This thesis is intended to analyze a mental phenomenon widely neglected in current philosophical discussions: personal memories. The first part presents a general framework to better understand what personal memories are, how we access our personal past and what we access about our personal past. Chapter 1 introduces traditional theories of memory: direct realism and representationalism in their different versions, as well as some objections. I defend here a particular form of representationalism that is based (...) on the distinction between content, intentional object and ontological object. Chapter 2 explores the possible contents of our personal memories, which prove to be heterogeneous, whereas chapter 3 analyses their possible intentional objects, with a special focus on past events. The second part of the thesis explores an aspect of our personal memories that was omitted in the first part: the senses in which our personal past is apprehended as personal. Chapter 4 examines the way in which the “self” intervenes in the construction of our personal memories. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the analysis of what seems to be the most subjective aspect of our memories, that is, the emotions and feelings of our past experiences. In these last two chapters, I analyze the different interactions that can take place between memories and emotions and defend the idea that there can be emotional memories that are reducible neither to a propositional memory nor an occurrent and present emotion. The overall intention of this thesis is twofold. First, I aim to show to the philosophical community that there is still a lot to be said and discussed about memory as a mental phenomenon. And second, I intend to emphasize the importance of bringing into the philosophical discussions about the mind ideas coming from different philosophical traditions as well as ideas and empirical data coming from scientific research. (shrink)

When recalling events that one personally experienced, sometimes one sees oneself in the remembered scene: from an external, detached 'observer perspective'. In such cases one remembers from-the-outside. Remembering from-the-outside is a common yet curious case of personal memory. This book disentangles the puzzles posed by such memories.

How do our bodies influence who we are? Recent research in cognitive neuroscience has examined consciousness associated with the self and related multisensory processing of bodily signals, the so-called bodily self-consciousness. A parallel line of research has highlighted the concept of the autobiographical self and the associated autonoetic consciousness, which enables us to mentally travel in time. The subjective re-experiencing of past episodes is described as re-living them from within or outside one’s body. In this brief perspective, I aim to (...) explore the underlying characteristics of self-consciousness and its relation to bodily signals and episodic memory. I will outline some recent behavioral and neuroimaging evidence indicating that bodily cues play a fundamental role in autobiographical memory. Finally, I will discuss these emerging concepts regarding the current understanding of bodily-self, autobiographical-self, their links to self-consciousness, and suggest directions for future research. (shrink)

The article honors aspects of George Psathas’ life achievement. In particular, it describes his commitment to “Human Studies” and places his social phenomenological research work in dialogue with Alfred Schütz and Harold Garfinkel.

In 2017, Tom Gruber held a TED talk, in which he presented a vision of improving and enhancing humanity with AI technology. Specifically, Gruber suggested that an AI-improved personal memory (APM) would benefit people by improving their “mental gain”, making us more creative, improving our “social grace”, enabling us to do “science on our own data about what makes us feel good and stay healthy”, and, for people suffering from dementia, it “could make a difference between a life (...) of isolation and a life of dignity and connection”. -/- In this paper, Gruber’s idea will be critically assessed. Firstly, it will be argued that most of his pro-arguments for the APM are questionable. Secondly, the APM will also be criticized for other reasons, including the risks and affects to the users’ and other’s privacy and the users’ autonomy. (shrink)

Sometimes I remember my past experiences from an ‘observer’ perspective, seeing myself in the remembered scene. This paper analyses the distinction in personal memory between such external observer visuospatial perspectives and ‘field’ perspectives, in which I experience the remembered actions and events as from my original point of view. It argues that Richard Wollheim’s related distinction between centred and acentred memory fails to capture the key phenomena, and criticizes Wollheim’s reasons for doubting that observer ‘memories’ are genuine (...) personal memories. Since field perspectives in personal memory are also likely to be the product of constructive processes, we should reject the common assumption that such constructive processes inevitably bring distortion and error. Yet field perspectives tend to be treated as privileged also in the domains of memory for skilled movement, and memory for trauma. In each case, it is argued that visuospatial perspective in personal memory should be distinguished from other kinds of perspective such as kinesthetic perspective and emotional perspective. (shrink)

There has been a growing interest in research concerning memory modification technologies (MMTs) in recent years. Neuroscientists and psychologists are beginning to explore the prospect of controllable and intentional modification of human memory. One of the technologies with the greatest potential to this end is optogenetics—an invasive neuromodulation technique involving the use of light to control the activity of individual brain cells. It has recently shown the potential to modify specific long-term memories in animal models in ways not (...) yet possible with other MMTs. As the therapeutic potential of optogenetics has already prompted approval of the first human trials, it is especially important and timely to consider the opportunities and dangers this technology may entail. In this article, we focus on possible consequences of optogenetics as an MMT by analyzing fundamental threats potentially associated with memory modifications: the potential disruption of personality and authenticity. (shrink)

What does it take for a subject to experience a personal memory as being her own? According to Fernández’ (2019) model of endorsement, this particular phenomenal quality of our memories, their “sense of mineness”, can be explained in terms of the experience of the mnemonic content as veridical. In this article, I criticize this model for two reasons: (a) the evidence that is used by Fernández to ground his theoretical proposal is dubious; and more importantly, (b) the endorsement (...) model does not accommodate many non-pathological everyday memories that preserve their sense of mineness, but whose veridicality is explicitly denied, suspected, not automatically endorsed, or neither denied nor endorsed. Finally, I sketch two alternative explanations: one also problematic, the other one more promising, and present some normative advantages of the latter. This also displays the undesirability of the endorsement model from a normative perspective. (shrink)

(1999). A Singular and Representative Life: Personal Memory and Systematic Harms. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 29, Supplementary Volume 25: Civilization and Oppression, pp. 227-257.

There has been a growing interest in research concerning memory modification technologies (MMTs) in recent years. Neuroscientists and psychologists are beginning to explore the prospect of controllable and intentional modification of human memory. One of the technologies with the greatest potential to this end is optogenetics—an invasive neuromodulation technique involving the use of light to control the activity of individual brain cells. It has recently shown the potential to modify specific long-term memories in animal models in ways not (...) yet possible with other MMTs. As the therapeutic potential of optogenetics has already prompted approval of the first human trials, it is especially important and timely to consider the opportunities and dangers this technology may entail. In this article, we focus on possible consequences of optogenetics as an MMT by analyzing fundamental threats potentially associated with memory modifications: the potential disruption of personality and authenticity. (shrink)

Memory of past episodes provides a sense of personal identity — the sense that I am the same person as someone in the past. We present a neurological case study of a patient who has accurate memories of scenes from his past, but for whom the memories lack the sense of mineness. On the basis of this case study, we propose that the sense of identity derives from two components, one delivering the content of the memory and (...) the other generating the sense of mineness. We argue that this new model of the sense of identity has implications for debates about quasi-memory. In addition, articulating the components of the sense of identity promises to bear on the extent to which this sense of identity provides evidence of personal identity. (shrink)

Lockean views of personal identity maintain that we are essentially persons who persist diachronically by virtue of being psychologically continuous with our former selves. In this article, I present a novel objection to this variant of psychological accounts, which is based on neurophysiological characteristics of the brain. While the mental states that constitute said psychological continuity reside in the cerebral hemispheres, so that for the former to persist only the upper brain must remain intact, being conscious additionally requires that (...) a structure originating in the brainstem—the ascending reticular activating system—be functional. Hence, there can be situations in which even small brainstem lesions render individuals irreversibly comatose and thus forever preclude access to their mental states, while the neural correlates of the states themselves are retained. In these situations, Lockeans are forced to regard as fulfilled their criterion of diachronic persistence since psychological continuity, as they construe it, is not disrupted. Deeming an entity that is never again going to have any mental experiences to be a person, however, is an untenable position for a psychological account to adopt. In their current form, Lockean views of personal identity are therefore incompatible with human neurophysiology. (shrink)

Despite the popularity that the embodied cognition thesis has gained in recent years, explicit memories of events personally experienced are still conceived as disembodied mental representations. It seems that we can consciously remember our personal past through sensory imagery, through concepts, propositions and language, but not through the body. In this article, I defend the idea that the body constitutes a genuine means of representing past personal experiences. For this purpose, I focus on the analysis of bodily movements (...) associated with the retrieval of a personal memory, which have certain features that make them different from procedural memories, pragmatic actions and common gestures, as well as other forms of embodied memories found in recent literature. I refer to these as “kinetic memories” and analyse their representative nature as well as their adaptive functions. Kinetic memories are bodily movements in which some event or action that took place in the past can be seen, because they are an externalisation of the subject’s inner intention of representing a past personal experience. Kinetic memories represent a past experience sometimes by imitation of a past movement, and other times through embodied symbols and metaphors. Furthermore, although sometimes they present direct pragmatic benefits, such as communicative benefits, they seem to enhance the whole reexperience of the past event and memory recall, which I argue is one important adaptive value. (shrink)

I want to reflect on some functions of memory and their relations to traditional issues about personal identity. I try to elicit ways in which having memory, with its presupposition of agent identity over time, is integral to being a person, indeed to having a representational mind.

Locke is often thought to have introduced the topic of personal identity into philosophy when, in the second edition of theEssay,he distinguished the person from both the human being and the soul. Each of these entities differs from the others with respect to their identity conditions, and so they must be ontologically distinct. In particular, Locke claimed, a person cannot survive total memory loss, although a human being or a soul can.

This paper explores William Ockham's account of memory with a view to understanding its implications for his account of the nature and persistence of human beings. I show that Ockham holds a view according to which memory (i) is a type of self-knowledge and (ii) entails the existence of an enduring psychological subject. This is significant when taken in conjunction with his account of the afterlife. For, Ockham holds that during the interim state—namely, after bodily death, but prior (...) to bodily resurrection—we retain and recall our embodied experiences. This entails that the subject of our embodied psychological states can survive in a disembodied state and continue to engage in characteristic rational activities—a claim that appears to run against Ockham's own commitment to a hylomorphic conception of human beings (as essentially material). A central aim of this paper is to explore the prospects for reconciling Ockham's account of interim memory with his account of human beings. (shrink)

Michael Haneke's film Hidden ( Caché, 2005) raises questions about responsibility and guilt in the context of post-colonial inequities that are profoundly discomfiting for the viewer, framing a meditation on identity, consciousness and responsibility that is at once visceral and intellectual. On the reading presented here, this film makes visible and palpable some of the effects of the ' strange suppositions' about personal responsibility and memory that were first articulated by a philosopher who also felt called upon to (...) justify colonialism: John Locke. The perspective provided by the film casts light both on the unpleasant emotional resonances of Locke's theory of personal identity and points to the likely source of its structure in his celebrated theory of private property. (shrink)

What is it to remember an episode from one’s past? How does episodic memory give us knowledge of the personal past? What explains the emergence of the apparently uniquely human ability to relive the past? Drawing on current research on mental time travel, this book proposes an integrated set of answers to these questions, arguing that remembering is a matter of simulating past episodes, that we can identify metacognitive mechanisms enabling episodic simulation to meet standards of reliability sufficient (...) for knowledge, and that the subjective experience of reliving the past is a precondition for the reliability of simulational remembering. The resulting account of memory, memory knowledge, and their evolution will be of interest both to philosophers interested in empirically-informed approaches to memory and to psychologists interested in the philosophical implications of empirical memory research. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of extended and distributed cognition theory for our notions of personal identity. On an extended and distributed approach to cognition, external information is under certain conditions constitutive of memory. On a narrative approach to personal identity, autobiographical memory is constitutive of our diachronic self. In this paper, I bring these two approaches together and argue that external information can be constitutive of one’s autobiographical memory and thus also of one’s diachronic (...) self. To develop this claim, I draw on recent empirical work in human-computer interaction, looking at lifelogging technologies in both healthcare and everyday contexts. I argue that personal identity can neither be reduced to psychological structures instantiated by the brain nor by biological structures instantiated by the organism, but should be seen as an environmentally-distributed and relational construct. In other words, the complex web of cognitive relations we develop and maintain with other people and technological artifacts partly determines our self. This view has conceptual, methodological, and normative implications: we should broaden our concepts of the self as to include social and artifactual structures, focus on external memory systems in the (empirical) study of personal identity, and not interfere with people’s distributed minds and selves. (shrink)

Stanley Klein and Shaun Nichols describe the case of patient R.B., whose memories lacked the sense of “mineness” usually conveyed by memory. Klein and Nichols take R.B.’s case to show that the sense of mineness is merely a contingent feature of memory, which they see as raising two problems for memory-based accounts of personal identity. First, they see it as potentially undermining the appeal of memory-based accounts. Second, they take it to show that the conception (...) of quasi-memory that underpins many memory-based accounts is inadequate. I argue that Klein and Nichols’ characterization of R.B.’s experience is implausible; as a result, the problems that they describe for memory-based accounts of personal identity do not arise. (shrink)

The book delves into mathematical mindsets, a current approach to understanding mathematical identities, as well as success and failure in mathematics.

Brian Garrett constructs cases satisfying Andy Hamilton’s definition of weak q‐memory. This does not establish that a peculiar kind of memory is at least conceptually coherent. Any ‘apparent memory experiences’ that satisfy the definition turn out not to involve remembering anything at all. This conclusion follows if we accept, as both Hamilton and Garrett do, a variety of first‐person authority according to which memory judgements may be false, but not on the ground that someone other than (...) the remembering subject had the remembered experience. Garrett’s brain‐bisection illustration sounds convincing, but only because we retain the idea that the subjects created by implanting a hemisphere each in two different bodies are entitled to say that they remember experiences before the surgery in the ordinary sense. To that extent the illustration presents a case of ordinary memory, not q‐memory. (shrink)

Here the distinguished philosopher Ian Hacking uses the MPD epidemic and its links with the contemporary concept of child abuse to scrutinize today's moral...

Memory is a complex phenomenon, so the loss of memory that occurs in dementia is equally complex. Accounts that deny personhood to dementia sufferers typically fail to accommodate that complexity.

The recent emergence of reprogramming technologies to convert brain cell types or epigenetically alter neurons and neural progenitors in vivo and in situ hold significant promises in brain repair and neuronal aging reversal. However, given the significant epigenetic and transcriptomic changes to components of the existing neuronal cells and network, we question if these reprogramming technology might inadvertently alter or erase memory engrams, conceivably resulting in changes in narrative identity or personality. We suggest that the nature of these alterations (...) might be less predictable compared to memory and personality changes known to be associated with diseases, drugs or brain stimulation therapies. While research in applying reprogramming technologies to neurological ailments and aging should continue, more targeted analyses should be put in place in animal experiments to gauge the severity and degree of memory alterations, and appropriate risk and benefit analyses should be conducted before these technologies move into human trials. (shrink)

For nearly two decades, ethicists have expressed concerns that the further development and use of memory modification technologies (MMTs)—techniques allowing to intentionally and selectively alter memories—may threaten the very foundations of who we are, our personal identity, and thus pose a threat to our well-being, or even undermine our “humaneness.” This paper examines the potential ramifications of memory-modifying interventions such as changing the valence of targeted memories and selective deactivation of a particular memory as these interventions (...) appear to be at the same time potentially both most promising clinically as well as menacing to identity. However, unlike previous works discussing the potential consequences of MMTs, this article analyzes them in the context of the narrative relational approach to personal identity and potential issues related to autonomy. I argue that such a perspective brings to light the ethical aspects and moral issues arising from the use of MMTs that have been hidden from previously adopted approaches. In particular, this perspective demonstrates how important the social context in which an individual lives is for the ethical evaluation of a given memory-modifying intervention. I conclude by suggesting that undertaking memory modifications without taking into account the social dimension of a person’s life creates the risk that she will not be able to meet one of the basic human needs—the autonomous construction and maintenance of personal identity. Based on this conclusion, I offer some reflections on the permissibility and advisability of MMTs and what these considerations suggest for the future. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophical writings on personal identity have taken the form of attempts to discover the dominant criterion for deciding when a person at one time is identical with a person at some other time. Among the candidates for the role of dominant criterion have been bodily continuity and memory . In the normal case, where a person P is identical with a person P′ at an earlier time, it is true that P and P′ share a continuous body, (...) that P can remember experiences of P′, and that many other relationships hold between P and P′. Consequently, the debate as to which of the normal criteria is the dominant one has usually taken the form of imagining strange cases in which one or more of the normal criteria are lacking, and attempting to say, in such cases, who is identical with who. The scene was set, at least for modern times, by Locke's prince/pauper example, in which, according to Locke, the ability to remember experiences of a person having a different body guarantees, nevertheless, that one is that person—and hence that the memory criterion is dominant over the bodily identity one. (shrink)