What makes a mental state feel like a memory: feelings of pastness and presence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ef.n64a05Keywords:
memory, perception, imagination, phenomenologyAbstract
The intuitive view that memories are characterized by a feeling of pastness, perceptions by a feeling of presence, while imagination lacks either faces challenges from two sides. Some researchers complain that the “feeling of pastness” is either unclear, irrelevant or isn’t a real feature. Others point out that there are cases of memory without the feeling of pastness, perception without presence, and other cross-cutting cases. Here we argue that the feeling of pastness is indeed a real, useful feature, and although this feeling does not define memory ontologically, it is a characteristic marker which helps us easily categorise a mental state first-personally. We outline several cognitive features that underlie this experience, including the feeling of past accessibility, ergonomic significance, immersion, objectivity and mental strength. Our account is distinctly phenomenal, rather than doxastic, although our web of beliefs may contribute to this experience.
Downloads
References
Albright, T. D. (2012). On the perception of probable things: neural substrates of associative memory, imagery, and perception. Neuron, 74 (2), 227–245. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2012.04.001
Allen, K. (2015). Hallucination and imagination. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 93(2), 287–302. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2014.984312
Anstis, S. (2010). Visual filling-in. Current Biology, 20(16), R664-R666. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.06.029
Arcangeli, M. (2020). The two faces of mental imagery. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 101(2), 304-322. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12589
Arntz, A., de Groot, C. & Kindt, M. (2005). Emotional memory is perceptual. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 36(1), 19–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2004.11.003
Augustine. (1998). The city of god against the pagans. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511802300
Barkasi, M. (2020a). Does what we dream feel present? Two varieties of presence and implications for measuring presence in VR. Synthese, 1-27 [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02898-4
Barkasi, M. (2020b). Some hallucinations are experiences of the past. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 101(3), 454-488. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12320
Barkasi, M. (2021). What should the sensorimotor enactivist say about dreams? Philosophical Explorations, 24(2), 243-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2021.1908575
Barkasi, M. & Rosen, M. G. (2020). Is mental time travel real time travel? Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 1(1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2020.1.28
Bitbol, M. & Petitmengin, C. (2013). A defense of introspection from within. Constructivist Foundations, 8(3), 269–279.
Bitbol, M. & Petitmengin, C. (2016). On the possibility and reality of introspection. Mind and Matter, 14(1), 51-75.
Bitbol, M. & Petitmengin, C. (2017). Neurophenomenology and the microphenomenological interview. In S. Schneider & M. Velmans (Eds.), The blackwell companion to consciousness, 2 edition (pp. 726-739). Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119132363.ch51
Bob, P. & Mashour, G. A. (2011). Schizophrenia, dissociation, and consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4), 1042-1049. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2011.04.013
Bone, M. B., Ahmad, F. & Buchsbaum, B. R. (2020). Feature-specific neural reactivation during episodic memory. Nature Communications, 11(1945), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15763-2
Butz, M. V. (2017). Which structures are out there: learning predictive compositional concepts based on social sensorimotor explorations. In PPP-Philosophy and Predictive Processing (pp. 1-16). MIND Group.
Byrne, A. (2007). Possibility and imagination. Philosophical Perspectives, 21(1), 125-144. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2007.00123.x
Byrne, A. (2010). Recollection, perception, imagination. Philosophical Studies, 148, 15-26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9508-1
Corlett, P., Taylor, J. R., Wang, X.-J., Fletcher, P. C. & Krystal, J. H. (2010). Toward a neurobiology of delusions. Progress in Neurobiology, 92(3), 345-369. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pneurobio.2010.06.007
Craver, C. F. (2020). Remembering: epistemic and empirical. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(2), 261-181. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00469-7
De Brigard, F. (2014). Is memory for remembering? Recollection as a form of episodic hypothetical thinking. Synthese 191, 155-185. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0247-7
Debus, D. (2016). Imagination and memory. In Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination (pp. 135–148). Routledge.
Descartes, R. (1998). Discourse on method and meditations on first philosophy (D. A. Cress, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company.
Dijkstra, N., Mazor, M., Kok, P. & Fleming, S. (2021). Mistaking imagination for reality: congruent mental imagery leads to more liberal perceptual detection. Cognition, 212, 104719. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104719
Dokic, J. (2014). Feeling the past: a two-tiered account of episodic memory. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5, 413-426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0183-6
Dokic, J. & Martin, J.-R. (2017). Felt reality and the opacity of perception. Topoi, 36(2), 299-309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9327-2
Dretske, F. (1994). Introspection. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 94, 263-278. https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/94.1.263
Elliott, M. L., Knodt, A. R., Ireland, D., Morris, M. L., Poulton, R., Ramrakha, S. & Hariri, A. (2020). What is the test-retest reliability of common task-fMRI measures? New empirical evidence and a meta-analysis. bioRxiv [preprint] https://doi.org/10.1101/681700
Fernández, J. (2019). Memory: a self-referential account. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190073008.001.0001
Fernández, J. (2020). Self-referential memory and mental time travel. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11, 283–300. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00453-w
Ffytche, D. H. (2013). The hallucinating brain: neurobiological insights into the nature of hallucinations. In F. Macpherson & D. Platchias (Eds.), Hallucination: Philosophy and Psychology (pp. 45–64). The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262019200.003.0003
Filevich, E., Dresler, M., Brick, T. R. & Kühn, S. (2015). Metacognitive mechanisms underlying lucid dreaming. The Journal of Neuroscience, 35(3), 1082-1088. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3342-14.2015
Grassini, S. & Laumann, K. (2020). Questionnaire measures and physiological correlates of presence: A systematic review. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00349
Handel, S. (2019). Perceptual organization: an integrated multisensory approach. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96337-2
Horikawa, T. & Kamitani, Y. (2017a). Generic decoding of seen and imagined objects using hierarchical visual features. Nature Communications, 8(15037), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15037
Horikawa, T. & Kamitani, Y. (2017b). Hierarchical neural representation of dreamed objects revealed by brain decoding with deep neural network features. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 11(4), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2017.00004
Horikawa, T., Tamaki, M., Miyawaki, Y. & Kamitani, Y. (2013). Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep. Science, 340, 639–642. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1234330
Hume, D. (1739/2000). A treatise of human nature. Clarendon Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oseo/instance.00046221
Husserl, E. (1975). Experience and judgment. Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, E. (2006). Phantasy, image consciousness, and memory (1898-1925) (Vol. 11). Springer Science & Business Media.
Ichikawa, J. (2008). Scepticism and the imagination model of dreaming. The Philosophical Quarterly, 58(232), 519–527. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.546.x
Ichikawa, J. (2016). Imagination, dreaming, and hallucination. In The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination (pp. 149-162). Routledge.
Ichikawa, J. & Sosa, E. (2009). Dreaming, philosophical perspectives. In The Oxford Companion to Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
James, W. (1892/1962). Psychology: briefer course. Collier Books. https://doi.org/10.1037/11630-000
Jansen, J. A. (2010). Phenomenology, imagination and interdisciplinary research. In D. Schmicking & S. Gallagher (Eds.), Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (pp. 141-158). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2646-0_8
Kimble, M., Boxwala, M., Bean, W., Maletsky, K., Halper, J., Spollen, K. & Fleming, K. (2014). The impact of hypervigilance: evidence for a forward feedback loop. Journal of anxiety disorders, 28(2), 241-245. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2013.12.006
Kind, A. (2017). Imaginative vividness. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 3(1), 32-50. https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2017.10
LaBerge, S. (1981). Lucid dreaming: directing the action as it happens. Psychology Today, 15(1), 48-57.
LaBerge, S. (1985). Lucid dreaming. J. P. Tarcher.
LaBerge, S. (2000). Lucid dreaming: evidence and methodology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(6), 962-964. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00574020
LePort, A. K. R., Stark, S. M., McGaugh, J. L. & Stark, C. E. L. (2017). A cognitive assessment of highly superior autobiographical memory. Memory, (Hove, English), 25(2), 276-288. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2016.1160126
Levy, L. (2012). Rethinking the Relationship between Memory and Imagination in Sartre’s The Imaginary. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 43(2), 143-160. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2012.11006764
Loftus, E. F. & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric annals, 25(12), 720-725. https://doi.org/10.3928/0048-5713-19951201-07
Mahr, J. B. & Csibra, G. (2018). Why do we remember? The communicative function of episodic memory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, e1. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X17000012
Mather, G. (2016). Foundations of sensation and perception (3 ed.). Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315672236
Matthen, M. (2005). Seeing, doing, and knowing: a philosophical theory of sense perception. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199268509.001.0001
Matthen, M. (2010). Two visual systems and the feeling of presence. In N. Gangopadhyay, M. Madary & F. Spicer (Eds.), Perception, action, and consciousness: sensorimotor dynamics and two visual systems (pp. 107–124). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199551118.003.0007
McGurk, H. & MacDonald, J. (1976). Hearing lips and seeing voices. Nature, 264(5588), 746-748. https://doi.org/10.1038/264746a0
Metzinger, T. (2003). Phenomenal transparency and cognitive self-reference. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2(4), 353-393. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:PHEN.0000007366.42918.eb
Metzinger, T. (2009). The ego tunnel: the science of the mind and the myth of the self. Basic Books. Michaelian, K. (2011). Generative memory. Philosophical Psychology, 24(3), 323-342. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2011.559623
Michaelian, K. (2016). Confabulating, misremembering, relearning: the simulation theory of memory and unsuccessful remembering. Frontiers in Psychology 25(1857), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01857
Mitterer, H., Horschig, J. M., Müsseler, J. & Majid, A. (2009). The influence of memory on perception: it’s not what things look like, it’s what you call them. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(6), 1557. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017019
Mizuguchi, N., Nakata, H., Uchida, Y. & Kanosue, K. (2012). Motor imagery and sport performance. The Journal of Physical Fitness and Sports Medicine, 1(1), 103-111. https://doi.org/10.7600/jpfsm.1.103
Morales, J. (2018). The strength of the mind: essays on consciousness and introspection (Ph. D. thesis). Columbia University.
Nanay, B. (2016a). Hallucination as mental imagery. Journal of Consciousness Studies 23(7-8), 65-81.
Nanay, B. (2016b). Imagination and perception. In The Routledge handbook of the philosophy of imagination (pp. 124–134). Routledge.
Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. The MIT Press.
Noë, A. (2007). Magic realism and the limits of intelligibility: what makes us conscious. Philosophical Perspectives, 21, 457-474. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2007.00132.x
Overgaard, M. & Mogensen, J. (2017). An integrative view on consciousness and introspection. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 8, 129-141. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0303-6
Palombo, D. J., Sheldon, S. & Levine, B. (2018). Individual differences in autobiographical memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(7), 583-597. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.04.007
Patihis, L., Frenda, S. J., LePort, A. K. R., Petersen, N., Nichols, R. M., Stark, C. E. L., McGaugh, J. L. & Loftus, E. F.
(2013). False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(52), 20947-20952. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1314373110
Pelaprat, E. & Cole, M. (2011). “Minding the gap”: imagination, creativity and human cognition. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 45(4), 397-418. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-011-9176-5
Penfield, W. & Perot, P. (1963). The brain’s record of auditory and visual experience. Brain 86(4), 595-696. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/86.4.595
Perky, M. C. W. (1910). An experimental study of imagination. The American Journal of Psychology, 21, 422-452. https://doi.org/10.2307/1413350
Perrin, D., Michaelian, K. & Sant’Anna, A. (2020). The phenomenology of remembering is an epistemic feeling. Frontiers in Psychology, 11(1531), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01531
Pizlo, Z. (2001). Perception viewed as an inverse problem. Vision research, 41(24), 3145-3161. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0042-6989(01)00173-0
Redshaw, J. (2014). Does metarepresentation make human mental time travel unique? WIREs Cognitive Science, 5(5), 519-531. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1308
Revonsuo, A. (1995). Consciousness, dreams and virtual reality. Philosophical Psychology, 8(1), 35-58. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089508573144
Robins, S. K. (2019). Confabulation and constructive memory. Synthese, 196, 2135-2151. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1315-1
Rosen, M. G. (2013). What I make up when I wake up: anti-experience views and narrative fabrication of dreams. Frontiers in Psychology, 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00514
Rosen, M. G. (2018a). How bizarre? A pluralist approach to dream content. Consciousness and Cognition, 62, 148-162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2018.03.009
Rosen, M. G. (2018b). Your dream-body: all an illusion? commentary on Windt’s account of the dream-body. Dreaming. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25(5-6), 44-62.
Rosen, M. G. (2019). Dreaming of a stable world: vision and action in sleep. Synthese, 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02149-1
Russell, B. (1921). The analysis of mind. George Allen and Unwin.
Sanchez-Vives, M. V. & Slater, M. (2005). From presence to consciousness through virtual reality.
Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 332-339. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1651
Sant’Anna, A. & Michaelian, K. (2019). Thinking about events: a pragmatist account of the objects of episodic hypothetical thought. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 10, 187-217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0391-6
Schacter, D. L. & Addis, D. R. (2007). The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory: remembering the past and imagining the future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1481), 773-786. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.2087
Schredl, M. (2018). Researching dreams: the fundamentals. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95453-0
Schwitzgebel, E. (2008). The unreliability of naïve introspection. Philosophical Review, 117, 245-273. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2007-037
Siegel, S. (2006). Subject and object in the contents of visual experience. Philosophical Review, 115(3), 355-88. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2006-003
Sutton, J. (1998). Philosophy and memory traces: Descartes to connectionism. Cambridge University Press.
Sutton, J. (2003). Constructive memory and distributed cognition: towards an interdisciplinary framework. In B. Kokinov & W. Hirst (Eds.), Constructive Memory (pp. 290-303). New Bulgarian University.
Teroni, F. (2017). The phenomenology of memory. In The Oxford handbook of philosophy of memory (pp. 21–33). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315687315-3
Thomas, N. J. (2014). The multidimensional spectrum of imagination: images, dreams, hallucinations, and active, imaginative perception. Humanities, 3(2), 132-184. https://doi.org/10.3390/h3020132
Tulving, E. (1983). Elements of episodic memory. Oxford University Press.
Tulving, E. (1985). Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 26(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0080017
Tulving, E. (2002). Episodic memory: from mind to brain. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135114
Voss, U., Schermelleh-Engel, K. Windt, J., Frenzel, C. & Hobson, A. (2013). Measuring consciousness in dreams: the lucidity and consciousness in dreams scale. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(1), 8-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.001
Wade, K. A., Garry, M., Read, J. D. & Lindsay, D. S. (2002). A picture is worth a thousand lies: using false photographs to create false childhood memories. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(3), 597-603. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196318
Whiteley, C. M. K. (2020). Aphantasia, imagination and dreaming. Philosophical Studies, 178, 2111–2132. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01526-8
Wiese, W. & Metzinger, T. (2017). Vanilla PP for philosophers: a primer on predictive processing. In T. Metzinger & W. Wiese (Eds.), Philosophy and Predictive Processing (pp. 1-18). MIND Group. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262036993.003.0008
Windt, J. M. (2010). The immersive spatiotemporal hallucination model of dreaming. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9, 295-316. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11097-010-9163-1
Windt, J. M. (2018). Predictive brains, dreaming selves, sleeping bodies: how the analysis of dream movement can inform a theory of self- and world-simulation in dreams. Synthese, 195, 2577-2625. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1525-6
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Melanie Rosen, Michael Barkasi
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
1. The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term "Work" shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
2. Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
3. The Author shall grant to the Publisher a nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoCommercia-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions: (a) Attribution: Other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;(b) Noncommercial: Other users (including Publisher) may not use this Work for commercial purposes;
4. The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal;
5. Authors are permitted, and Estudios de Filosofía promotes, to post online the preprint manuscript of the Work in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access). Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work is expected be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Estudios de Filosofía's assigned URL to the Article and its final published version in Estudios de Filosofía.
