437
Wolff’s lectures (finished), Crash Course Philosophy, Banya.
s - 1, i - 1, M.
d – 23, g – 40.
Let’s take a meditation on memory. According to neuropsychology, as far as I can tell, we don’t have so-called memories of something, but rather reproduce whatever we’ve experienced in our thoughts. That is to say, we don’t remember an event but get through it in our imagination again and articulate it as if it were going on now. When I think about yesterday’s lectures I don’t open a kind of file with the data and, looking at what is there, reproduce in my speech or writing what I’m seeing. Rather I put myself in a similar situation again and observe how it’s developing having known some details which I paid attention to when the real situation took place.
But what’s going on in the cases when we memorize things in all details? For example, if I’d learned a poem and then read it—should I say that I put myself in a situation when I’d learned the poem and then just observed the whole process from the beginning? That’s strange. It seems as if I were creating the poem in this case; and since while I was memorizing the poem I created it many times again and again, I can repeat the process quite easily. And yet, at any new time it’s a different poem even if it sounds the same. As Heraclitus said, you can’t enter the same river twice.
So if I identify myself with my memory, I can’t avoid adding imagination as the essential part of my existence. But all of this is too abstract.
Memory, imagination, attention—
Past, future, present—
Well, why don’t think about weather or what did I eat at breakfast?
To the beginning: http://www.proza.ru/2018/03/10/1530
Next: http://www.proza.ru/2019/10/21/1121