The truth about memory.
Schechtman, Marya
ABSTRACT Contemporary philosophical discussion of personal identity has centered on refinements and defenses of the “psychological continuity theory”–the view that identity is created by the links between present and past provided by autobiographical experience memories. This view is structured in such a way that these memories must be seen as providing simple connections between two discrete, well-defined moments of consciousness. There is, however, a great deal of evidence–both introspective and empirical–that autobiographical memory often does not provide such links, but instead summarizes and condenses life experiences into. a coherent narrative. A brief exploration of some of the mechanisms of this summarizing and condensing work furthers the philosophical discussion of personal identity by showing why a view with the structure of the psychological continuity theory will not work, and by illuminating the role of autobiographical memory in the constitution of personal identity.
John Locke is famously taken to be the founder of the memory theory of personal identity; the view, roughly put, that someone in the present is the same person as someone in the past if and only if the present person remembers (or can remember) the experiences of the past person. Something in this view has seemed very right, and it has had tremendous staying power. This Lockean insight has found expression most recently in the “psychological continuity theories” offered by, e.g., Sydney Shoemaker (1984), Derek Parfit (1984), and John Perry (1975).
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These views, which are based on Locke’s, have enjoyed a great deal of success, and although philosophical accounts which define identity in terms of psychological features are by no means universally accepted, the amount of sway they have held demonstrates that there is something deeply compelling in what Locke says.
Strangely enough, however, for all of the defense and criticism of memory-based theories in the philosophical literature, there has been little explicit discussion of some of the most fundamental questions about memory–the nature of its content and the relation of that content to the content of the experiences remembered. Nor has there been much discussion of memory’s specific role in the constitution of personal identity. Analysis of identity has more or less stopped at the fact that it is constituted by memory, and we are left with no account of why memory connections are so important. The failure to explicitly discuss the nature and role of memory has allowed contemporary psychological continuity theorists to presuppose implicitly an oversimplified and problematic view of memory, which is inaccurate to many actual memories and fails to include the very aspects of memory most relevant to personal identity.
In what follows I shall argue that memory as it actually occurs is much more complicated than the structure of psychological continuity theories allows, and that when its complexity is appreciated, the nature of the relation between memory and personal identity will become clearer. I start with a brief discussion of psychological continuity theories, arguing that their basic structure commits them to viewing memory as a simple connection between discrete moments of consciousness. I then consider facts of common knowledge and results in empirical psychology which show that this picture is inaccurate to many of our actual memories. Next I outline an alternative picture of memory, which, I suggest, can help explain the intuitive appeal of memory-based theories of personal identity in a way that psychological continuity theorists cannot.
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... from thinking. In order to perfect personal identity there needs to be continuity of consciousness, memory and rational life (Dabbs, 2001: ... is needed to retain personal identity is some link of continuity" (Sparknotes, 2005: 1) In conclusion, Locke distinguishes between 'same man' ... not only flow from one psychological state to another, but also continuity of content. Locke would believe it to be ...
I. Psychological continuity theories
In the second edition of his Essay Goncerning Human Understanding, John Locke seeks to find “wherein personal identity consists” (Locke, 1964, p. 39).
He concludes that this identity cannot consist in sameness of immaterial soul, nor of material substance, but that “as far as … consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person” (Locke, 1694, p. 39).
This claim is almost universally read as the first presentation of the memory theory, holding that what makes someone in the present the same person as someone in the past is that the former person remembers experiences of the latter.
Contemporary psychological continuity theorists start with the same goal as Locke, seeking to find what personal identity “necessarily involves, or consists in” (Parfit, 1984, p. 203).
Convinced of the basic solidity of Locke’s insight, they too are determined to offer views according to which identity is constituted not by sameness of substance, but by sameness of psychological features. These theorists share the standard reading of Locke as a memory theorist (Sydney Shoemaker, for instance, tells us that “it is by no means uncontroversial exactly what Locke means by [the claim that identity extends as far as consciousness]. But it is clear that ‘consciousness’ for Locke includes memory, and that it is primarily memory he has in mind when he speaks of consciousness in his discussion of personal identity” (Shoemaker, 1984, p. 77)).
This memory theory is thus taken as the basis upon which psychological continuity theorists build their own modern and more sophisticated views of personal identity (e.g. Derek Parfit: “Locke suggested that experience-memory provides the criterion of personal identity. Though this is not, on its own, a plausible view, I believe that it can be part of such a view. I shall therefore try to answer Locke’s critics” (Parfit, 1984, p. 205)).
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Psychological continuity theorists thus start with Locke’s somewhat vague claim about the identity of a person extending as far as consciousness extends, and place it into a contemporary framework, generating explicitly-stated criteria of personal identity. To begin with, these theorists borrow their picture of what an answer to the question of personal identity should look like from more general metaphysical identity questions. It should, on this conception, be a criterion which gives the necessary and sufficient conditions for saying that a time-slice of an object at time t2 is a slice of the same object as a time-slice of an object at t2. Their idea is that the fact of the persistence of an object should be defined in more basic terms which do not presuppose a persistent object. The object is thus to be broken down into atomic units, and its continued existence analyzed in terms of connections between those units.
This method is employed in questions of personal identity by first recasting Locke’s memory view into a modern idiom, stating it as the view that a person-time-slice at t2 is a part of the same person as a person-time-slice at t1 just in case the former contains a state which is a memory of an experience had by the latter (see for instance Grice, 1975; Lewis, 1976; Shoemaker, 1984).
This basic view is then modified and strengthened in a variety of ways. To respond to charges of circularity, contemporary theorists require not memory connections themselves, but “apparent memory appropriately caused”. To respond to transitivity problems with the memory view originally raised by Thomas Reid (Reid, 1785), identity is taken to be created not only by these memory-like connections, but by their ancestral relation as well. In the interest of generally increasing plausibility, other connections (e.g. those which hold between an intention and the action which carries it out, or between the different temporal parts of a persistent belief, value, desire, or other psychological feature) are added to memory, yielding a more general psychological account of identity.
The developments of the Lockean view overviewed above can be quite complex, and different understandings of how they are to be undertaken have yielded different versions of the psychological continuity theory. For our purposes here, however, it is not important to understand all of this in depth. What is important, is to have a sense of the basic format of the views these changes have yielded. To gain such a sense, I offer Derek Parfit’s version of the psychological continuity theory as an example of the contemporary views which have been based on Locke’s memory theory.
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Parfit begins his statement of the psychological continuity theory with some preliminary definitions. The first is the idea of “direct connections”, which are connections of the following sort: that between a memory and the experience of which it is a memory, that between an intention and the later act in which it is carried out, and the persistence of a belief, desire, or other psychological feature (Parfit, 1984, p. 206).
Parfit goes on to define a second relation: “Psychological connectedness is the holding of particular direct psychological connections” (Parfit, 1984, p. 206).
He then says that,
… we can claim that there is enough connectedness [for personal identity] if the number of connections over any day, is at least half the number of direct connections that hold over every day, in the lives of nearly every actual person. When there are enough direct connections, there is what I call strong connectedness. (Parfit, 1984, p. 206)
He thus takes, as the criterion of personal identity over time,
The Psychological Criterion: (1) There is psychological continuity if and only if there are overlapping chains of strong connectedness. X today is one and the same person as Y at some past time if and only if (2) X is psychologically continuous with Y, (3) this continuity has the right kind of cause, and (4) there does not exist a different person who is psychologically continuous with Y. (5) Personal identity over time just consists in the holding of facts like (2) to (4).
(Parfit, 1984, p. 207)
Although there are many different versions of the psychological criterion, this one can be taken as perfectly representative in the respects relevant to our discussion.
What I wish to focus on initially is the form of this criterion. Psychological continuity theorists have started with the intuition that psychological continuity, preserved through memory connections, must be present for the persistence of a person. Hoping to provide a reductionist analysis of personal identity, these theorists thus seek to define psychological continuity in terms of relations between atomic moments of the lives of persons. The relations must thus be seen as simple, countable, discrete relations between moments of consciousness. Memory-connections are one of the primary connections underlying personal identity on this view, and so the psychological continuity theory presupposes that there is some simple, recognizable connection–“memory of”–which holds between momentary states of consciousness. We must be able to look at the contents of a person’s consciousness at t2 and determine whether it does or does not contain a state which is a memory of an experience at t1, and so on this view memory must be the sort of thing which can provide a straightforward, discernable, countable connection between two person-time-slices.
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In what follows, I shall show that there is a great deal of introspective and scientific evidence that many of our memories are not such simple connections. Even a very brief consideration of the role of memory will make this point obvious. I believe that it has been overlooked because the history of philosophy provides a picture of memory which fits this structure nicely–the “storehouse” concept, arguably held by Plato, Augustine, Hobbes, Hume, and Locke himself, to name just a few. On this view, memory is seen as a sort of warehouse in which our ideas and experiences are laid away for later retrieval in their original form. Using this picture of memory it is easy to understand the sort of counting the psychological continuity theory calls for; if a person at time t2 has in her “storehouse” an image or reproduction of an experience at t1, then she has one psychological connection to the person at t1.
With the storehouse picture of memory in the background, the sorts of connections called for by psychological continuity theorists seem quite natural. This view of memory, however, has many well-known difficulties, and is widely discredited as a general account of how memory operates. Psychological continuity theorists do not themselves claim to hold a storehouse picture of memory, and I am not sure that it is entirely fair to attribute it to them, although I do think it is behind many of their assertions about memory. It is, however, fair to say they are committed to a view which is like the storehouse view in at least one respect, that it sees memory as a straightforward link between a present moment and a single, well-defined past experience. It is this presupposition, I shall argue, which is both inaccurate to actual memory and which prevents psychological continuity theories from capturing the full intuitive appeal of the Lockean insight. I turn first to a consideration of the inaccuracies.
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II. Memory as we have it
It is first of all important to be clear on the type of memory under discussion. We have many different sorts of memory, and many different taxonomies possible for the memories we have. They can be described as episodic, semantic, long-term, short-term, and so on. Psychological continuity theories of personal identity are based in particular on our memories “from the inside” of our own past actions or experiences–autobiographical experience memory. Even this category of memory is not monolithic, however. Some autobiographical memories do present themselves as simple reproductions of past experiences, and these memories fit nicely into the structure of psychological continuity theories. A few moment’s introspection, however, will show that many autobiographical memories do not take this form. We have memories of periods of our lives, ways we used to feel or act, or things we used to believe. I can remember that my childhood was happy, or that for a long time I used to go to bed early, or that I was lonely in high school. I can remember that I used to have more energy, or less patience, or that my life used to be simpler; I can remember mama. Although such memories may include memories of particular experiences, they also may not, and their relation to the past is much more complicated than simple reproduction.
Recent work in empirical psychology has tended to confirm these observations of introspection, supporting the claim that we do much more in memory than simply storing and retrieving events. For one thing, we often summarize information about our pasts, remembering simply that we engaged in certain sorts of activities, or had certain sorts of experiences. For instance: I may remember that when I first moved to the city I used to go out to eat often; that for a while I was doing a lot of cooking; that there was a stretch of time when I was always traveling, that when I was depressed I used to go to the movies all the time to cheer myself up, and so on. Furthermore, I can have these sorts of memories without remembering in detail any particular instance of what is remembered, or remembering some instances distinctly, some vaguely, and some not at all.
It has been found, furthermore, that this type of remembering is quite common, and central to our memory of our own pasts. Lawrence Barsalou conducted a study in which students on the Emory campus were stopped at the beginning of the fall semester and asked what they had done over the summer. More specifically, they were asked to list all the events they could remember from their summer vacations. The findings were surprising. Barsalou reports:
We originally believed that the primary content of autobiographical memory was supposed to be memories of specific events. Yet subjects, when asked to describe “events” from their summer vacation, spent only 21% of their time recalling specific events.
We were sufficiently troubled by this outcome that we ran another version of the study in which we pointedly tried to elicit only specific events from subjects. In the instructions, subjects were told about the difference between specific and summarized events and were repeatedly asked only to recall specific events. In addition, if a subject did anything but retrieve specific events during this recall, the experimenter stopped the interview and reminded the subject to describe only specific events. We found that even under these conditions subjects had difficulty recalling only specific events. Subjects often retrieved other kinds of information and frequently had to be stopped. This new procedure seemed to disturb subjects’ normal mode of recalling the past. The retrieval of summarized and extended events, along with other kinds of information, appears to play an important role in accessing information about periods of one’s life. (Barsalou, 1988, p. 201)
The findings were similar with “cued” memory studies, where subjects were told what sorts of events to remember. Barsalou concludes,
On the basis of these two studies, it is obvious that autobiographical memories are not exclusively memories of specific events. In fact, the most common kind of information retrieved by subjects in both studies concerned summarized events. Whereas summarized events comprised around 60% of the cued-recall protocols, specific events comprised only around 40%. Whereas summarized events comprised 32% of the free-recall protocols, specific events comprised only 21%. In addition, the free-recall protocols contained several other kinds of information, including extended events [single events lasting longer than a day], alternative events [events that did not take place in the summer, were alternative to what actually occurred, or might occur in the future] and comments about aspects of events. (Barsalou, 1988, p. 203)
Memories of particular experiences are thus only one of the kinds of autobiographical memories we have, and do not even seem to be the most common.
It is not easy to see, however, how these summarized-event memories can be fit into the structure of psychological continuity theories; they are not simple, countable connections between two well-defined moments of consciousness. Take, for instance, a subject who reports that he remembers going to the movies several times over the past summer, but can remember the details of no one specific instance. Shall we say that in this case there is a memory-connection between the subject remembering and the subject who viewed some particular movie? And if so is there a connection between the person remembering and the person who saw each movie? Are there ten memory connections if the subject saw ten movies and only five if he saw five? And is this true even if he does not remember how many movies he saw, or remembers one or two distinctly and then remembers only that there were more? A single memory can be, and often is, linked to various disconnected stretches of the subject’s life, and when it is it provides a more general sort of connection to the past than that involved in the reproduction of some one particular event.
Summarized-event memories do not even seem to provide a simple connection between two well-defined moments of consciousness, and so they present one of the clearest difficulties for views with the structure of psychological continuity theories. There is evidence, however, that even those memories which do seem to provide such connections may not always do so. In memory we often condense experiences, presenting to ourselves a fictitious event or experience which is a composite of the essential features of a series of real ones.
In many instances it is possible to catch oneself in such condensing by focusing carefully on the chronology presented in certain memories–the overlap of people and events–and comparing it to external checks. A few examples will make the phenomenon I have in mind here clearer. Remembering my first year of college, for instance, I remember a variety of parties and social outings which, on reflection, I know could not have happened as I remember them. The collection of people I recall being gathered together could not have been at the time I remember, because I did not even meet some of them until later. A similar condensing effect occurs in remembering conversations at professional conferences. In a year where I went to a great many conferences, I was fortunate enough to have helpful conversations with different colleagues at each one. Unless I make an effort to sort things out, however, I tend to remember all of the most important and memorable conversations as taking place at one conference, and the conference in which they are placed is one which is itself memorable because of significant life events which occurred around the same time.
In these cases it is possible to know that some sort of condensing work has occurred, and that the occurrent memory is not entirely accurate to the events remembered, by checking external sources. In most cases we will not feel the need to attend to such checks. We may thus condense a great deal more than we know, and finding and using external checks frequently bears out the suspicion that this is quite a prevalent phenomenon. An interesting and informative example is given by Ulric Neisser (1981) in his case study of John Dean’s memory. Dean’s memory, as you will recall, was one of the many remarkable features of the Watergate hearings. In his testimony Dean was able to recall prior meetings with the president in astonishing detail, giving almost verbatim accounts of conversations had much earlier. Later, however, the infamous Watergate Tapes were discovered, including tapes of the meetings about which Dean testified. These provided the opportunity to compare the transcript detailing Dean’s memories of those conversations with the conversations themselves.
Neisser took advantage of this opportunity and discovered that Dean’s testimony was frequently wrong in just those cases where he expressed the greatest confidence. The interesting result of this comparison is found in Neisser’s emphasis on the ways in which Dean was right in his erroneous recollection. Dean’s testimony was often grossly inaccurate to the details of the conversations about which he testified, but not in any way which could be to his advantage. The testimony’s relation to the conversation gives no reason to believe that Dean was being insincere. Instead, it suggests that he represented the important and relevant information about his conversations with Nixon in a more condensed form. Neisser explains that Dean’s testimony,
… had much truth in it, but not at the level of ‘gist.’ It was true at a deeper level. Nixon was the kind of man Dean described, he had the knowledge Dean attributed to him, there was a cover-up. Dean remembered all of that; he just didn’t recall the actual conversation he was testifying about. (Neisser, 1981, p. 151)
Dean condensed the knowledge he had acquired over a long series of meetings, and presented himself in memory with a fictionalized conversation which contained the most salient points of that knowledge. As Neisser describes it: “In memory experiments, subjects often recall the gist of a sentence but express it in different words. Dean’s consistency was deeper; he recalled the theme of a whole series of conversations and expressed it in different events” (Neisser, 1981, p. 159).
These fictitious events were created in part by condensing and collapsing the features of different conversations or of instances of rehearsed or repeated statements or episodes into a single remembered incident. Neisser concludes that Dean
… is not alone in making this mistake. I believe that this aspect of Dean’s testimony illustrates a very common process. The single clear memories that we recollect so vividly actually stand for something else; they are “screen memories” a little like those Freud discussed long ago. Often their real basis is a set of repeated experiences, a sequence of related events that the single recollection merely typifies or represents. We are like the subjects of Posner and Keele (1970), who forgot the individual dot patterns of a series but “remembered” the prototypical pattern they had never seen. (Neisser, 1981, p. 158)
This condensing work is thus also a prevalent part of ordinary autobiographical memory.
Condensed memories, like summarized-event memories, present a difficulty for psychological continuity theories. They, too, connect the moment of remembering to several other moments of a person’s life in an extremely complex way and thus make the requirement of “counting” the number of connections of similarity between discrete moments of consciousness deeply problematic. These memories remind us of the immense complexity of the relation “memory of”. To apply the criterion offered in psychological continuity theories, we are supposed to look at two moments of consciousness and determine whether one contains a memory of the other. But how much similarity must there be between the two moments in order for the one to count as a memory of the other? How much of the content of the experience must be reproduced and how accurately? How many portions of the past is the present connected to in a condensed memory, and how is this determined? These are not easy questions to answer, nor are they questions that psychological continuity theorists address. Once again, however, we can see that the format of psychological criteria is not natural to our memories as they actually occur.
Summarizing and condensing are just two of the ways in which we process autobiographical memory. There are undoubtedly many others, and there are undoubtedly memories which are not processed at all. I do not wish to dwell any longer on the fact of such processing, because I take it to be a relatively uncontroversial claim that it occurs in at least some of our memories. As Neisser says, “We are hardly surprised to find that memory is constructive or that confident witnesses may be wrong. William Stem studied the psychology of testimony at the turn of the century and warned us not to trust memory under oath; Bartlett was doing experiments on “constructive” memory fifty years ago” (Neisser, 1981, p. 157).
What is more important for our purposes is the more controversial question of the rules according to which this processing takes place, and this is the question to which I now turn.
III. Memory and the construction of a past
We can gain a certain amount of insight into how our memories are processed by considering why they are processed. It should be clear that as a cognitive strategy, the more general, summarizing and condensing memories described in the last section make good sense. We have a great many experiences, and receive an overwhelming amount of information about our own lives–too much information to be of much use without some sort of processing. If memory is to provide us with a useful source of knowledge about our own histories, we will need to condense the information we receive. It makes sense, therefore, that in autobiographical memory the information about our lives that is constantly coming in should be reconstructed as a more concise and comprehensible narrative which emphasizes the most significant factors of past experiences and depicts general and longstanding patterns or activities with representative examples.
Our knowledge of what we have done is, however, at the same time knowledge of who we are and what we are like. Memory of what we have done and felt and experienced is one of the most important sources of self-knowledge we have. If, therefore, we wish to glean useful information about ourselves from what we know about our pasts, it will again be necessary to process and interpret the information we take in. My suggestion is that our need for usable self-knowledge is part of what determines the way we process experience in autobiographical memory. The goal of making sense of the unfolding of our lives–of writing our own biographies–would require that we interpret and reconstruct our experiences to create a coherent life history. Anomalous events may thus be recast, representative ones emphasized, and other changes undertaken to make one’s past more smooth and comprehensible.
There is a growing body of empirical evidence supporting the view that we do process our memories in this way. Craig Barclay and Peggy DeCooke, for instance, conducted an experiment in which subjects were asked to keep a journal recording events and experiences in their day to day lives. Later these subjects were called upon to pick out their memories in a recognition test, distinguishing between their own experiences and various types of foil memories added by the experimenters. Barclay and DeCooke found that subjects were quite accurate in correctly identifying the exact copies of their journal entries offered as experiences they had recorded. They were also highly accurate in rejecting as not their own foil memories which were phrased in their writing style but negating some features of their actual memory (e.g. replacing a positive evaluation with a negative one); the same held true of foil memories which were taken from the journal of another subject. Subjects showed a high degree of inaccuracy, however, when they were presented with foil memories which were written in a semantic style unlike theirs but described events like ones they had recorded as actual memories. On the basis of these results Barclay and DeCooke concluded that “Autobiographical recollections are not necessarily accurate, nor should they be; they are, however, mostly congruent with one’s self-knowledge, life themes, or sense of self’ (Barclay & DeCooke, 1988, p. 92) They say further that,
As with allegory, autobiographical memory often is a constructive and reconstructive process used to condense everyday memories of events and activities, extracting those features that embrace and maintain meaning in one’s self-knowledge system. In turn, seemingly unconnected episodic recollections become allegorical in that particular events can be remembered and used as instances of generalized life experiences to convey one’s sense of self to an audience. (Barclay & DeCooke, 1988, p. 92)
If our autobiographical memories are the way we tell ourselves and others the story of our lives, a consideration of the way these memories really work suggests that we are rather subtle authors. We do not need to resort to crude, literal reproduction of our physical and psychological histories, but pick and choose the important elements, use sophisticated representational devices, and shape a story that can express what we take to be the basic and essential information about our lives.
Further support for this view is presented by Michael Ross. In his article “The relation of implicit theories to the construction of personal histories” Ross surveys a number of studies which have shown systematic biases in subjects’ recollection of personal attributes or attitudes. He suggests that these biases can be best explained by the hypothesis that individuals have implicit theories of personal development, and that they recollect in a way which makes their lives consistent with the expectations of those theories. In circumstances where subjects have no reason to believe they have changed, or have reason to believe they have changed very little, they tend to exaggerate consistency between the past and present. On the other hand, in circumstances where people have reason to believe they have changed (e.g. having gone through a self-improvement course or experienced a significant life event) they tend to exaggerate the difference between the present and past. Ross points to a great deal of diverse empirical evidence for such bias, and argues persuasively that his view, that memory is processed in accordance with implicit life theories, accounts for the widest range of data (Ross, 1989).
This evidence suggests a picture of autobiographical memory quite different from that presupposed by psychological continuity theorists. Memory, on this view, is not always or only a reproduction of past experiences or a simple connection between two discrete moments of consciousness. It is also a way of weaving the facts about ourselves and our histories into a coherent and intelligible story, expressive of the overall contours of our characters and our lives; our autobiographical memory is, that is, more like a biography than a photo album. Like a scientist who creates a continuous graph by drawing a line close to, but not necessarily in contact with, all the data points, our autobiographical memories draw a smooth storyline among the various experiences we have had–a storyline which is constrained by the bulk of those experiences, but which need not contain them exactly, and which gives our lives a narrative unity.
I do not mean to suggest, of course, that the attempt to create a coherent narrative history is the only influence determining how our memories are processed, nor that all of our memories will fall into a smooth narrative of the sort I have described. As I have said before, it is obvious that we process our memories in a number of ways, and some memories are not processed at all. Nonetheless, there does seem to be good evidence for the intuitively plausible claim that a central function of our memory is turning the countless experiences with which we are bombarded into a manageable and comprehensible life history, that this will involve summarizing, condensing, and rewriting the facts remembered, and that such work is therefore pervasive in our autobiographical memories. This function of memory is furthermore one which both causes great difficulty for psychological continuity theories, and underlies the intuitive appeal of the memory theory, as I shall argue in the next and final section.
IV. Memory and personal identity
It should be obvious from the discussion so far that the autobiography-building function of memory cannot be easily captured in the format of psychological continuity theories. These views seek to define the identity of persons in terms of connections between discrete well-defined person-slices, and so they need to view memories as such connections. What we have seen, however, is that it is precisely insofar as our memories smooth over the boundaries between the different moments in our lives, interpreting and reinterpreting individual events and experiences in the context of the whole, that we are able to produce a coherent life history. It is by summarizing, condensing, and conflating the different temporal portions of our lives in memory that we are able to see them as part of an integrated whole, and this integration blurs the distinction between different moments of our lives. Memories which are processed in this way provide relations to one’s history as a whole, rather than to some one particular moment of that history, and so the memories which contribute most to the formation of a self-conception are those least suited to the structure of psychological continuity theories.
We see, then that psychological continuity theories in the form they have been offered cannot be accurate to the actual psychological lives of persons, because they must leave out one of the central functions of memory. Nonetheless, there is something very compelling about Locke’s original claim, and we are loathe to simply give up on the idea of offering an account of personal identity in psychological terms. Of course we do not have to. What is indicated is not a rejection of memory-based accounts of identity, but an attempt to give such an account with a structure which can accommodate memory in all of its complexity.
I have developed one such alternative psychological account of identity elsewhere (Schechtman, unpublished), and argue there that it is not only more psychologically accurate but also more satisfying than psychological continuity theories. These latter have been, in many respects, a disappointment. Even many of those initially drawn to the claim that personal identity must be constituted by the continuation of psychological life have worried, when confronted with developed psychological continuity theories, that the connection these views offer is not strong enough to bear the importance attributed to identity. Why, after all, should the fact that some future person has a psychological state which is a reproduction of my current experience make me care about what happens to that person as I care about myself, or view her existence as survival? As long as memory is viewed as a simple connection between discrete moments of consciousness it is mysterious how it could provide a powerful enough connection to underlie identity, and this has caused much second-guessing of Locke’s original insight.
My claim is that this problem stems not from a fundamental defect with the Lockean claim, but from the fact that the features of memory left out in psychological continuity theories are precisely those most central to memory’s role in personal identity. A memory-based identity theory which could include those features would thus avoid these difficulties. I will not, of course, be able to develop my alternative view in the space remaining, but I hope that a schematic account of its general contours will provide an idea of how such a view might go, and how it might represent an improvement on psychological continuity theories.
To begin, it will be helpful to return to Locke’s discussion, and reconsider the original impetus behind a psychological account of identity. Locke begins his discussion of personal identity by distinguishing between persons and human beings. Human beings are biological animals of a certain configuration, while “person … is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit” (Locke, 1694, p. 50).
Persons, for Locke, are creatures with a certain subjectivity, and a certain set of capacities. They are capable of “a law, and happiness, and misery” (Locke, 1694, p. 50-51).
They anticipate, and care about, and plan for, their futures; they respond to their pasts; they are capable of moral responsibility and agency. It is on this basis that Locke argues that personal identity cannot be constituted by sameness of substance. He claims that the continuation of substance, whether material or immaterial, without the continuation of consciousness, cannot underlie the capacity to follow a law, to act as an agent, or to have the appropriate relation to one’s future or past.
The intuitions tapped to support contemporary psychological continuity theories are essentially the same as those which support Locke’s view. Contemporary theorists implicitly accept the distinction between sameness of human being and sameness of person since their psychological views allow for the possibility of the person continuing to exist without the human being with which it is associated continuing, and vice versa. They urge a psychological account of personal identity on the grounds that when we imagine a separation of body and psychology, we find that it is the continuation of the psychological life which is required for us to believe that we have continued to exist, to be concerned in the life of the resultant person as we are for our own futures, to hold that person responsible for our actions, and to grant it a right to the rewards of our sacrifices.
A person, then, is a creature with a certain sort of subjectivity and a certain set of capacities. This subjectivity and these capacities can only exist, however, where there is psychological continuity in a strong sense. To be able to care about some future in the appropriate way, I need to see it as my future, anticipate experiencing it, believe that what I do now will affect its character, and so on. To have the capacity for agency or commitment, or complex social interaction I will need to see a past as my past, and believe that my present actions will have consequences which may impact upon me in the future. To take these attitudes, essential to being a person, I need to have a sense of myself as a persisting subject, with a consistent set of characteristics; I need to see my life as unfolding in a coherent fashion, the character of the present being conditioned by the character of the past and conditioning the character of the future. This is why Locke says that a person is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” (Locke, 1694, p. 39), and that “wherever a man finds what he calls himself there, I think, another may say is the same person” (Locke, 1694, p. 50).
If, however, it is the sense of oneself as a persisting subject which is essential to being a person, and to remaining the same person over time, then it becomes clear what role the sort of autobiographical memory I have described can play in the constitution of identity. The sense of oneself as a persisting person is not something that can be easily achieved with the independent memory connections presupposed by the format of psychological continuity theories. The mere reproduction of a past action is not sufficient to yield the sort of connection between past and present that underlies personhood. Even the reproduction of a past experience with the consciousness of it as one’s own experience is not going to be enough. A simple memory in which I, the present subject, recall some particular past experience and take it to be mine, does give me a rudimentary sense of the subject of some past experience as myself, and the collection of many such experiences will give me the sense of many such subjects as all being me. This mere collection is not yet enough, however, to bring about the sort of subjectivity and continuity required for the capacities of personhood.
An analogy may help here. Consider for a moment the difference between an archive and a biography. Even the most complete archive, containing all of the facts about the objective history of an individual, would not by itself provide a picture of a the life of a particular character. To get a sense of the person behind the facts we need a biographer to sort through the multitude of details looking for patterns, anomalies, turning points, resolutions, and causal connections; separating the important from the trivial, and tracing events from their origins to their implications. Only when the facts have been interpreted and presented as part of a smooth and continuing narrative does a picture of the character underneath and of the life of a person emerge.
It is exactly this sort of work, however, which we have seen to be done in autobiographical memory. It is not merely collecting facts about oneself, but turning these facts into the story of a life which makes one a person, and underlies the continuation of a single life. It is precisely because our lives do not appear to us as a meaningless hodge-podge of events and experiences, but rather as an unfolding story, that we are able to act from reasons, plan for the future, take responsibility for the past, make commitments, come to decisions, and engage in the wide variety of complex activities definitive of the lives of persons.
Deliberating, planning, intending, and so on, require a certain amount of consistency, and require further that we see ourselves as having desires, goals, and so on. If we could not see general patterns or themes which form the general organizing principles of our lives, and if we could not see ourselves as individual subjects with a persistent character and with continuing interests and achievements, we would lack the capacities which seem fundamental to our personhood. The formation of a self-conception thus contributes to our pasts by interpreting them in such a way that we are able to conceive of ourselves as individual subjects with an ongoing history, and hence to act as personal subjects.
This self-conception further contributes to the constitution of personal identity by influencing what we say and do in the present and future. I said before that through autobiographical memory each of us acts as his own biographer. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the work of a biographer and the work we do in autobiographical memory. The biographer is making sense of a set of facts which is already complete, while we construct and revise our autobiographies throughout our lives. This means that the details to be included are not all given before the fact; they can be and often are influenced by our understanding of the story to date.
Who we are is thus determined by who we think we are in many crucial ways. We first of all need a sense of our pasts as the comprehensible unfolding of a lifestory to have the capacities definitive of persons. Furthermore, the way in which we process information to construct a particular story will play a role in creating the particular person we become. Autobiographical memory thus links together the different temporal parts of a person’s life by providing the unity of a narrative. If, however, the creation of this sort of unity explains a large part of the link between personal identity and memory, then it is precisely those features of memory which cannot be conveniently fit into the structure of psychological continuity theories which allow memory to play the role it does.
The difference between the way memory contributes to personal identity on my view and on that of the psychological continuity theorists can be seen as the following: psychological continuity theorists see memory as adding to the constitution of identity brick by brick, as it were, each individual memory adding one more bit of connection until there is enough to say there is sameness. On my view, the contribution of memory is far less piecemeal. It is not that one particular memory links me to one particular past self by being a memory of that self’s experience, it is rather that the fact of being a rememberer–of having the sort of memory system I do–allows me to see myself as a creature with a past, and so allows me to have the sort of psychology which makes me a person. Furthermore, the fact of having the particular memories I have, processed as I process them, is what makes me the particular person I am.
The above discussion has, of course, gone by very fast. In order actually to develop and defend an alternative account of identity, and show that it has the advantages I claim, I would need to say a great deal more about how our memories are processed into a narrative, to what extent this processing is volitional or conscious, what constraints it is bound by, and how it is related to other sorts of continuity, like the continuity of a particular human body. This is not the place to answer these questions, and I did not intend to offer definitive arguments for an alternative view here; only to show what it might be like.
The conclusion I ultimately wish to draw is just this: something in Locke’s insight does seem very fight; there is a great deal of intuitive appeal to the claim that memory plays a major constitutive role in personal identity. If, however, we really wish to speak to these intuitions, we will do well to be more flexible in our conception of what an account of identity will look like, and to pay more attention to the actual nature of human psychology.
Acknowledgements
I was helped at all stages of this paper by conversations with friends and colleagues. I am especially indebted to the members of the seminar on autobiographical memory conducted by professors Norman Bradburn, Bertrand Cohler, and Jean-Ellen Huttenlocher at the University of Chicago in the winter of 1990, where I first encountered much of this material, to Gary Hatfield, Bill Bechtel, and two anonymous referees for Philosophical Psychology, who offered immensely sympathetic and helpful comments and suggestions on a much rougher earlier draft, and to Connie Meinwald for her insightful input.
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By MARYA SCHECHTMAN; Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois, Chicago IL 60680
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