water, inserted her forefinger, and agitated the water. Suddenly she removed her finger and the water immediately returned to its quiescent state.

"So much for the forming of young minds," said the older and wiser one.

Related articles

Sam Harris and the Problem of Disagreement: Is Conversation Our Only Hope?

Philip Larkin's "Continuing to Live"

World's top female chess player resigns after 5 moves having repeatedly being made to play women

Time Balm

Time flattens the peaks of emotion and fills the valleys of despond.  Tormentors from the past are now shades pale and insubstantial, too weak to haunt.  Absence wins out over presence.  One needn't work at the purgation of memory: time does the work for us.

Why Do We Remember the Dead?

One reason, the best reason, is to keep ourselves face-to-face with the reality of death.  To live well is to live in the truth, without evasion. Transhumanist and cryonic fantasies aside,  death cannot be evaded.  We remember the dead, then, for our own spiritual benefit.  Where they are, we will be.  And soon enough.  But people think they have plenty of time.  Don't put off until the eleventh hour your preparation for death.  You may die at 10:30.

Another reason is because we owe the dead something: honor, remembrance, gratitude, care of their monuments, legacies and intentions.  But how can anything be owed to the no longer existent?

For a taste of some of the underlying puzzles, see Death as a Relational Harm?

Passing Strange

As dubious as are the fleeting items of this world, we yet cling to them.  We even cling to the claim checks of memory's lost baggage such as the faded photographs of forgotten friends.

Memory, Matter, Mind

Memory loss points to the materiality of mind while memory's exercise points to its immateriality.  Mind is mysterious, but memorial mind is even more so, situated as it is at the crossroads of intentionality and time.

The Straws of Memory

We grasp at the straws of memory to keep from being swept away by time's flood.

Memory and the Operations of Reason

"Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer, #651) 

This seems right.  Consider this quick little argument against scientism, the philosophical, not scientific, view that all knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge:

1. I know by reason alone, a priori, and not by any natural-scientific means, that addition has the associative and the commutative properties and that these properties are distinct.

2. If scientism is true, then  it is not the case that (1).

Therefore

3. Scientism is not true.

I grasp (understand) this argument and its validity by reason.  To grasp any such argument, it is not sufficient that a succession of conscious states transpire in my mental life.  For if the state represented by (1) falls into oblivion by the time I get to (2), and (2) by the time I get to (3), then all I would undergo would be  a succession of consciousnesses but not  the consciousness of succession.  But the consciousness of succession is necessary to 'take in' the argument.  And this consciousness of succession itself presupposes a kind of memory.  To grasp the conclusion as a conclusion -- and thus as following from the premises -- I have to have retained the premises. There has to be a diachronic unity of consciousness in which there is a sort of synopsis of the premises together with the conclusion with the former entailing the latter.

But of course something similar holds for each proposition in the argument.  The meaning of a compound proposition is built up out of the meanings of its propositional parts, and the meaning of a simple proposition is built up out of the meanings of its sub-propositional parts, and these meanings have to be retained as the discursive intellect runs through the propositions.  ('Discursive' from the L. currere, to run.)  This retention -- a term Husserl uses -- is a necessary condition of the possibility of understanding.

And so while I do not grasp an argument by memory (let alone by sense perception or introspection), memory is involved in rational knowledge.

The Pascalian aphorism bears up well under scrutiny.

Example of associativity of addition: (7 + 5) + 3 = 7 + (5 + 3).  Example of commutativity:  (7 + 5) + 3 = (5 + 7) + 3.  The difference between the two properties springs to the eye (of the mind).  Now what must mind be like if it is to be capable of a priori knowledge?  Presumably it can't just be a hunk of meat.

But if the below companion post is right, not even sense knowledge is such that its subject could be a hunk of meat.  We are of course meatheads.  But squeezing meaning out of mere meat -- there's the trick!

Companion post: Pascal on the Immateriality of the Subject of Experience  

Related articles

Rosenberg's Definition of Scientism and the Problem of Defining 'Scientism'

Steven Pinker on Scientism, Part One

Eric Voegelin's 1948 Definition of Scientism

Jerry Fodor's Idiosyncratic Understanding of 'Scientism'

Will We Even Be Forgotten?

Not only will we be forgotten, we will be forgotten by people who never really knew us in the first place.  So we will not even be forgotten.  You can't remember or forget a person you never knew.

The 'Floaters' of Memory

We should look past useless memories to present realities in the way we look past the floaters in our visual field.  To concentrate on the detritus of memory is only to enliven what ought to be left to slumber.

Memory, Memory Traces, and Causation

Passing a lady in the supermarket I catch a whiff of patchouli.  Her scent puts me in mind of hippy-trippy Pamela from the summer of '69.  An olfactory stimulus in the present causes a memory, also in the present, of an event long past, a tête-à-tête with a certain girl.  How ordinary, but how strange! Suddenly I am 'brought back' to the fantastic and far-off summer of '69.  Ah yes!  What is memory and how does it work?  How is it even possible? 

Let's start with the 'datanic' as I like to say:

1. There are (veridical) memories through which we gain epistemic access to the actual past, to events that really happened.  The above example is a case of episodic personal memory.  I remember an event in my personal past.  To be precise, I remember my having experienced an event in my personal past.  My having been born by Caesarean section is also an episode from my personal past, and I remember that that was my mode of exiting my mother's body; but I don't remember experiencing that transition.  So not every autobiographical memory is a personal episodic memory.  The latter is the only sort of memory I will be discussing in this post.  The sentence in boldface is the nonnegotiable starting point of our investigation. 

We now add a couple of more theoretical and less datanic propositions, ones which are not obvious, but are  plausible and accepted by many theorists:

2. Memory is a causal notion.  A mental image of a past event needn't be a memory of a past event.  So what makes a mental image of a past event a memory image?  Its causal history.  My present memory has a causal history that begins with the event in 1969 as I experienced it.

3. There is no action at a temporal distance.  There is no direct causation over a temporal gap.  There are no remote causes; every cause is a proximate cause.  A necessary ingredient of causation is spatiotemporal contiguity.  So while memory is a causal notion, my present memory of the '69 event is not directly caused by that event.  For how could an event that no longer exists directly cause, over a decades-long temporal gap, a memory event in the present?  That would seem to be something 'spooky,' a kind of magic. 

Each of these propositions lays strong claim to our acceptance.  But how can they all be true?  (1) and (2) taken together appear to entail the negation of (3).  How then can we accommodate them all?

Memory trace theories provide a means of accommodation.  Suppose there are memory traces or engrams engraved in some medium.  For materialists this medium will have to be the brain.  One way to think of a memory trace is as a brain modification that was caused at the time of the original experience, and that persists since that time.  So the encounter with Pam in '69 induced a change in my brain, left a trace there, a trace which has persisted since then.  When I passed the patchouli lady in the supermarket, the olfactory stimulus 'activated' the dormant memory trace.   This activation of the memory trace either is or causes the memory experience whose intentional object is the past event.  With the help of memory traces we get causation wthout action at a temporal distance. 

(Far out, man!)

The theory or theory-schema just outlined seems to allow us to uphold each of the above propositions. In particular, it seems to allow us to explain how a present memory of a past event can be caused by the past event without the past event having to jump the decades-long temporal gap between event remembered and memory.  The memory trace laid down in '69 by the original experience exists in the present and is activated in the present by the sensory stimulus.  Thus the temporal contiguity requirement is satisfied.  And if the medium in which the memory traces are stored is the brain or central nervous system, then the spatial contiguity requirement is also satisfied.

Question:  Could memory traces play merely causal roles?

Given (2) and (3), it seems that memory traces must be introduced as causal mediators between past and present.  But could they be just that?  Or must they also play a representational role?  Intuitively, it seems that nothing could be a memory trace unless it somehow represented the event of which it is a trace. If E isthe original experience, and T is E's trace, then it it seems we must say that T is of E in a two-fold sense corresponding to the difference between the subjective and objective genitive.  First, T is of E in that T is E's trace, the one that E caused. Second, T is of E in that T represents E. 

It seems obvious that a trace must represent.  In my example,the sensory stimulus (the whiff of patchouli) is not of or about the '69 event.  It merely activates the trace, rendering the dispositional occurrent.  But the memory is about the '69 event.  So the aboutness must reside in the trace.  The trace must represent the event that caused it  -- and no other past event.  The memory represents because the trace represents.  If the trace didn't represent anything, how could the memory -- which is merely the activation of the trace or an immediate causal consequence of the activation of the trace -- represent anything?  How a persisting brain modification -- however it is conceived, whether it is static or dynamic, whether localized or nonlocalized -- can represent anything is an important and vexing question but one I will discuss in a later post.

Right now I want to nail down the claim that memory traces cannot play a merely causal role, but must also bear the burden of representation.

Suppose a number of strangers visit me briefly.  I want to remember them,  but my power of memory is very weak and I know I will not remember them without the aid of some mnemonic device.  So I have my visitors leave calling cards.  They do so, except that they are all the same, and all blank (white).  These blank cards are their traces, one per visitor.   The visitors leave, but the cards remain behind as traces of their visit.  I store the cards in a drawer.  I 'activate' a card by pulling it out of storage and looking at it.  I am then reminded (at most) that I had a visitor, but not put in mind of any particular visitor such as Tom.  So even if the card in my hand was produced by Tom, that card is useless for the purpose of remembering Tom.  Likewise for every other card.  Each was produced by someone in particular and only by that person; but none of them 'bring back' any particular person. 

Bear in my mind that I don't directly remember any of my visitors.  My only memory access to them is via their traces, their calling cards.  For the visitors are long gone just like the '69 experience.  So the problem is not merely that I don't know which card is from which person; the problem is that I cannot even distinguish the persons.  

Had each visitor left a differently  colored card, that would not have helped.  Nor are matters helped if each visitor leaves a different sort of trace; a bottle cap, a spark plug, a lock of hair, a guitar pick.  Even if  Tom is a guitar player and leaves a guitar pick, that is unhelpful too  since I have no access to Tom except via his trace. 

So it doesn't matter whether my ten visitors leave ten tokens of the same type, or ten tokens each of a different type.  Either way I won't be able to remember them via the traces they leave behind.  Clearly, what I need from each visitor is an item that uniquely represents him or her -- as opposed to an item that is merely caused to be in my house by the visitor.  Suppose Tom left a unique guitar pick, the only one of its kind in existence.  That wouldn't help either since no inspection of that unique pick could reveal that it was of Tom rather than of Eric or Eric's cat.  Ditto if Tom has signed his card or his pick 'Tom Riff.'  That might be a phony name, or the name of him and his guitar -- doesn't B. B . King call his guitar 'Lucille'?

If I can remember that it was Tom who left the guitar pick, then of course I don't need the guitar pick to remember Tom by.  I simply remember Tom directly without the need for a trace.  On the other hand, if I do need a trace in order to remember long gone Tom, then that trace must have representational power: it cannot be merely something that plays a causal role. 

Traces theories have to avoid both circularity and vicious infinite regress.

Circularity.  To explain the phenomenon of memory, the trace theory posits the existence of memory traces.  But if the explanation in terms of traces ends up presupposing memory, then the theory is circular and worthless.  If what makes the guitar pick a trace of Tom is that I remember that Tom left it, then the explanation is circular.  Now consider the trace T in my brain which, when activated by stimulus S causes a memory M of past experience E.  M represents E because T represents E.  What makes T represent E? What makes the memory trace caused by the encounter with Pam in '69 represent Pam or my talking with her?  The answer cannot be that I remember the memory trace being caused by the encounter with Pam.  For that would be blatantly circular.  Besides, memory traces in the brain are not accessible to introspection.

Infinite Regress.  Our question is: what makes T represent E and nothing else?  To avoid circularity one might say this:  There is a trace T* which records the fact of E's production of T, and T represents E in virtue of T*.  But this leads to a  vicious infinite regress.   Suppose Sally leaves a photo of herself.  How do I know that the photo is of Sally and not of her sister Ally?  If you say that I directly remember Sally and thereby know that the photo is unambiguously of her, then you move in a circle.  You may as well just say that we remember directly and not via traces.  So, to hold onto the trace theory, one might say the following:  There is a photo of Sally and her photograph, side by side.  Inspection of  this photo reveals that that the first photo is of Sally.  But this leads to regress:  what makes the second photo a photo of the first?

Conclusion:  To avoid both circularity and infinite regress, memory traces must possess intrinsic representational power.  Their role cannot be merely causal.

A later post will then address the question whether memory traces could have intrinsic representational power.  If you are a regular reader of this blog you will be able to guess my answer.

REFERENCE:  John Heil, "Traces of Things Past," Philosophy of Science, vol. 45, no. 1 (March 1978), pp. 60-72.  My calling card example above is a reworking of Heil's tennis ball example.

 

Memory and Happiness

It is we who supply the blood that enlivens the spectral vampires that haunt us from our past.  A part of mind control is purgation of memory, and without mind control happiness is achieved with difficulty, if at all.