This is a meditation on memory. I am going to start it with the question: "What is memory?" and then move on applying an epistemological analysis to the definition I am supposed to come up with.
So, what is memory? Is it a faculty of the brain that allows us to represent linguistically (symbolically) our experience? Can we remember only those things that we have experienced? Although some people claim they can remember their "previous lives," we usually do not take them seriously. We are also quite suspicious of those who recall being taken by aliens and those who believe they can remember the future. However, many things that we experience cannot be represented symbolically without years of special training, and yet we somehow can remember those things and even "see" events from our childhood as if they were happening right now. Furthermore, there is such thing as collective memory that allows us to "see" the events from the childhood of our civilization.
Do we really "remember" anything, or it's rather a construction of a new experience out of something we are already familiar with? Is every new moment a distorted copy of the previous moment?
Well, let's say memory is what holds our experience together. Thus, there is no difference between memory and the self. Our self is our memory. We are what we can remember, whether it's a bunch of theories and laws we studied at school; or a set of stories about the transformation of our bodies; or a set of stories we have read about in books, seen in movies, or heard from other people.
According to the correspondence theory of truth, a proposition may be true or false depending on whether it fits what is known as "objective reality." When I try to remember something, it's all the same as trying to find propositions that would accurately correspond to this something.
The coherence theory of truth requires a proper fit of elements within a whole system. Hence, I am supposed to look for propositions that would support each other without being contradictory.
I also would like to incorporate the pragmatic theory of truth and social constructivism as well as all sorts of minimalist theories into my analysis, but I am afraid it will take too much time and make my meditation way longer than I planned.
This brief introduction was necessary to set a stage for the development of a particular conversation. The conversation took place yesterday. I met Oksana at ICC and we were talking for about 40 minutes. I am going to write down our conversation as accurately as possible. It is not about representing linguistically the "objective reality," but rather it is about creating a new reality on the basis of the actual conversation. The distinction is crucial, and I want to emphasize once again that merely remembering something is not what I am doing here.
My previous article "The Trivial", where I describe another conversation with Oksana, builds the foundation for this one, and therefore must be read first.
We met at 14:06. The meeting room was still busy, and while waiting until other people take their stuff and get out, I asked Oksana about what she can remember from our previous conversation. After she named the main topics, I offered her to read "The Trivial". It took her about 8 minutes to get through the text. At that time, the room was already free, we grabbed seats and began to talk.
She said that I have a very good memory. I asked about how accurately the article describes what was really going on. She did not catch my pronunciation, so I had to repeat the question articulating every word. After she got it, she said that I described pretty much everything we were talking about. I objected saying that there were so many things which I missed and which bothered me the next day after I'd finished and published the article.
Then, we started talking about writing. I persuaded her to use writing as a tool to analyze her conversations with other people. I tried to make a point that there is a lot more going on in every conversation than one can see simply by participating in it. Another point was to show how our studies are usually disconnected from our experience, which makes both incomplete. I asked what she usually talks about when she records videos. She said that it is everything from what she is doing to what she studies; she likes that there are no boundaries, though often she cannot remember what was on her mind after she records a talk. I asked about the duration of these talks and she replied that it is 10-15 minutes on average. I recommended that she rewatch them from time to time once a week or once a month to get a kind of broader vision.
I don't remember exactly why I brought up the double-sentence technique, but it was funny to explain how it works. Oksana tried it and made a couple of sentences, one of which we changed adding past perfect tense.
Later, we moved to those concepts which I've been studying recently. I introduced such concepts as epistemology and truth, and we spent the rest of our conversation talking about knowledge. I divided all knowledge into abstract, that is to say, taken from books or acquired by reasoning, and the knowledge we gain from experience. Oksana currently studies law at university. To illustrate this division, I suggested that we take as an example various codes of law and real situations like murder or whatever goes on in court. Studying codes of law is about gaining abstract knowledge; being involved or observing real situations is about experiential knowledge. I mentioned that I also studied law at university writing the dissertation on the three branches of government: a legislature, an executive and a judiciary.
From there, we went to the question about self-knowledge. She hesitated to answer the question about what she knew from experience, and I pointed out the videos she made, saying that this was a perfect example of self-knowledge. She told me about some observations which seemed to her puzzling. Deciding to do something, saying this and then not doing it made her think about why she said that she was going to do it in the first place. We talked about different emotional states and consistency in our words and actions.
Finally, I pushed her to build a linguistic body of knowledge out of her experience studying any part of it that she finds the most valuable. I stressed the importance of understanding, not merely memorizing a bunch of words that fit together. I used an analogy with the human body that consists of various parts and organs the names of which one does not need to remember to understand it.
Now, here is the question: Do I need a good memory to reconstruct a conversation like this one? Or all I need is to focus on the "truth" and let it lead my pen? And what is the "truth"? How much "truth" was in these coherently tied propositions? What is more true: my description which can presumably survive for hundreds of years and be read by thousands of people or these 40 minutes which are no longer here? And lastly, how do we know?