This post is by Chris McCarroll (pictured above), who has just finished his PhD under the supervision of John Sutton at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University. Here he summarises a paper currently in progress entitled 'Constructing and Reconstructing Observer Perspectives in Personal Memory'.
In a previous
post I discussed a puzzling aspect of memory imagery: when remembering events from one’s life one often sees the remembered scene as one originally experienced it, from one’s original point of view (field perspective). Sometimes, however, one sees oneself in the memory, as if one were an observer of the remembered scene (observer perspective). Memory imagery often involves visual points of view.
Here, I summarise a recent paper I gave on this topic at the
Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, held at Macquarie University. My paper was entitled ‘Constructing and Reconstructing Observer Perspectives in Personal Memory’.
I outline two related arguments against observer perspective memories: the argument from perceptual impossibility and the argument from perceptual preservation. On these ways of thinking, there simply cannot be genuine personal or episodic memories in which one adopts an observer perspective.
According to the argument from perceptual impossibility, given that one did not (indeed cannot) see oneself from-the-outside at the time of the original experience, one cannot have a memory in which one sees oneself from-the-outside: one cannot recall from an observer perspective. Further, even if one grants that it is unrealistic to think that memory perfectly preserves past perceptions, the argument from perceptual preservation states that nothing can be added to the content of genuine memory: forgetting is a natural aspect of memory and content may be lost, but genuine memory will involve no additional content other than that available at the time of encoding. Observer perspectives are said to involve an additional representation of the self and hence cannot be genuine memories.
Most people who recall an event from an observer perspective simply take themselves to be remembering. But if one takes oneself to be remembering, and one is accurately representing some past event in all aspects other than occupying the original point of view, what motivates the claim that such representations are not genuine memories? The answer seems to lie in the idea that memory should preserve the content of perception. In perception one sees an event unfold from a particular point of view. Therefore memory, involving reproductions of perception, should be recalled from the same point of view as one had on the original scene. In other words, genuine memories should be recalled from a field perspective.