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ABSTRACT
We offer a framework for assessing what the structure of episodic memory might be, if one accepts a Buddhist denial of persisting or even momentary selves. Our paper is a response to Jonardon Ganeri's [Citation2018] ‘Mental Time Travel and Attention’, and we focus on his exploration of Buddhaghosa's ideas about memory. In particular, we distinguish between memory perspectives on the past and memory relations that may or may not be successfully borne to the past. We also critically examine 3 ways of trying to cash out what is distinctive about episodic memory: (1) episodic memory as mental time travel, (2) episodic memory as reliving of the past, and (3) episodic memory as reflective attention to the past.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
* Many thanks to Monima Chadha, Marvin Chun, Aaron Glasser, Parimal Patil, Antonia Peacocke, Cat Prueitt, Evan Thompson, and Jonardon Ganeri for comments and discussion, and to Aaron Glasser for research assistance.
1 One could also semantically remember falsehoods.
2 For a contrasting attempt to assimilate episodic to semantic memory see Barclay [Citation1994].
3 Some mental phenomena combine procedural and semantic memories, such as when one recognises something or someone one has seen before. If you know what avocados look like, you are skilled at identifying the avocados at the produce stand, but you presumably also know some facts about what visible features avocados have, such as their typical shapes, size, and textures. For discussion of this phenomenon, see McGrath [Citation2017].
4 On extramission theories, see Hatfield [Citation2002].
5 Some approaches to perception attempts to analyse some perceptual perspectives in terms of perceptual relations. A related idea is that there are perceptual perspectives one has when dreaming or hallucinating that cannot be analysed in terms of perceptual relations. For an overview, see Soteriou [Citation2016].
6 Are perceptual relations essentially perceptual perspectives? On one interpretation, at the end of Perky's [Citation1910] experiment in which the subjects start out looking at a blank screen and imagining an object (such as a tomato) and end up seeing a picture of a tomato that is gradually projected onto the screen, these subjects combine a perceptual relation (to a picture) with a non-perceptual imaginative perspective, by perceiving (a picture of) a tomato while seeming merely to imagine one.
7 For discussion (sometimes critical) of how to analyse psychological continuity, see Shoemaker [Citation1984] or chapters 1 and 2 of Olson [Citation1997]. For discussion in particular of causal continuity, see section 2 of Chadha [Citation2014].
8 We're grateful to Jonardon Ganeri for pointing us to these passages.
9 In principle one could deny persisting selves while affirming persisting faculties, but this combination of commitments would need a special defence to show why the factors that supposedly rule out persisting selves allow for persisting faculties, such as the mind-door.
10 For further discussion of how memory might work if there is no self at a time, see Ganeri [Citation2018: 362–5] on Vasubandhu, also Chadha [Citation2014].
11 Could the passing thought of an episode count as an episodic memory, if the episode seemed merely possible (perhaps appealing or aversive) but didn't seem to the subject to be something occurred in the past—even though it actually did occur in the past? For a classic example in which a painter remembers a scene without believing that he remembers the scene, and instead believes that he only imagines the scene, see Martin and Deutscher [Citation1966: 167–8]. Martin and Deutscher however do not speak directly to whether the scene is presented as past by the painter's memory itself.
But suppose SMonday walked on the beach, STuesday vividly entertained a scenario of walking on the beach, complete with the perspectival aspects of SMonday’s experience, and due in part to that experience, but without marking the scenario as something that occurred in the past. Here, some aspects of the memory relation connect Tuesday's mental state to Monday's walk, without the typical memory perspective. We won't count this scenario as an episodic memory, because we want to ask how the ‘pastness’ of an experience might figure in the structure of the memory perspective. We therefore focus exclusively on memory perspectives that present a remembered episode as having occurred in the past, so that we may see in what way Buddhaghosa's theory, according to Ganeri, might account for this aspect of paradigmatic episodic memories.
12 On one interpretation, Evans [Citation1982] argues that this last option is incoherent. Even by his lights, something nearby might be coherent. By contrast with paradigmatic memories, some mythical crystal balls work this way: you gaze into the ball and see that someone walked on the beach last Monday, without any presumption that it was you, or someone in any way continuous with you. Perhaps if the experience of looking into the crystal ball were combined with a belief that the person who walked on the beach was continuous with the crystal-ball gazer, where the belief was based on testimony, then the resulting combination could be a hybrid of episodic and semantic memory. This kind of case falls into a large grey area surrounding the category of episodic memory.
In contrast to both paradigmatic memories and the crystal ball hybrid, if a mental state presented an episode (such as walking into a shrine) as past, and was committed to the discontinuity between that past experience and the rememberer, then arguably that mental state would not be a memory perspective.
13 Wheeler, Stuss, and Tulving [Citation1997: 331] write: ‘One of the most fascinating achievements of the human mind is the ability to mentally travel through time. It is somehow possible for a person to relive experiences by thinking back to previous situations and happenings in the past’.
14 Buddhaghosa does not explicitly say that you can continue to feel your present uncomfortable bed while thinking back to your past comfortable bed, but we take it to be overwhelmingly plausible that you can remember a past episode while still experiencing a present trigger of your memory.
15 In Burge's [Citation2013: 155–60] taxonomy of episodic memory and self-representation, he also cites Freud [Citation1899] on the field/observer distinction. For some scepticism about the distinction, see Vendler [Citation1984] or Wollheim [Citation1984], with a response in Sutton [Citation2010].
16 E.g., the title of Michaelian's [Citation2016] book defending a simulationist theory of episodic memory is Mental Time Travel.
17 Imaginative simulation can also occur without memory of any kind, and perhaps imaginative simulation without memory is the paradigm of such simulation. Our point is that memory of experience types can occur simultaneously with imaginative simulation.
18 Ganeri [Citation2017: ch. 4] discusses this passage.
19 Here we have in mind the following passage of Buddhaghosa (quoted by Ganeri [Citation2018: 358] (emphasis ours): And when he has made use of special food of the various kinds, sharing it out with his companions in the Life Divine, then at another time, wherever he gets a meal of beans, as soon as he adverts ‘At that time I made use of special food of the various kinds sharing out with my companions in the Life Divine’ it is as if that flavour as object comes into focus as tasted. This is how a flavour as object comes into focus as tasted. And when he makes use of a bed or chair or a coverlet or robe that has a pleasant touch, then at another time wherever he makes his bed in discomfort, as soon as he adverts ‘At that time I used a soft bed and chair’ it is as if that tangible datum as object (phoṭṭhabhārārammaṇa) comes comes into focus as touched.
20 A recent view that construes memory as a special case of this kind of imagination is developed by De Brigard [Citation2014].
21 Once one tries to account for distorted memories, answers become more complex. The complexities we're setting aside include the possibilities that an episodic memory can inherit the misperceptions in the remembered experiences, producing a correct memory of an incorrect experience.
22 For discussions of whether it really is possible to attend to a perceptual experience, and if so how, see Kind [Citation2003] and Stoljar [Citation2004]. As their discussion brings out, in principle one might attend to one's past perceptual experiences by attending to past entities experienced, in a reversal of the direction we discuss in the main text. We won't pursue the option further though.
23 For clear evidence that Chun actually does allow for reflective attention and perceptual attention to have the same objects, see Chun and Johnson [Citation2011: 522–3].
24 For an overview of the debate, see Wu [Citation2014]. For some classic papers in the debate, see Noe [Citation2002].
25 For a classic example of such a view, see Wolfe [Citation1999].
26 De Brigard [Citation2012] argues that you presently remember x only if you internally attend to x.
27 See Gurwitsch [Citation1964], Jennings [Citation2015], and Watzl [Citation2017] for extended analyses of the idea that attention structures perceptual experience. We discuss attention and the epistemology of perception in Siegel and Silins [Citation2014, Citationforthcoming].
28 For some philosophical overviews on constructive views of memory, see Michaelian [Citation2013], Frise [Citation2017], or Salvaggio [forthcoming].
29 There might be another way for Buddhaghosa to explain the emergence of suffering from attachment, consistently with a theory of memory devoid of any sense of persisting self in the memory perspective. Perhaps attachment to a supposedly persisting self arises downstream of memory, for instance in interpretations of it. On that picture, the error would be located in responses to the memory perspective, rather than belonging to the memory perspective itself. Thanks to Cat Prueitt and Parimal Patil for discussion of this point.