Could you have someone else’s memories?

When you have a memory (for instance, you remember walking down the street from your house to the office this morning) — it seems perfectly obvious that this must be your memory. If you remember it, then the remembered episode must also be one of your past experiences. Otherwise it would not be a memory, but a fantasy. (Or some other kind of imaginative project.)

Yet some philosophers[1] have speculated about the idea of q-memories (or quasi-memories). A q-memory is like a memory; but if you have a q-memory, you don’t remember an episode from your own life, you remember one from another person’s life.[2] (Perhaps we could profitably apply the notion in an interpretation of Poe’s “Tale of the Ragged Mountains”?)

1) Richard Wollheim[3] has criticized the notion of q-memory as, first, “incompatible with the way […] in which persons, even as they live in the present, can be brought under the influence of the past” (TL 111-112); and secondly, as unintelligible (TL 112-117). The latter argument is more detailed, but the former is more interesting. Wollheim doesn’t pursue it in The Thread of Life, because in that book, he has used centered event-memory, the particular type of memory in question, to characterize what it means to live a human life. And assuming that characterization to fit, the argument would run into a circularity. But precisely why would that be?

2) The argument takes the form of modus tollens:

a) If q-memory were possible, then people could not lead their lives in the way they do.
b) People lead their lives in a way so that they can be brought under the influence of the past.

Premise b) expands the consequent of premise a) here, therefore

c) If q-memory were possible, then people could not be brought under the influence of the past.

The somewhat obscure phrase “brought under the influence of the past” means broadly this: when a person leads a life, he experiences it in the present — and thereby forms dispositions which then persist. Such dispositions can be beliefs, memories, dispositions to fantasize in a particular way, and so on. These dispositions exert some force over the person: memories come unbidden (sometimes); beliefs shape the way we perceive reality and act in the world; fantasies can inspire us or drain our energy away. We lead our lives, as Wollheim puts it, always “at a crossroads: at the point where a past that has affected him and a future that lies open meet in the present” (TL 31). And “that the past influences the person largely through mental states is responsible for much of how we live” (TL 32). This is the general claim of the book, and it is crystallized in premises a) to c) above.

Now since

d) We in fact lead our lives in the way we do.

e) Therefore, q-memory is not possible.

And e) follows from c) and d) by modus tollens.

3) So far, so good. The argument is valid, but its cogency would depend on the rather large claims about how we lead our lives. And evaluating those claims would mean to engage with the whole argument of The Thread of Life. But I’m not concerned with whether the argument is cogent; I’m concerned with the question why Wollheim thinks that it is circular.

To answer that question, it will be helpful to understand why Wollheim is interested in the idea of q-memory in the first place. The reason for that is that

“centered event-memory is best studied for the contribution it makes to the way in which persons lead their lives […] Specifically, it must be sufficient for the identity of a person’s life.” (TL 110)

In Wollheim’s picture, we can use centered event-memory as sufficient identity criterion for the life of a person (the totality of all events, actions, perceptions etc. in which that person is ever involved). If you have a centered event-memory of an episode (such as walking down the street from your house to the office this morning), this is sufficient for concluding that both the episode and your remembering pick out the same overall life.

Thus, the overall argument reads like this:

i) If q-memories were possible, centered event memory would not be a sufficient identity criterion for lives. 

ii) If q-memories were possible, then people could not be brought under the influence of the past. 

iii) People can in fact be brought under the influence of the past. 

iv) Q-memories are not possible. 

v) Therefore, centered event-memory is a sufficient identity criterion for lives.

Here, premises ii) to iv) are the equivalent of a) to e) above, and iv) follows from ii) and iii). As it stands, the argument is not valid, but it now fully reflects the line of thought which Wollheim presents. Supposing it could be made valid (which I think possible), it is now also quite clear where the circularity lies. For in order to state premise ii), one must assume something very close to v).

[1] Sydney Shoemaker (“Persons and Their Pasts”, in: American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970), 269-285), and following him, Derek Parfit, (“Personal Identity”, in: The Philosophical Review LXXX (1971), 3-27).

[2] Strictly speaking, the notion of q-memory is construed so that it contains memory as a special case, so when you’re having a q-memory, you are remembering something either from your own or from another person’s life. But the latter is of course the more intriguing possibility.

[3] Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life. The William James Lectures 1982. New Haven: Yale UP 1984. Quoted directly with TL and page number.

Einsteigen

When I was a child (I remember) I watched a movie called Die Einsteiger. It was centered around a couple of geeks who were able to 'jump into a movie' by means of some technical instrument. The film was firmly in the genre of light entertainment, and the technique of entering the worlds of movies was simply used as a device for bringing in jokes and a bit of action. But I was fascinated by this core idea: what if you could simply enter a movie plot, such as that of Raiders of the lost ark or Dance of the vampires, walk around in the world of that movie, participate in the action (or wander off to some parts of it that weren't even shown in the film)?

Where did that fascination come from? Was it just childish identification with the adventurous heroes in those films? A bit of that was certainly in the mix for me, at the time. But then the fascination didn't fade away even long after heroic fantasies had (predictably) lost their appeal. So perhaps there's something more interesting to be found here. Mostly, I think, what was intriguing was this notion of crossing that border, of walking around in a world I knew didn't exist. After all, even though it didn't exist, it could be imagined, described, and even depicted in a movie. So how much of a step could it be to actually go there, to travel into it and walk around inside it? Strictly speaking, it actually can be done in fantasy only, and a movie such as the one I saw is best described as simply acting out a fantasy. But the fact remains that the idea on which this fantasy is based exerts an immense pull on the imagination. So let's have a closer look at that idea.

The world of a movie, just as the world of a novel, the past, or the future, is the world of an instance of unreality — it's not really there, but you can imagine it (including the people and events in it) to be there. Typically, this imaginative activity requires some prompting. Fiction is a paradigmatic example of what induces us to imagine such unreal worlds; but there are others, too: dreams do the same; or you can deliberately trigger it yourself in daydreams.

When we imagine the world of a movie, we fit it with as many details as is needed for the narrative. Thus Dance of the vampires will include a wide landscape in deep snow, a rustic inn, and a sinister castle where the vampires reside. It will also include a bizarre cast of characters (the single-minded professor and his fearful assistant, the selfish innkeeper and his beautiful bathing-addict daughter, and the cruel and powerful vampire chief along with his dandyish son). Once the world is stuffed and staffed with all these items and people, there is a sequence of events (the plot), with some memorable scenes perhaps standing out of the stream of what happens. What we mean when we speak of 'the world' of this movie is something like this rough inventory I've just given. We're only able to speak about it like that after we have seen the movie, of course, and that implies also that, even before that, the movie must have been realized (i.e. produced). All those items must have been created (by use of props and scenery, with the help of a camera and nowadays quite likely also computer-generated imagery); all those characters must have been portrayed (by actors), guided by a script and directed by someone with an overall vision, in order to make it coherent and detailed enough to be recognized as a fictional world on its own.

Now if such a fictional world exerts a certain pull on our imagination — if it is an interesting enough place to capture our curiosity and attention —, it seems that this creates a desire for more: we might want to re-watch the movie (sometimes several times), to re-live the experience of getting immersed in that story and its world. (Perhaps a movie makes this even easier for many people because, in contrast to a novel, the visual representation facilitates the operation of the imagination.) What's more: we might also feel that the world in which the story unfolds is so rich and fascinating in itself (aside from the particular plot) that we can easily imagine other interesting stories unfolding in it, too. In other words, we begin to imagine that more happens within the same landscape, more happens to the same characters, than the story presents. If you fancy yourself in the plot of Dance of the vampires, it's not that you simply want to mechanically play out the same role as, say the young assistant to the professor, Polanski's character, seeing the world of the movie through his eyes, re-experiencing what he must have felt. In a sense, that is what you already get from the movie. You want more. You think that you, in the place of that character, might have done something different. Perhaps you may have simply lingered for half an hour longer in this curious old castle, or spent a couple of hundred years reading through that enormous library, or perhaps you might have done something different entirely which none of the movie's characters would ever have thought of. The point is that the moment you can imagine doing something else in the world of that movie than the characters do, however minor a thing it might be, you are on the track I'm exploring here. (Your imagination has widened the space of options within that world of fiction.)

But of course, there is not much of a chance that this gigantic movie machinery will be put to use again just in order to give you that experience. (Some experience may be outside the powers of even Hollywood, anyway.) So your phantasy will probably remain just that. And this is where the idea of a device that can take you there, a device as in Die Einsteiger, begins to seem mightily attractive. (It's the same way in which a time machine begins to get a very desirable thing when you consider using it to visit some event in your past that you happen to have missed.)

So it seems there are at least two conditions to the desire to travel into the world of a movie: it must be a full-fledged world that is open for some possibly interesting activity (an activity that would be interesting enough so that you want to engage in it), and the surroundings must include options which you can't get anywhere else. (Consider: if a movie is set in the Bahamas, and the only thing that is intriguing for you is the nice, sunny beaches you see, then you wouldn't desire to be in the movie — you would simply desire to be in the Bahamas. Now unless that is so unaffordable for you that it is entirely out of the question, this is a desire that's easily fulfilled: just go there! The desire to have a movie-travel machine won't come up. It will only come into play if there is something attractive about the world of the movie itself, something you can't have by merely booking a holiday.)

Fantasy, imagination, and unreality

In a passage I find illuminating,[1] Roger Scruton distinguishes imagination from fantasy (or aesthetic interest from mere effect):

True art appeals to the imagination whereas effects elicit fantasy. Imaginary things are pondered, fantasies are acted out. [...] A fantasy desire seeks neither a literary description, nor a delicate painting of its object, but a simulacrum — an image from which all veils of hesitation have been torn away. It eschews style and convention, since these impede the building of the surrogate, and subject it to judgment. (104–105)

The defining characteristic, then, is that imagination (the operation from an aesthetic interest) creates a distance, where fantasy destroys every distance (104). And it's not just an arbitrary sort of distance, but one that comes from inserting elements that have to do with the specific capacities I described in my post about our appreciation of the craft (in products of the imagination). Since fantasy destroys the distance that is essential in imagination, no beauty and real emotion can survive in it.

Scruton illustrates that point with respect to different subject matters: one is sexual fantasy, facilitated by pornographic images: "pornography lies outside the realm of art, [...] is incapable of beauty in itself and desecrates the beauty of people displayed in it. The pornographic image is like a magic wand that turns subjects into objects, people into things — and thereby disenchants them, destroying the source of their beauty." (163)

Another one is theatre. There, "the action is not real but represented, and however realistic, avoids (as a rule) those scenes which are the food of fantasy. In Greek tragedy the murders take place off stage [...]. The purpose is not to deprive death of its emotional power, but to contain it within the domain of the imagination" (106).

Imagination, as I would put it in the terms used on this blog, engages us in the creation of unreality, whereas fantasy does no such thing for us. It leaves us in the world of reality, and quite probably in a worse way than most alternatives. Since Scruton doesn't use 'unreality' in the technical sense I do, he assigns 'unrealities' both to imagination and fantasy, but that's a difference in terminology only; Scruton's 'unrealities' of fantasy are within our world, not within any world of the imagination: "while the unrealities of fantasy penetrate and pollute our world, those of the imagination exist in a world of their own, in which we wander freely and in a condition of sympathetic detachment." (105) It's that distance which is amiss in fantasy, which is why it wouldn't qualify as unreality (produced by the activity of imagination) in my sense. Fantasy is precisely an example for what it looks like when you take imagination out of the picture: not unreality, but a de-humanized reality.

[1] In his Beauty. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009. Quoted with page numbers in the text.