Memory and Identity

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Memory and identity Author(s): Marya Schechtman Source: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition , Vol. 153, No. 1, SELECTED PAPERS FROM THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION,

PACIFIC DIVISION, 2012 MEETING (March 2011), pp. 65-79Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41487616Accessed: 12-11-2015 21:41 UTC

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Philos Stud (2011) 153:65-79 DOl 10.1007/sl 1098-010-9645-6

Memory and identity

Marya Schechtman

Published online: 28 October 2010 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract Among the many topics covered in Sven Bernecker's impressive study of memory is the relation between memory and personal identity. Bernecker uses his grammatical taxonomy of memory and causal account to defend the claim that memory does not logically presuppose personal identity and hence that circularity objections to memory-based accounts of personal identity are misplaced. In my comment I investigate these claims, suggesting that the relation between personal identity and memory is more complicated than Bernecker's analysis suggests. In particular, I argue (1) that while he shows that some memories do not presuppose personal identity he fails to show that those that are appealed to in memory-based accounts of personal identity do not, and (2) that the features of his view that allow him to define memory without reference to personal identity also obscure important features of memory that must be part of a complete account.

Keywords Personal identity • Memory • Circularity objection • Psychological continuity theory

Sven Bernecker's Memory: a Philosophical Study provides a most welcome contribution to what Bernecker rightly describes as an under-studied subject - the philosophy of memory. Bernecker develops an exciting new philosophical account of memory and applies it to a wide range of outstanding problems. Here I will focus on just one of the areas he discusses; the relation between personal identity and memory, and in particular the claim that memory does not logically presuppose personal identity. Bernecker engages in extended discussion of this relation at two

M. Schechtman (13) Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1423 University Hall, MC 267, 601 S. Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607-71 14, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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points in the book. The first is in a defense of memory-based accounts of personal identity; the second in an exposition of the kinds of causal connections in terms of which his view defines memory. In the end I do not believe Bernecker makes a compelling general case for the logical independence of memory and personal identity. By tackling the issue with the completeness and clarity that he does, however, he pushes the discussion forward immeasurably, and generates important new insights and fruitful questions.

1 A causal theory

Before looking at some of Bernecker's specific arguments concerning memory and identity, it will be useful to have a general sense of his position on the topic. Bernecker' s theory of memory is a causal theory which holds that in order for S to remember that p it must be the case that "S's representation at t2 that p is suitably causally connected to S's representation at ti that p*" (Bernecker 2010, p. 128). Suitable causal connection is spelled out in the "trace condition" which requires that "S's representation at ti that p* and S's representation at t2 that p are connected by a persisting memory trace or a contiguous series of memory traces" (Bernecker 2010, p. 130).1 The question of whether memory presupposes personal identity thus becomes the question of whether these conditions can be met without identity between the rememberer and the person who had the experience (seemingly) remembered; can S's representation at t2 that p be suitably causally connected to S*'s representation at ̂ that p* because it is connected by a persisting memory trace or a contiguous series of memory traces?

Bernecker's answer to this question is a resounding "yes." To describe the sense in which this is so he adapts an example from Derek Parfit. In Parfit's example Paul experiences a dramatic storm in Venice during which lightening strikes the bell tower of San Giorgio. Later, through an unspecified technology, Paul's memory trace is transplanted into Jane. Subsequently, Jane has a vivid representation of Paul's experience. Since she knows about the transplant, and also knows that she has never been in Venice, she concludes that this must be a memory of Paul's experience. Jane has an accurate representation of the past experience, and no delusion that it is her own. Parfit argues that Jane's experience is non-delusional and that it contains what is relevant to personal identity in genuine memory.

In Bernecker's adaptation, as in Parfit's Venetian memory case, memory traces from S (Paul) are "surgically removed" and "instilled in S*'s (Jane's) brain" (2010, p. 41). In the amended case, however, it is not a memory of the image of lightening hitting the bell tower that is transplanted, but rather Paul's memory of the fact that San Giorgio Maggiore was completed in 1610, something he read in a book. The reason for this change in the example is not explicitly stated, but it presumably stems from the fact that in Bernecker's theory memories are categorized not

1 The reason "p" becomes "p*" is that Bernecker allows the representation in the memory to be slightly different in content from the original representation (see 2010, pp. 39-40). This is a complication we can ignore for our purposes.

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according to their qualitative or imagistic aspects, but rather in terms of their grammatical features. After arguing that existing ways of categorizing memory all run into insurmountable difficulties, Bernecker offers as an alternative a grammatical taxonomy which classifies memories in terms of "the grammatical objects of the verb 'to remember' and of its (near) synonyms..." (2010, p. 19). According to this classificatory scheme, there are four main categories of remembering: "One can remember persons and things ... properties, ...events, ...and facts or propositions" (2010, pp. 19-20). The grammatical taxonomy means that "phenomenological aspects are irrelevant for determining what kind of memory a mental episode belongs to," and that "whether the memory state is accompanied by imagery and qualitative experiences is of no importance for determining what kind of memory it is" (2010, p. 21). Another aspect of this taxonomy is the distinction between "introversive" and "extroversive" memories; the former are memories of one's own former mental states, and the latter memories of something other than one's mental states (2010, p. 4). Introversive memories come only in the first-person mode, while extroversive memories can come in either a first-person mode, which makes indexical reference to the rememberer, or a third-person mode which does not (2010, p. 34).

Bernecker makes it very clear that his study will focus "squarely on propositional memory," (2010, p. 22). Moreover, he also allows that introversive memories or extroversive memories in the first-person mode cannot be transferred from one person to another. This is because there is also an accuracy condition on memory, and memories that contain first-person reference as part of their propositional content will fail to meet that condition if they are transferred. The claim that it is possible for S* to be given one of S's memories is thus constrained in several important ways. First, the claim is only that S* can have an appropriately caused representation of the propositional content of S's original representation, and second S can only be given S*'s extroversive memories in the third-person mode. When these conditions have been met, however, interpersonal memory transfer is possible, and this is enough to show that "memory does not imply personal identity. The dependence relation between these two notions is of a contingent rather than logical nature" (Bernecker 2010, p. 46). There is nothing in the structure of memory that prevents such transfer on Bernecker' s view, only accidental facts about its content.

I The argument from constitutive holism

The conclusion that memory does not logically presuppose personal identity is important not only for general, theoretical reasons, but also to respond to charges that memory-based accounts of personal identity are viciously circular. The well- known circularity objection to views that define personal identity in terms of memory charges that in order for such a definition to be at all plausible we must distinguish between actual memories and delusory memory-like experiences and this distinction presupposes personal identity. Whether someone's sincere claim to have led the troops at Waterloo is a memory or a sign of delusional madness, that is,

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depends upon whether the person making this claim is actually Napoleon. But if memory must be defined in terms of personal identity, a theory that defines personal identity in terms of memory is not going to be terribly informative.

The standard response to this objection is to argue that the distinction we are after should be drawn in terms of the cause of an alleged memory rather than in terms of the identity of the rememberer with the experience. Identity in itself, it is argued, is neither sufficient nor necessary for the legitimacy of memory. That it is not sufficient can be seen by imagining a case in which someone struck with total amnesia is, by pure serendipity, given a post hypnotic suggestion to represent as a memory some past event which, as a matter of chance, happens to be one that the person actually experienced. Because of its anomalous cause, we would not consider this representation a memory despite the fact that the person remembering is the person who had the experience remembered. The fact that identity is not necessary for memory is seen in cases like that of Jane and Paul (which is the purpose for which Parfit originally constructed the example). What we see in both cases is that the relevant difference between delusional and non-delusional representations of the past lies in the causal connection to the original experience which is absent in the post hypnotic suggestion case despite identity and present in the case of Jane and Paul despite lack of identity.

Defenders of memory-based accounts of identity thus ultimately define identity in terms of quasi-memory (q-memory) - memory-like representations of the past that are caused in the right kind of way by the experiences remembered. The "quasi" is in deference to those who say that "memory" presupposes identity as a matter of definition. Regular memories, on this scheme, are a sub-class of q-memories - q-memories of our own experiences. It is, however, the category of q-memory and not the more restricted notion of memory that is claimed to express what is relevant to personal identity, and since q-memory does not presuppose identity, the argument goes, an account that defines identity in terms of q-memory avoids the circularity objection.

Bernecker' s causal memory theory provides a comprehensive theoretical expres- sion of the basic ideas involved in this defense of memory-based accounts of personal identity, and so he obviously has a great deal to contribute to this discussion. By the same token, any difficulties with this response to the circularity objection are also potential difficulties for Bernecker's theory, and so he spends some time defending the notion of q-memory from some of the concerns that have been raised about it. He discusses three main kinds of objection to q-memory, but here I will focus on only one, which he calls the objection from "constitutive holism." This objection is found, among other places, in my own work.2 Its core claim is that the content of memories depends at least in part on their place in a broader psychological context, and so that some content will necessarily be lost when a memory is transplanted into an alien psychology. In my own version of the objection I illustrate this point using an example of an actual memory reported by Edward Casey in his book Remembering: a phenomenological study (1987). Casey describes his memory of going to see the film

2 Schechtman (1996). Wolheim (1979, 1984) is the other main source of the argument Bernecker discusses.

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Small Change with his family. The memory includes representations of eating at one of the local restaurants, browsing in the bookstore, waiting in line at the theater with his children, and watching the film with an acute awareness of his children's reactions (Casey 1987). This memory, unlike Jane's memories of Venice in Parfit's example is shot through with content specific to Casey's life.

Imagining Casey's memory rather than Paul's being transplanted into Jane's psyche, the difficulties with such transplantation become evident at once. If the memory represents Casey going to his favorite restaurant, looking at books at his local bookstore, with his wife and children, then, assuming that the full content is preserved, it will be delusional for Jane, no matter what its causal origin; this is not her favorite restaurant, her local bookstore, or her wife and children. If, on the other hand, Jane receives only the neutral elements of the original representation - if it is just a representation of a restaurant, a bookstore, a woman, some children, and a film - the claim that the content of Casey's original memory has been preserved through the transplant is questionable. In particular, if the original representation is stripped of anything that makes reference to Casey's autobiography the suggestion that it contains what is relevant to personal identity highly implausible.

Bernecker employs two main strategies to respond to the objection from constitutive holism. One is to offer examples from neuropsychology in which people seem to have isolated memories that are divorced from their original context and associations. People with retrograde amnesia, he points out, often recover their lost memories piecemeal, and so may have just one or two memories of their pasts without the broader context in which those memories originally occurred. In certain dissociative disorders, moreover, there are often circumstances in which patients experience memories that are perceived as foreign in some way. In DID (multiple personality), for instance, one alter will often have access to the consciousness of another, and so memories of that alter' s experiences, even though their personalities are quite distinct. These cases seem to show that it is possible to have a legitimate memory without the whole psychological context that attended the original experience.

It is somewhat surprising that Bernecker engages the argument from constitutive holism at this level at all. There is a much more direct way, it seems, for him to reject this argument, at least as I present it. The argument never really denies that it is possible to transfer some kinds of information from one person to another, only that it is possible to transfer the elements relevant to memory's role in constituting personal identity. My argument involving Casey's memory holds that this memory cannot be transferred non-delusionally because it makes reference to elements of Casey's life and to his emotions and attachments, and claims that crucial elements of the phenomenology of the memory would be lost without the broader context of Casey's life. As we saw in the last section, however, Bernecker explicitly denies that these phenomenological aspects are a defining feature of memory, and clearly states that introversive, first-personal memories (like Casey's) cannot be legitimate q-memories. To argue that Casey's memory cannot be transferred, Bernecker could argue, is not to reject anything he has said. He never claimed that all memories could be q-memories, only that some could be, and this is enough to show that memory does not, by its very nature, presuppose personal identity.

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This is a fair response, but it suggests that Bernecker and the constitutive holist are actually talking past one another. The constitutive holist does not insist that no memories can be transplanted q-memories any more than Bernecker insists that all memories can be. But not all memories are taken to be constitutive of personal identity either, and the relevant question in this context is whether those memories that are constitutive of personal identity can be transferred as q-memories, because only then can a memory theory of personal identity escape circularity. Memory- based accounts of personal identity as they are usually presented do not simply suggest that memory constitutes personal identity, but more specifically that identity is constituted through autobiographical experience memories. Although Bernecker does not recognize this category, it seems clear that such memories will be overwhelmingly introversive and first-personal. The memories on which these accounts of personal identity focus are memories of an experience "from the inside." It is not memories of propositions (like the year the construction of San Giorgio was completed), or even of images (like lightening hitting the bell tower), that are typically invoked as identity-constituting memories, but rather memories like Casey's. If all of the types of memories in terms of which personal identity is to be defined presuppose that identity, a memory-based account of identity is still in trouble, even if other types of memory do not.

Bernecker' s second strategy for responding to the objection from constitutive holism is to appeal to the possibility of fission, and this response may seem to have the potential to avoid this problem. There is general consensus that in cases in which we imagine one person splitting into two, both of whom are completely psychologically continuous with the original, neither fission product is strictly identical to the original person (since two things that are not identical to one another cannot both be identical to some third thing). Since each continuer has the full complement of memories, beliefs, desires, attitudes and so on that made up the original person's psyche, the difficulties that come from placing a memory in an alien psychological context do not arise in this case. Even if the claims of the constitutive holist about the way the content of memory depends on context are granted, then, fission at least seems to provide an example of a situation in which one person can q-remember another person's experience. Since all of the original person's memories are transferred, moreover, the worry that only memories that are not relevant to personal identity can be q-remembered by someone else does not seem to apply.

Even if we grant the legitimacy of this analysis, however, it is not clear that it demonstrates the viability of a memory-based account of personal identity. If the products of fission are indeed not identical to the original person, the sense in which this is so is very different from the sense in which Jane is not the same person as Paul. Jane and Paul are different people in a very straightforward and ordinary sense. In the fission case, however, the products of fission differ from the original person on a mere technicality. Transitivity does not permit the strict identity of both products of fission to the original person, yet according to the psychological theorists these products each possess, as Parfit famously puts it, all of "what matters" in identity (1984, pp. 245-280). While it might be inconvenient in all sorts of ways to split in two, it is not, the same as dying. To undergo fission is to have a

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completely different relation to the future than Paul would have were he to die, leaving Jane with his single memory trace as his closest continuer.

It is not entirely clear what this shows us about memory and identity. It certainly does not undermine the constitutive holist's claim that the memories that are connected with the constitution of personal identity cannot be transferred without replicating the psychological context in which they occur. If the transfer of such memories can occur only with complete replication of psychological life, it may show that these memories do not presuppose personal identity, but it hardly puts us in a position to offer a reductive analysis of personal identity in terms of q-memory. Moreover, it is not even clear that within the framework of Bernecker' s view the fission case is a case in which such memories are transferred. The introversive and first-personal representations that are reproduced in fission should not count as q-memories on this view since, strictly speaking, they fail the accuracy requirement. To the extent that they can count as q-memories it is only because the replication of an entire psychological life, whether it occurs uniquely or, as it does in fission, with duplication, is in some important respects like personal identity.

Finally, it is difficult to draw any kind of firm conclusions from wildly hypothetical cases like fission. As Bernecker admits, a world in which fission is possible might be a world in which memory (or q-memory) plays a very different role. If "I lived in a world where fission happened on a regular basis" he says, he would not be in the habit of concluding that he had experienced something from the fact that he quasi-remembered it (2010, p. 61). Since it seems that we need to reproduce the whole of psychological life in order to be sure that we capture what matters to personal identity in ordinary memory, we really have no idea which aspects of ordinary memory are doing the work in constituting identity. There is reason to believe, moreover, that it is the strong first-personal aspects of autobiographical experience memory that are important. In a world in which the relation between memory and identity is dramatically altered (e.g. by the possibility of fission), it is not clear that memory (or q-memory) could play the same role in personal identity.

Overall, then, while Bernecker's analysis may perhaps show that it is in principle possible for certain kinds of memories to be transferred from one person to another as q-memories, it does not vindicate memory-based accounts of personal identity, or show that the relevant kinds of memories can be transferred. Assuming that this analysis is correct, it may seem that an easy way for Bernecker to avoid the difficulties I raise is simply to concede the memory theory of personal identity. His emphasis is first and foremost on the nature of memory and not on the question of personal identity. If it turns out that the kinds of memories that psychological theorists believe constitute personal identity are not a legitimate category on his view, or do in fact presuppose personal identity, then it may be that a memory-based account of identity is fatally flawed. This does not, however, necessarily show that there is anything wrong with Bernecker's theory as a general account of memory, however, nor does it interfere with his claim that memory does not by its very nature presuppose identity, since some kinds of memory do seem to be transferable. The situation is a bit more complicated than that, however, as the next section will reveal.

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3 The causal connection and trace conditions

Although the main discussion of memory and personal identity takes place in Chapter Two, cases of memory transfer reappear in a later discussion of the nature of memory causation. Here Bernecker considers in more detail what the causal and trace conditions require, and uses cases of interpersonal memory transfer among his illustrations. As we saw earlier, the conditions taken together say that in order for a representation of a past experience to be a memory it must be caused by the original experience via a persisting memory trace or a spatio-temporally contiguous chain of such traces. In elaborating on the nature of such traces Bernecker tells us that they are dispositional beliefs or subdoxastic states that store mental contents. He remains somewhat agnostic about the precise mechanics of this storage, allowing for the possibility of either a classical computational or connectionist architecture. He does insist, however, that legitimate chains of memory-generating traces are not necessarily confined to a single body and can loop outside of the brain and body in which the original trace is laid down.

Assuming that trace implants and transplants are possible, he says, we can distinguish among five different scenarios (which fall under three major types). First, there is trace creation, in which a memory trace is created from scratch and then implanted into someone's brain. As an example of this kind of scenario he offers the film Total Recall in which the company Rekall Inc. creates memories of exciting or exotic vacations that can, for the right price, be transplanted into a customer's brain. This leaves the client with wonderful travel memories without the inconvenience and expense of travel. These traces do not give rise to actual memories, Bernecker says, because being fictional the original traces are not appropriately connected to the experience represented. Even if by chance the implanted trace gives rise to a representation whose content is the same as an earlier experience of the rememberer, the causal chain from representation to experience is not appropriate, and so there is no memory.

The second type of scenario involves trace transplants in which "someone's memory traces are surgically extracted, kept 'alive' for a couple hours" and then implanted back into the brain of the same person (intrapersonal transplant) or of a different person (interpersonal transplant) (Bernecker 2010, p. 138). The intrapersonal transplant unproblematically yields genuine memory, Bernecker says, so long as there are no spatiotemporal gaps in the causal chain. Interpersonal transplants are also generally unproblematic as long as the trace transplanted stores an extroversive memory in the third-person mode.

The final category to be considered is trace replication. In this scenario "a memory trace is removed, destroyed, rebuilt out of new material and transplanted into the brain of the very person from whom it had been taken" (intrapersonal replication), or someone else (interpersonal replication) (Bernecker 2010, p. 138). Again, so long as there are no gaps, the intrapersonal case raises no real difficulties according to Bernecker, and so long as there are no gaps and the limitations on memory type are heeded there are no problems with interpersonal replication either. To illustrate this he invokes Derek Parfit' s Teletransportation case, in which a scanner makes a blueprint of all of the states of a person's brain

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and body, destroys the original body, and builds a molecule-for-molecule replica on Mars. "If the trace replication involved in teletransportation consists in something like downloading information from a trace onto a computer, emailing a file to another computer, and copying the information into an 'empty' trace, there is no good reason to deny that the causal chain is temporally and spatially contiguous" (Bernecker 2010, p. 140).

Given that the precise nature of memory traces is rarely considered explicitly in the context of discussions of personal identity and memory transfer, Bernecker's exposition is most welcome and extremely illuminating. One of the things it brings to light immediately is a question about whether all of the categories he describes are really coherent. In particular, it becomes questionable whether the idea of a memory transplant - either intra- or interpersonal - makes sense. If we think of memory traces as material objects, we are tied to the empirical facts about how such traces are in fact stored in our brains Even on a computationalist model, it seems that a connectionist implementation is most plausible, and so that traces will consist in a distributed weighting of synaptic connections. Given what we do know about the physiology of memory, it is hard to envision how a memory trace could literally be surgically extracted from a brain and kept alive in vitro. This suggests that any case in which the chain of memory traces goes outside of a single body, even for a short time, will have to involve replication rather than transplant.

This is not in and of itself a problem, since Bernecker is here only looking at various possibilities that have been discussed and telling us which, if they did happen, would qualify as memory. If it turns out that transplants are not possible, the point simply becomes moot. On closer inspection, however, this fact has important implications, which it will take a few steps to appreciate. First, we have recognized that if there is to be q-memory it cannot be through the physical transplant of a memory trace, but must be through replication. The next question is what that replication involves. What, precisely, is being replicated?

One possibility is that the physical mechanism is reproduced in a different brain - that is, the synaptic connections in a new brain are rearranged to be exactly like those in the original brain. There is, however, very little physiological reason to think this can be done, at least if we are thinking of transplanting only a small number of memories. Here we are likely to encounter the engineering version of the argument from constitutive holism. If, as it seems, the implementation of memory involves activation patterns on neural networks in which a single connection may carry information shared by different memories, beliefs, and other cognitive states, the idea that the exact physiological mechanism could be reproduced in just any brain (an "empty trace") is not plausible. More to the point, however, once we have given up on the idea that we are physically moving a material trace, we need to think about legitimate ways of getting the original trace to its reproduction in another brain. To return to Bernecker's analogy if we are trying to get a file from one computer to another we might email it as Bernecker suggests, or save it to a flash drive or floppy disk or cd or tape, and it seems that it should not be terribly important which we do. In transferring a file what is crucial is that the information contained in the original document be stored in some form that allows it to be reproduced elsewhere. If we are talking about the replication of memory traces

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rather than their actual transplantation a similar principle should apply.3 Bernecker more or less acknowledges this when he tells us that although memory has both a neurological and psychological aspect, the kind that is most relevant to his study is the latter (2010, pp. 132-133).

If all we require to meet the trace condition is a continuous means of preserving the propositional information contained in a memory, however, we seem to be left with an implausibly liberal understanding of legitimate traces. To see this, let's consider a modified version of the Total Recall scenario, that makes it more like the case of Jane and Paul. Let's imagine, that the founders of Rekall discover that artificial memory traces are just too difficult to engineer, and so abandon the plan of creating them from whole cloth. Instead they find twenty extreme thrill seekers, and send them on every adventure they can imagine, replicating (using the Venetian memory technology) the memories that have been created in this straightforward and old-fashioned way and storing them for implantation into paying customers. On this modified Total Recall scenario, each customer who receives implanted vacation memories has the same relation to the original experience that Jane has to Paul's experience of lightening hitting the bell tower of San Giorgio. According to Bernecker's view, then, each of these recipients has a legitimate q-memory of the original experiences (provided that they are extroversive and third-personal). This is true no matter how many people get the same trace implanted, no matter how different they are from the original experiencer, and no matter how many decades or centuries after the death of the person who had the original experience the implantation takes place.

If we allow this, however, we can go still farther. Suppose that one of the adventurers approached by Rekall decided not to take the offer and instead goes on his own adventures, writing memoirs that depict them in vivid detail. Being a gifted writer, his prose is able to invoke in many readers extremely clear, forceful, and accurate representations of his original experiences. It seems that these, too, should count as legitimate q-memories, since here too there is a temporally and spatially contiguous chain of information leading from the original experience to its reproduction. The only difference between the Venetian memory case and the memoir case just described is the medium in which the relevant information is stored. In both cases the original memory trace takes the form of a modification in the brain of the original experiencer. In the first two cases the information coded by the trace is then moved to some sort of electronic storage device, while in the latter it is moved to paper. In both cases it is later translated back into a distributed memory trace in the brain of the recipient - the person who buys the implant in the former cases and who reads the book in the latter. It is not obvious how this difference could make a difference to whether the there is a legitimate chain of memory traces. To return once more to the original analogy, if I write a paper on my computer at home, print it out, and then scan the printout onto my computer at work, I have surely preserved and transferred the relevant information no less reliably than if I had saved it to a flash drive or emailed it.

1 Parfit (1984, pp. 207-209) makes a similar point but I do not go quite as far as he does.

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If written words can count as legitimate memory traces, moreover, it seems we are also committed to saying that someone can come to have q-memories of past experiences by being told about them. Spoken words are, after all, patterns of air compression that contain information that can be "loaded" into another brain, and it is not obvious where the principled difference lies between the spoken word or the "emailed" memory trace. To the extent that this last mode of transmission sounds superficially as if it might be a more legitimately memory-preserving kind of transfer this is probably only because it is high tech and unfamiliar and we are likely to imagine it as somehow a completely different way of transmitting information than are writing and speech. But it is difficult to think of how the claim that it is different in a way that makes a difference could be justified. Thinking of the trace condition as requiring only the preservation of information thus seems to commit us to the view that representations that occur as the result of reading about or hearing about events can count as memories. A vivid memoir written from a third-person perspective or a war correspondent's objective account of a battle can count as a memory trace, and someone who represents those past events as a result of reading the memoir or hearing the report can be said to remember (or at least to q-remember) it.

Is this problematic? In some ways yes and in some ways no, and understanding this gets us to the heart of the matter. I might ask my 13-year-old son if he remembers what happened on February 2, 1943. When he answers "the Battle of Stalingrad ended" I may be pleased with his historical knowledge. If, however, he tells me unprompted that he "remembers well the battle of Stalingrad" I will endeavor to make certain that he understands that he was not and could not have been there. In ordinary speech there is an ambiguity in the claim to remember what happened on February 2, 1943. One might be claiming only that one can recall from a reliable source the proposition that the Battle of Stalingrad concluded or one might be implying that he actually witnessed the event. Context will usually make it clear which is being asserted. Bernecker's theory, however, does not include a clear theoretical way to express this ambiguity when first-person indexicals are not involved. The propositional content is all that matters to making the memory the kind of memory it is, and so if we are thinking of extroversive, third-personal memories such as the descriptions of a battle that a war correspondent might give there is no important difference between representing a fact about the past that one has learned through reading or hearing the accurate report of a witness to the event on the one hand and representing a fact about the past that one witnessed oneself on the other.

This seems to be a bullet Bernecker is willing to bite, since it can be seen as a direct consequence of his grammatical taxonomy. In developing this taxonomy he articulates and rejects a common philosophical distinction between experience memories and propositional memories. After considering and criticizing various proposals for making this distinction he concludes that "there is no way of drawing a sharp and intuitively compelling boundary between experiential and propositional memory" (2010, p. 19). He acknowledges that this does not constitute a "knock- down" argument against the distinction, but says that it "does point to a structural weakness of this way of distinguishing kinds of memory" and that "it would

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therefore be desirable to establish an alternative taxonomy of kinds of memory" (2010, p. 19).

The distinction between experiential and propositional memory as Bernecker describes it is not exactly the distinction that is being drawn here. Experiential memories, he tells us, are characterized by imagery and qualitative content of the kind described in the last section. The difference I am pointing to now is not in phenomenological characteristics, but rather in the cause of a representation of the past. At issue is not whether my 13-year-old has vivid images of the Battle of Stalingrad or can imagine it from the inside, but rather whether his representing the date of its conclusion is caused by his having witnessed that conclusion or by having read an accurate report of what happened on that day.4 It seems as if the strictly grammatical taxonomy that replaces the more traditional distinction between experiential and propositional memory also implies that that as long as a representation of the past follows from a reliable and information-preserving chain from the original representation it is not theoretically significant whether it comes from firsthand experience or a more derivative source.

If this is Bernecker' s position, it is hard to see a compelling argument for it. To begin, a large part of the reason for rejecting the distinction between experiential and propositional memory comes from the fact that "the frequency and intensity of mental imagery varies greatly from one person to another" (2010, p. 16). Since the distinction here is drawn in terms of cause rather than phenomenology, it seems hard to see what the reasons for rejecting it are. More important, while it is undoubtedly true that it is difficult to draw the distinction between experiential and propositional memory cleanly and that it is desirable to have clearly defined categories, it is also important not to be too quick to eliminate admittedly messy forms of categorization that do real work.

As the example of my 13-year-old suggests, we do make a distinction between memories that result from firsthand experience and memories with the same propositional content that come from reading or hearing about someone else's experiences, and we tend to think that it is an important one. No doubt this is partly for reasons that do not apply to the case at hand. We might think that firsthand experience is more reliable, for instance, while by hypothesis we are assuming the accuracy of the representation here. Even when we make this assumption, however, someone who cannot distinguish between information gained by experience and information gained by reading or listening to someone else's account of his experience lacks an important cognitive skill. Our memories do not just give us information about the world; they give us information about ourselves. Even when they do not represent our inner lives or include first-person indexicals, our memories tell us about our lives and our trajectory through the world. It is not just important to know what happened at the Battle of Stalingrad, but also whether one was there when it happened. Our memories of our own past experiences do not inform us about ourselves only when they are explicitly about us; even when we do not appear

This is not to say that the two features are completely independent. Having vivid images and experiencing a representation of the past as if from the inside may well be what causes us to conclude (implicitly or explicitly) that it is a representation of something experienced firsthand.

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as parts of the propositional content of our experience memories, they help us to fix our trajectory through the world in something like the way a person's spatial point of view informs her about her location in space without representing her or her location. A theory of memory that does not give some importance to the distinction between representations caused by our own past experiences and representations caused by reading or hearing about someone else's thus seems to leave out a crucial feature of the way memory works in our lives.

Before we conclude this discussion, however, there is one more wrinkle we need to discuss. When Bernecker gives his initial example of trace replication he uses the case of Teletransportation rather than returning to the Venentian memory case. It is telling that he does so; the arguments I have been making in this section apply less clearly in a case where the totality of someone's psychological life is replicated, and it is worth considering whether this case can point the way to drawing a principled distinction between science fictional trace replication and ordinary cases like reading.

Teletransportation, in which the whole of a person's psychological life is reproduced by creating a molecule-for-molecule replica, does seem to present a case of information transfer that is significantly different from reading or listening to a report, but it is not obvious that the difference will ultimately help with the concerns raised above. The most significant difference between representations of the past caused by Teletransportation and those caused by reading is not the nature of the cause, but the completeness of the replication. In the case of reading, it is clear that the information contained in the memory is transferred from one person to another. When someone hears the war correspondent's account and "remembers" the Battle of Stalingrad, he is being given someone else's memories. This is equally true in cases where the traces are replicated in some more high-tech method, as in the Venetian memory and revised Total Recall cases. It is precisely the fact that memory information can be moved from one person to another that is supposed to vindicate q-memory.

In Teletransportation, however, things are murkier. Parfit' s view, at least, implies that in simple Teletransportation where the original body is destroyed and only one replica created, the replica is identical to the original person (see, e.g., 1984, p. 216). If we accept this, and also accept that the representations of the past are legitimate memories, all we have shown is that the kind of causation involved in Teletransportation can preserve memory if the entire psychological life (and so the identity of the person) is reproduced. This does not yet show that the particular causal connection is what is doing the work here, since there are a great many other connections preserved as well, including all of the qualitative and imagistic elements of the representations, their role in the psychological economy and, importantly, identity itself. From Parfit' s perspective, in fact, memory would also be preserved if someone was so taken with an exhaustive and well-written autobiography that her own psychological life was totally displaced by the content of the autobiography. This kind of "replication" (when unique) also constitutes identity on Parfit' s view, since he argues that what is relevant to identity is psychological continuity with any cause (1984, p. 215). Most people reject this liberal picture of the "appropriate" cause of memory connections, and many also reject the idea that a

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teleported replica is identical to the original person. The most common definitions of q-memory require the physical continuity of the same brain as the realizer of memory-connections. For those who take this position, Teletransportation does not preserve memories and the replica's representations of the past are not legitimate q-memories. This dispute will not be resolved here. The point of these remarks is only to show that it is not evident that even in the Teletransportation case the causal relations described intuitively constitute legitimate memory connections, and that even if we do think that memory connections are preserved, it is not clear that it is the causal relations described that underwrite that legitimacy.

At the end of the last section we considered the possibility that Bernecker' s theory of memory could escape from the concerns offered there unscathed if he was willing to simply concede that memory cannot be used to offer a non-circular criterion of personal identity. This will not be enough to avoid the difficulties raised in this section, however. Our analysis of the trace condition as described in this view reveals that the relation between personal identity and memory is crucial to our understanding of memory even outside of contexts where it is being used to define personal identity and applies even to extroversive third-personal memories. There are, to be sure, circumstances in which all that matters is whether we have access to propositional information about the past with a reliable pedigree. For many purposes, however, it matters a great deal whether the information was acquired firsthand or came from some other source, and insofar as Bernecker' s view makes no room for this distinction it fails to capture a central fact about the nature of memory. The causal connection and trace conditions might be perfectly adequate to define some kinds of memories, but there are others for which we need stronger requirements, and these seem inherently linked to facts about identity.

4 Conclusion

We have looked at two different ways in which memory and personal identity seem to be bound together. In the first section we saw that those memories which are taken to be constitutive of personal identity must include qualitative, first-personal, and experiential elements as part of their content. This is not to deny that some memories can be usefully defined wholly in terms of propositional content, only to claim that insofar as they are, they are not plausibly taken to be identity- constituting. The second section looked at the question of what kind of causal relation a representation to the past must have to qualify as a memory. There we saw reason to draw a distinction between a kind of memory where reliable preservation of causal content was sufficient and a kind of memory that seemed to require personal identity, or at least some kind of (as yet undefined) stronger connection than the one Bernecker defines.

None of this shows that Bernecker' s theory of memory is untenable or mistaken - only that it is incomplete. His grammatical taxonomy allows him to address many questions of memory with great precision and clarity. This taxonomy, however, also suppresses distinctions that are crucial to understanding other aspects of memory, and in particular to understanding the complex interactions between

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memory and personal identity. Once the grammatical taxonomy is accepted, it becomes fairly trivial to show that memory does not logically presuppose personal identity, but this comes at the cost of understanding why we think it should, and so of understanding an important feature of memory.

That the theory is incomplete in this way is hardly a criticism. It is too much to expect that a single theory should capture everything we want to know about something as central to our existence and multifaceted as memory is. Moreover, even though the theory may not in the end give a fully convincing account of the relation between memory and personal identity, it greatly illuminates this topic. By explicating in detail features that are often left vague, Bernecker uncovers many challenges and insights that promise to bear great fruit. He reveals, for instance, difficulties with the traditional distinction between experiential and propositional memory that must be addressed. Moreover, the issues that arise in considering his account of this connection point to a number of important and largely unexplored questions. Especially intriguing is the recognition that cases of complete psychological replication seem to provide different kinds of information than cases where only a few memories are replicated. A deeper exploration of the nature and implications of these differences is likely to yield valuable insights.

Bernecker' s wonderful study of memory answers many questions and, even more exciting, raises important new ones. It represents an invaluable and exciting contribution to this understudied area.

References

Bernecker, S. (2010). Memory: A philosophical study. New York: Oxford University Press. Casey, E. S. (1987). Remembering : A phenomenological study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schechtman, M. (1996). The constitution of selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wolheim, R. (1979). Memory, experiential memory, and personal identity. In G. F. MacDonald (Ed.),

Perception and identity: Essays presented to A J. Ay re with his replies to them (pp. 186-234). London: MacMillian.

Wolheim, R. (1984). The thread of life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Memory and Identity

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