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The Involvement of Our Identity in Experiential Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Ingmar Persson*
Affiliation:
Filosofiska lnstitutionen, Lunds Universitet, Kungshuset, S-222 22 Lund, Sweden

Extract

On many accounts, the criterion of our diachronic identity or persistence consists in or comprises some psychological conditions. As on Locke's account, these conditions often include one's appealing to the relation of remembering having an experience of. Contemporary theorists are unlikely to claim simply that a necessary condition for Pm at tm being the same person as Pn at a later time, tn, is that Pn remembers having experiences had by Pm at tm. They are more likely to appeal, as does Derek Parfit, to a ‘continuity of memory’ or ‘overlapping chains’ of memories, that is, to assert that Pn must at least remember having experiences had by somebody, Pn-1, existing at some time in-between tm and tn, that Pn-1 in turn must remember having experiences had by somebody Pn-2 … and so on back to Pm.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1997

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References

1 See An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Nidditch, P.H. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), Bk. II, ch. 27Google Scholar.

2 Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984), 205

3 See his Of Personal Identity,’ reprinted in, e.g., Perry, John ed., Personal Identity (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press 1975).Google Scholar

4 ‘Personhood and Personal Identity,’ The Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990) 71-92

5 Personal Identity (London & New York: Routledge 1989), ch. 8

6 The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1982) ch. 7

7 For a classic attempt to do so, see Martin, C. B. and Deutscher, MaxRemembering,The Philosophical Review 75 (1966) 161–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I outline my view below, in footnote 15.

8 Cf. Shoemaker's, SydneyM-type causal chain’ in ‘Persons and Their Past,American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970) 269–85, at 278.Google Scholar

9 Cf. Shoemaker, 271, and Parfit, sec. 80.

10 Shoemaker, 280ff.

11 An exception is the type of theory defended by Lewis, DavidSurvival and Identity’ in Rorty, Amelie ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press 1976)Google Scholar and by Noonan, chs. 7, 9 & 11.

12 Parfit, 220

13 It is an adaptation because Parfit speaks of a ‘copying’ of the memory traces.

14 Cf. Wilkes, Kathleen V. Real People (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1988), esp. 39-40 and 45-6.Google Scholar

15 To give an example of a causal requirement that would fit my argument: our concept of memory encapsulates a notion of an intrinsically unspecified state (whose nature neuro-science will probably specify eventually; hence, the ‘neural neutrality’) that is known (a) by enabling us to have memory-experiences (which, I think, intrinsically are like imaginings), and (b) by being caused by some subject having a corresponding experience (typically, but not necessarily, the two subjects are identical; hence, the possibility of quasi-memory). To remember an experience is to imagine having the experience as an actualization of a state having this origin. H so, it would require an identity of underpinning state (which is hardly fulfilled in tele-transportation cases; so the neural neutrality need not be bought at the price of an extreme laxity).

16 Note that Schechtman's argument falls short of establishing the general claim that experiential memory presupposes identity by her bracketing simple visual memories of the kind exemplified in Parfit's Venetian case (Schechtman, 81). It is also astonishing that she does not discuss the serious threat that fission cases pose to her claims.

17 Thus, remembering having E should not be confused with a piece of factual memory, remembering that E occurred which does not entail that E is remembered as had ‘from the inside.'

18 Parfit, 221-2

19 For the difference between these ways of identification, see Shoemaker, e.g., 283.

20 (London & New York: Routledge 1991), vol. 2, 285. Cf. also Persson, Ingmar The Primacy of Perception (Lund: Gleerup 1985), ch. 4 sect. 5.Google Scholar

21 Ayers, 285

22 This uniqueness is the reason for an ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ noticed by Evans, consisting in that if, on the basis of this perception one knows that some body instantiates some (physical) predicate, one knows that that body is one's own(ch. 7).

23 Ayers, 285. Contrast Evans's claim: ‘what we are aware of, when we know that we see a tree, is nothing but a tree’ (231). But, surely, when we see a tree, we see it in some spatial relation to ourselves, and are aware of this. In my opinion, this sits much better with what Evans says about our perceptual knowledge of our own location inch. 7 sect. 3.

24 Ayers, vol. 1,187

25 Noonan, 184

26 Contrast Johnston, Mark who characterizes experiential memory as ‘something whose internal phenomenology makes it seem like a faculty suited to picking up only mental connections between earlier and later mental states’ (‘Human Beings,’ The Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987) 5983, at 77)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I do not understand what he means by ‘picking up’ here. In remembering (myself) having E at t, I normally do not remember any mental connections between my having E at t and my present experience, though in virtue of me having this memory, there is such a connection.

27 Note that these judgments are non-inferential; so, saying that in identifying subjects we apply a bodily criterion is not to say that these identifications are inferred from evidence about bodies, but that they are tantamount to judgments about bodily identity. When Shoemaker denies that such identifications are made ‘on the basis of bodily criteria’ — see his Personal Identity: A Materialist's Account,Shoemaker, Sydney and Swinburne, Richard Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell 1984), 103Google Scholar — I think he uses criteria in another sense in which it is something that is epistemically prior.

28 To use Evans's expression (245), though he would not assent to the argument of this section.

29 See his Identity, Consciousness and Value (New York: Oxford University Press 1990), ch.4.

30 For a development of this idea, see my paper ‘Our Identity and the Separability of Persons and Organisms’ (forthcoming).

31 I am most grateful to Raymond Martin and Derek Parfit for valuable comments.