Games and Languages

 

 

Evidently, play evolved among animals, including humans: there is a “ludic instinct”. The most likely explanation for this fact is that play provides the opportunity to practice skills that will be useful in the animal’s life—hence its appearance during childhood. But games in the formal cultural sense are not among the instincts of animals; nor are games conspicuous in the animal kingdom. There is no instinct for chess, say, and chess does not exist in animal societies. Games are structured activities governed by rules and these rules have a specific character, namely that they involve the overcoming of unnecessary obstacles toward achieving a goal.  [1] For instance, the game of golf is constituted by rules that forbid the direct placing of balls in holes—the balls must get into the holes by means of clubs wielded from a distance, not merely by dropping them in by hand. A game is not just any old kind of playful activity. I wish to say two things about games so understood: animals don’t play games in the sense defined, and no game is innate in humans. Animals don’t distinguish between activities designed to achieve a certain goal as efficiently as possible (“technical activities”) and activities in which an artificial obstacle is created in order to serve the purposes of a game (such as the net in tennis or the handball rule in football). Animal play, which is real enough, is not governed by rules that proscribe the use of maximally efficient means to achieve a goal; presumably this idea is beyond animals. But even if something like games in this sense did exist in animal societies, they would not be instinctive; games are something additional to instinctive play. Thus in humans no games are innate, though evidently play is. No one is born knowing the rules of chess or baseball or tennis. The origin of games is not natural selection.

            How then do games originate? The obvious answer is invention: people invent games. Two caveats: first, people don’t reinvent a game that has already been invented—they learn a game invented by someone else; second, the invention is not generally a one-off solitary act of creation but consists in a drawn-out sequence of actions gradually honed into the kinds of games we observe. But still, the origin is human inventiveness not genetic endowment: game competence is passed on culturally not by biological inheritance. And it is not that humans originally learned games by observing their natural environment—say, by watching some other species playing games and learning from them. No, humans create games from their own cognitive resources, as they create different kinds of technology (the wheel, the computer)—games are human inventions, neither learned nor innate. We can only invent games because we have a creative capacity—the capacity to bring new and interesting things into the world. This kind of creativity seems generally absent from the animal world, though animals can obviously learn. Animals will never invent snakes and ladders.

 Thus humans have two sorts of capacity in relation to play and games: (a) an innate evolved capacity to engage in play, and (b) a creative capacity with which to invent games (this capacity is presumably itself innate, though its products are not). The innate intersects with the invented: we (instinctively) play (invented) games. Not surprisingly, then, we find a universal tendency among humans to play combined with much variation in what is played. Many different games have been invented in which to express the single universal desire to play. The innate capacity to play might itself involve certain kinds of cognitive and motor competence, and this competence could be quite complex; it is not some kind of lumpish disposition to engage in “frolicking behavior”. It might be structured and rule-governed, generative and unlimited; it might be an intricately organized computational mental module (“the play module”). The play programs might even be digital, recursive, and combinatorial. It is just that they are innate while the actual games played are invented (no innate program for billiards or backgammon). There is interplay between the two levels of psychological reality but the levels should not be conflated, and we must characterize them appropriately (innate versus invented).

            The reason I am making these (I hope) pedestrian remarks is that I want to make an analogy to a far more contested area—language. I want to say that the general human capacity for language is innate but that individual languages are invented—as play is innate but games are invented. The first claim is familiar and I won’t defend it: I shall simply assume that humans are equipped with an innate cognitive structure with the formal characteristics of natural languages (notably recursive syntactic rules and a finite lexicon that combine to produce infinitely many potential sentences).  [2] You can think of this structure as a language of thought: call it LANGUAGE. It is not identical to any human natural language, being more abstract than such a language; it is best understood as a formal computational system instantiated in the brain and deriving from the genes. It is not spoken: whatever its lexicon is the elements of it are not parts of ordinary speech. For concreteness, you might think of it as like a logical language along the lines of quantified modal logic (or whatever your favorite logic is) couched in inscrutable symbols. It is the secret code in which thought expresses itself—the universal medium of mentation. It is not an external spoken language, not even being hooked up to the vocal articulation system. Indeed, it is not inherently communicative but rather a device for expediting reasoning—a tool of thought. Thus LANGUAGE has nothing essentially to do with languages, i.e. spoken systems of human communication. LANGUAGE might have existed without languages ever coming to exist: an internal cognitive structure serving thought but accompanied by no outer system of audible signs. Similarly, play (even complex play) could have existed without the existence of games in the sense defined above; they are something superadded, by no means presupposed. Games incorporate play, but they are not entailed by play. No doubt languages likewise incorporate LANGUAGE, but they are not entailed by LANGUAGE.

            Now I can state my main thesis: languages are invented while LANGUAGE is innate.  [3] Humans found themselves genetically endowed with an internal language of thought and on that basis they erected spoken communicative languages—the former was folded into the latter. Particular languages are thus neither innate nor learned (for who could have instructed the original speakers?); they exist by virtue of human inventiveness. Note as before that this inventiveness is not to be conceived as a singular all-at-once feat of mental construction; it is rather the kind of long drawn-out haphazard process that other cultural inventions are (art, law, politics). But it is still invention, still the exercise of human creativity (not innate endowment or observational learning). Languages are indeed still being invented, reconfigured, changing and growing by human will. They are not like LANGUAGE, the fixed innate system inherited from our ancestors after some freakish genetic mutation and subsequent natural selection. The two sorts of symbolic system have quite different kinds of origin—just like play and games.  [4] That both deserve to be called “language” is neither here nor there: that is a structural description neutral on the question of origin. When languages were invented humans exploited a pre-existing fact about themselves—an internal cognitive structure they did not invent. They linked this structure to the organs of articulation to produce a sound system (possibly a sign system) capable of expressing syntactic combinations—a highly nontrivial task. There was no guarantee that the resources of the vocal system could match the internal structure of LANGUAGE, and indeed some modifications and upgrades were called for. The reason humans invented languages, using LANGUAGE as template, was presumably for purposes of interpersonal communication (though possibly external language further helped as a tool of thought): people had to speak to be heard, i.e. to convey messages–there being no such thing as telepathy. People invented languages as a tool of communication by tapping into a LANGUAGE they did not invent. Hence there are many languages and only one LANGUAGE—as there are many games but only one play instinct (per species). Games and languages are thus part of culture, while play and LANGUAGE are part of biology. Games and languages are products of our inventive faculty, while play and LANGUAGE have their roots in biological evolution (mutation and natural selection).   [5]

            To the old question of how “language” evolved we must split the answer into two parts: (a) how the internal language of thought evolved; (b) how spoken languages evolved (came to exist). These are quite different questions, one question belonging to the science of biology, the other to the study of culture broadly construed. This division corresponds to traditional expectations, if not to many theories popular in the twentieth century; in particular, the concepts of innateness and invention replace the concept of learning.  [6] If LANGUAGE is a tribute to the power of biological evolution, then languages are a tribute to the power of human invention. Clearly our distant ancestors must have been a clever and resourceful lot: they in effect created the language of Shakespeare from a cognitive system not originally designed for external use. This is as impressive in its way as the invention of the cell phone or the atomic bomb.

 

  [1] Here I am following Bernard Suits’ classic treatment of the concept of a game in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (Broadview, 2005).

  [2] Chomsky’s oeuvre is the obvious reference: see in particular Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (MIT Press, 2016; written with Robert C. Berwick) on how language evolved and the relationship between internal and external language.

  [3] I also discuss this in “Invention and Language”.

  [4] This is consistent with allowing that some aspects of our utterances are instinctual: not everything vocal is invented, e.g. groans, cries, shrieks, laughs, etc. We did not invent these noises; we inherited them. But such vocalizations are not part of language properly so-called: they are not part of the system of spoken words that combine syntactically. We invented this system—the mapping of meanings onto segmented sounds. We invented the sound-meaning pairings of English, German, Japanese, etc—though not the species-wide expressive sounds speakers of these languages also make.

  [5] This is not to deny that LANGUAGE is embedded in languages as their scaffolding and soul; it obviously is so embedded. It is just to say that language differences originate from invention not inheritance.

  [6] Of course children learn their native language, but languages don’t come to exist in virtue of learning as opposed to invention (unlike, say, geographical knowledge). The concept of learning was connected to empiricism, but the concepts of innateness and invention invoke quite different modes of intellectual acquisition.

                                               

 

 

Unity and the Universe

 

 

The universe contains different sorts of unity. There is the kind of unity found in conscious subjects (psychic unity), the kind found in animals and artifacts (telic unity), and the kind found in inanimate objects like pebbles or snowflakes (geometric unity). There is phenomenological unity, functional unity, and symmetrical unity. There are also things that lack unity, such as random collections of rocks in a desert or splashing water: here the parts (if we can call them that) are not organized according to any unifying principle—they just exist as separate entities. We can form sets of them, such as the set consisting of this cup, that fern, and the spider under the table, but there is no natural unity here, no coalescence or collusion. Merely being found next to something else does not a unity make.

            Is the universe itself a unity? I want to say not. The universe consists of a disorganized distribution of bits of matter in space with no internal cohesion or pattern. It is not a psychic unity or a telic unity or a geometric unity. In particular, it lacks symmetry: its geometry is nothing like the geometry of a circle or rectangle. It has no more unity than a sprinkling of rocks in a desert. No doubt such a sprinkling had its causes and was brought about by laws of nature (which might themselves be unities), but what was brought about lacks unity—it is just a mess. Perhaps we can say that planets, stars, and solar systems are unities, but the layout of galaxies forms nothing similarly unified, despite being the result of laws. The distribution of matter across space is chaotic, disorganized, and formless. It is so much spatial noise. It exhibits neither logic nor purpose. It is hard to see how it could be planned or thought out—it just happened that way. It’s all higgledy-piggledy. You would think it had just been thrown there, scattered about, rather than carefully arranged or made obedient to some principle of symmetry.

            We have discovered this to be so. The universe was not always thought of this way: we used to believe that it was a unity. There was the idea of celestial harmony (“harmony of the spheres”), but also the more concrete idea that the universe had the unity of a home—that it had the telic unity of a designed artifact. The earth was our house, the sun our heating system, and the starry sky our backyard. God created this home for us and his own unity was stamped upon it: all the parts were laid out to serve a purpose, with nothing jarring or gratuitous. The universe was not a disorderly mess in which we contingently happened to reside. Even when astronomy went heliocentric, this comforting picture survived: still the universe was conceived as a harmonious unity, a place of purpose and pattern. But twentieth century astrophysics put an end to that picture: not only is the universe unimaginably vast and impersonal; it is also formless and chaotic, a complete shambles. We have discovered that it is not a unity but a plethora: a bunch of stuff scattered about without rhyme or reason. It is not like a home or an animal or even a snowflake. It is a hodgepodge, a jumble, a shapeless agglomeration.

            This discovery has reverberations. First, it puts the idea of a divine designer into serious doubt: for how could an intelligent creator put together such a meaningless assemblage? Wouldn’t we expect at least some pleasing symmetry shaping all this widely distributed matter—a kind of cosmic snowflake? Instead it looks like a child’s rumpus room with stuff scattered all over the place. The impressive extent of the universe seems to confirm God’s majesty (but what is the point of so much space and matter?), but its sheer untidiness doesn’t fit our image of God—what was he thinking?  [1] The galaxies are just dotted about the place without regard for aesthetic or functional form, and their internal structure leaves much to be desired (each one a veritable dog’s dinner). The problem becomes acute if we try to follow Spinoza and identify God with the universe. For Spinoza, God is the infinite and perfect substance, so the universe itself needs to be infinite and perfect. But how could a perfect unitary substance such as God stand in the relation of identity to the formless unorganized universe we have discovered to exist? The universe is not really a substance at all—any more than a random collection of rocks in a desert is a substance. The universe is not a unity, so how can it be God? Surely God can’t be a mess! Haphazardness is really not what we expect from an almighty and discerning God.

Secondly, putting the question of God aside, there is the psychological or spiritual impact of astrophysics. It is often noted that the sheer vastness of the universe, compared to our puny dimensions, is an affront to humanity’s self-important view of itself: we are so small and it is so big! But there is also the disquieting fact that we exist in a vast and chaotic world: space stretches out to astronomical distances (literally) and all that space is populated with disorder and chance. It isn’t even like a city that has grown up over time; at least that has some point and form to it. It’s more like matter has just been chucked there, like so much litter. It mocks our attempts at order and pattern: there is no system, no intelligible arrangement. It’s just one damn galaxy after another. The microcosm has system and unity—atoms and molecules—but the macrocosm is a giant disorganized heap (it would be different if it had the form of a crystal, say). The elements of the universe form no overarching unity beyond that of mere spatial aggregation. The universe has about as much form as your average rubbish dump or junkyard. Come to think of it isn’t that the aspect under which the universe presents itself—as a repository of junk? What are those billions of galaxies but so much astronomical garbage, taking up space but serving no purpose?  [2] Biologists speak of junk DNA; well, aren’t vast swaths of the universe so much astronomical junk? You could make a bonfire of it all and lose nothing of value. The universe is a pile of pointless old garbage (even if there are some nice glittering jewels amidst all the dull lumps). Who needs the asteroid belt, for example? It isn’t as if we have found the universe to be some sort of mathematically marvelous super-entity with all sorts of lovely symmetries and a cosmic purpose to boot; no, we have found it to be a disorderly dumping ground for chunks of old matter nobody wants. Unity is the last thing it has on its mind.

You may think I am being too hard on the universe, not giving it its due. You may think I am overstating the universe’s disarray, its charmless lack of structure (as if it is ungrammatical), but consider what we know of its origins. It came about from an explosion (the big bang): there was a previous universe, an antecedent reality, which literally exploded to form the current universe.  [3] This universe, our universe, consists of debris from that explosion, flying out with great velocity into space. And what does debris from an explosion look like? It looks like an unholy mess—anything but orderly. Explosions don’t leave pleasing unities; they leave chaos and disorder. Our universe is the result of an explosion and it has just the properties you would predict from that fact. Our universe is a bombsite, a blast scene, a debris field. It is the result of a shattering and splintering (“the splintered universe”). We can reasonably suppose that the previous universe had some sort of inner unity–enough to constitute a bomb at least, and maybe more (it was not itself the result of an explosion). Then the big bang was the undoing of this unity. The previous universe killed itself in the big bang, destroying its unity and replacing it with the chaotic remains that we see today. If we think of it as analogous to a pane of glass, then the big bang was the shattering of this pane’s unity into a million shards: from organized unity to shapeless heap—or better, an expanding front of fragments whipping through space.  [4] Explosions convert unities into non-unities—surviving fragments, formless debris. Thus we live amidst the ruins of a previous world. Compare the demolition of a building: from a cohesive structured form it instantly turns to dust and jagged fragments. That is our universe: the result of a previous universe demolishing itself. Some unitary parts may survive demolition, but the whole entity does not. Our universe contains some unities, possibly prefigured in the previous universe, but not the original cosmic unity; all that is left is a random distribution of dispersed elements. We live in a razed and ruined city. The universe we know consists of the ruins left behind when the previous universe violently put an end to itself. We could call the big bang the “big splintering”. We are accustomed to thinking of it as an act of creation, but it is also an act of destruction. All explosions create something—their remains—but they are mainly destructive. From the point of view of the previous universe, the big bang was anti-creative: it destroyed what went before. True, it created the bombsite in which we now uneasily reside, and that bombsite has taken on a life of its own (as architectural ruins often do). But the process was a destructive explosion, leaving only debris (initially the big bang produced nothing but formless gas). Given the nature of the universe’s origin, then, we should expect chaos and disorder—the usual results of an explosion. Bits of matter are distributed according to the initial explosive event and whatever forces the bits themselves exert. The expanding universe is simply the universe as it acts after an explosion has propelled it into space.

We know little if anything about the nature of the previous universe, but it seems reasonable to suppose that it was unified—a unity. What kind of unity? In principle it could be anything from our three categories—psychic, telic, or geometric. Or maybe it had some other type of unity whose name we don’t know. The question seems worth investigating: is it possible to infer anything about the nature of this unity from the results of shattering it? What we do know is that the universe that succeeded it is not a unity; and we know why—it’s a debris field. It isn’t the result of a de novo act of constructive creation; it’s the result of a pulverizing act of destruction—the dismemberment of a prior cosmic unity. The big bang destroyed in order to create; or better, it destroyed and accidentally “created” (we don’t create ruins). What we call Creation could equally be called Destruction. You can create a desert by destroying a city, but that is not a terribly impressive form of creation. The previous universe might have been a beautiful unity, only to be replaced by a broken landscape of charred remains. Our universe is like the smoking remnants of a once great metropolis. We have eked out a place in it, like rats in a bombed-out building, but we can’t deny that it is a palace brought to ashes.  [5] We literally live in an exploded (and still exploding) world.

It can take a while before scientific discoveries sink into the human imagination. The heliocentric view is still sinking in, and Darwinian evolution has yet to penetrate deeply and widely; the big bang and associated cosmology have not made much of a dent in old preconceptions. That is, our imagination is stuck in an earlier epoch; we need imaginative forms of expression to make the reality of the universe vivid to ourselves (even if we grasp it abstractly). It is not enough to know it; we have to feel it—feel its consequences and ramifications. Science needs poetry. Here I have tried to articulate what modern cosmology is telling us by emphasizing the lack of order in the layout of the universe and the meaning of the big bang as an act of destructive creation. The universe is less a magnificent cathedral than a pile of remnants. At the moment of the big bang the previous universe was literally vaporized, existing as nothing but free-floating gas, formless and devoid of unity, the very picture of destruction, as if the previous reality had gone up in smoke. But even when gravity began to form pockets of solid matter the universe was still in the throes of the initial destructive act, and the onset of life did not change that. Life on earth evolved on a piece of debris flying through space after the initial cataclysm. We humans live among the remnants of a universe-busting event, a place of disarray and disorder. It is nothing like the friendly and harmonious world depicted by world religions and the mathematical speculations of the ancient Greeks.

 

  [1] Everyone knows the story of Russell extolling (but also lamenting) the vastness of space and Ramsey replying that he wasn’t much impressed with bigness, since he was quite big himself; the human mind was what impressed him. I wonder what both men would say about the unending messiness of the universe.

  [2] You might reply that they could be home to advanced civilizations or at least contented animals, so they are not junk to them. But they might not, and even the ones that are will be mostly redundant junk. Face it: the universe looks like the work of a particularly determined and indiscriminate hoarder.

  [3] I will speak of a “previous universe” though I could make the same points by speaking of previous states of theuniverse. This seems a more apt way of speaking to me, given that the pre-big bang universe must have been radically different from what we see today.

  [4] I should note that on the standard interpretation of big bang cosmology space did not pre-exist the big bang but came with it: space was created by the big bang and expanded as matter was accelerated by it. However, this does not detract from the truth that the big bang was a type of explosion: an abrupt radiating force stemming from a spot of exceptionally high density, pressure, and temperature.

  [5] Of course, I don’t know that the universe before the big bang was a “palace”, but grant me some poetic license. It must have been something other than scattered debris from a prior explosion, since debris doesn’t explode. Astrophysicists speak of a “singularity” and that captures the idea of unity I am working with: the pre-big bang universe was not a sundered mishmash but a concentrated oneness.

                                               

 

 

 

 

 

What is Remembering?

 

 

 

Not much philosophical attention has been paid to the concept of remembering, in contrast to perceiving and communicating (as well as thinking, reasoning, knowing, believing, imagining, willing, intending, acting, feeling, consciousness, and other concepts). How should remembering be conceived? Nabokov entitled his autobiography Speak, Memory: this provides a suggestive starting-point for inquiry into remembering. It suggests that memory works by communicating with the conscious subject—sending messages for conscious recall. Memory speaks to us: that is what remembering is—receiving information transmitted from stored memories. Remembering is hearing messages about the past; it is listening to the past (or information about it). Call this the “communicative model”: the idea is that just as we receive messages from other minds in acts of interpersonal communication, so we receive messages from the part of our own mind known as memory. Remembering is a receptive act, rather like hearing someone speak; but it results from a productive act, like acts of speech themselves. Remembering is listening to a voice within. We should interpret “hearing” and “listening” broadly here, since the deaf can remember but don’t have the power of hearing audible speech. Remembering is a symbolic communicative act, but not necessarily one based on the sense of hearing.

            Perhaps the best way to motivate this theory is to link memory to thought. If we are already predisposed to accept a language of thought, it is no giant leap to extend this conception to memory. Memory clearly interfaces with thought, and if thought is symbolic, then so is memory. Thoughts mingle with memories as they well up from the unconscious, so it is likely that they share a symbolic medium. The mingling is like a conversation between two voices—the voice of memory and the voice of thought. There is a LOT and a LOM and they inter-translate. This theory stands opposed to the theory that remembering is perceiving what lies in memory—that conscious recollection is sensing or apprehending memory traces. Call this the “perceptual model”: memory doesn’t actively communicate its contents; its contents are passively perceived by the remembering subject.  [1] According to the perceptual model, Nabokov should have entitled his memoir Let Me Have a Look, Memory: we scan our memories, as we scan a perceptual scene; they don’t speak to us. Remembering can be modeled either on interpersonal communication or on sense perception. Does memory talk to us or do we gaze at it? Is it an agent or an object?

How can we decide between these two theories? One way is to consider the role of the will in remembering. We can try to remember but we can also try to forget, and we can fail at both. Memory might choose not to speak or it might choose to speak too much: it can either refuse to yield up the information we seek or it can give us information we don’t want. We have limited powers when it comes to accessing our memory, as if we are contending with another agent, possibly with its own agenda. It is hard to square this with the perceptual model: just as we can open or shut our eyes and see or not see, so we should be able to access or block perception of memory at will. Objects of perception don’t actively thwart our will, unless they too have will; but memory appears to have a mind of its own, at least some of the time. It can be cooperative or uncooperative. Consider how memory intrudes into dreams, selecting and trimming, acting like an autonomous agent: it isn’t that dreams are perceptions of memories, driven by the conscious wishes of the dreamer. There is something like a gatekeeper that controls what memories get into the dream and what don’t. It is not so different in waking life: a traumatic memory may insist on making an appearance no matter how much its possessor may try to suppress and banish it. Yet a pleasant or useful memory may remain hidden and inaccessible no matter how hard you try to bring it to awareness. When Nabokov writes, “Speak, memory” he is asking or requesting his memory to speak to him, knowing full well that it may be reluctant to do so; he could equally write, “Don’t speak, memory” if his memory is plaguing him with the past. This is not how we think of a perceptual object—as if it needed to be coaxed into cooperating. We know that memory is active and self-organizing, reconfiguring itself over time, sometimes dramatically so; it is also agent-like in its discretionary powers, sometimes declining to yield up its secrets, sometimes gushing too much. It can be frustrating and infuriating, like a wayward speaker who insists on saying either too little or too much. Nor is its accessibility merely random—there is a method to its disclosures, though it can be hard to divine what that is. This is where we venture into Freudian territory, but there is no need to buy into the whole Freudian apparatus to recognize that what we remember or forget is related to our emotions. Memory is a kind of intentional system, much like a communicating agent; it is not like a passive object of perception, waiting indifferently to be scanned or searched. It speaks or it remains silent, while a perceptual object sits there neutrally.

            It is anyway strange to think of remembering as like seeing a memory—as a brain scientist might see a memory trace in the brain. Surely we don’t literally sense our memories, scrutinize them, view them from different angles. Nor do we introspect them. We are more the recipients of their publications: they speak and we listen, or they remain silent and we hear nothing. The memory system is an active component of the mind, interacting with other components (thought, language, emotion): what is remembered is what is actively delivered to the conscious mind. Memory issues bulletins or keeps its cards close to its chest, according to inscrutable principles (dreams being the clearest example of this inscrutability). It isn’t that it sits there passively awaiting our inspection, playing no role in determining what is remembered. It may even see fit to transmit false memories that deceive the conscious mind—like a speaker who tells lies. Memory can fabricate and confabulate, like the most imaginative and untruthful of speakers, sending us wildly misleading messages. It seems to be doing so on purpose. It isn’t just a storehouse of inert items through which we rummage. It actively asserts that p, truly or falsely, aiming to secure our assent, purporting to be a source of knowledge.  [2] It is more like an orator trying to persuade than a tree standing stiffly before our eyes. One might even come to view one’s memory as a congenital liar, constantly purveying falsity, propaganda, and prejudice. Memory is notoriously susceptible to the promptings of emotion—the original unreliable narrator. It makes things up as it goes along. It can do this only because it operates like a speaker.

            Memory has two jobs: it stores information unconsciously and it transmits information to consciousness. There is not much point in doing the first job if the second is not performed. This duality is analogous to the standard communicator: she contains a store of information (knowledge) as well as the ability to transmit that information to another person. She may be reluctant to transmit the information or she may be enthusiastic about it, as in the case of memory; she may also be good or bad at information transmission, as people have good or bad powers of recall. The structure is the same in both cases. What differentiates them is that we have a full-blown agent in one case but not in the other—an actual person doing the transmitting. In the case of memory we can say that we have a quasi-agent, since memory acts like an intentional system, but it is stretching the point to suggest that memory is a person. Can we find a way to make the analogy complete? Here goes: memory involves a past selfthat speaks to you. At a certain time of your life you had certain experiences and these were laid down in memory, more or less permanently; you later recall them, as your memory communicates its contents. The memories refer back to an earlier time in the life of a person, possibly long ago. Consider a memory that stems from childhood, well before your mature self has formed: isn’t it just as if your childhood self were speaking to you across the years? Doesn’t the memory embed that earlier self in all its innocence and naivety? The memory is saying to you, “I had this experience”. Or rather, your previous self is saying that—sending you a message in a bottle from the past. It is you speaking, or a self that preceded your present self. The memory is a speech act from a previous person. The speech act is delivered by an actual agent—a previous self no less. Such memories have a peculiar charm and magic to them, precisely because they hail from a remote self. In that memory you can hear your old self remotely speaking to you. That self speaks to you through memory. Persons and memories are bound together, so a memory message is connected to a particular past person.

            When I say that memory operates like speech I don’t mean to restrict the means of communication to the standard devices of natural language. The language of memory could take many different forms: it needn’t consist of a pairing of sound and meaning (or a pairing of gesture and meaning in the case of sign language). It could employ sensory materials in the messages it sends—mental images of the past: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory. No doubt many of our memories are clothed in such sensory materials. But that does not invalidate the communicative model or favor the perceptual model (these are not sensory images of memories, but of past events  [3]); it merely tells us that the medium of communication is sensory. Memory employs sensory elements to form the messages it transmits to consciousness—hence their characteristic phenomenology. Its speech acts incorporate pictorial constituents (if that is the right way to view mental images). It need not all be bloodless syntax in an arcane computational language, or insistent voices in the head. Memory can send us messages about the past in the form of visual pictures. The important point is that the means of transmission is like communication (not like perception): it is kind of telling, a letting know, a sharing of information. It is not like the imprinting of an object on a sense organ. Memories speak to us; they don’t present themselves for perceptual inspection. Remembering is like hearing someone talk. It is not like perceiving traces of the past inscribed on a mental parchment.  [4]

 

Colin McGinn   

  [1] This is sometimes called the “searchlight” theory—remembering by directing a light on the contents of memory. By contrast, the communicative model compares remembering to utterance: memories as reports of the past. 

  [2] Thus knowledge of the past emerges as a kind of testimony-based knowledge: we know about the past because we have heard testimony about it—because memory has spoken to us. We don’t know about it by (currently) perceiving it.

  [3] I am not ruling out a perceptual model of our psychological relationship to past events, just our relationship tomemories of such events. I don’t favor that model of memories of events, but it is compatible with the communicative model of remembering itself: we see past events by being told about them. Memory speaks to us and we thereby become perceptually acquainted with the past. This would be the analogue of perceiving a present object by being told about it—perception by means of testimony. This is a strange idea, no doubt, but not incompatible with viewing memory as speech.

  [4] The classic idea of a memory trace invites the perceptual model—we detect these traces by a process of internal scanning. The trace is like a visible footprint left by the past. But this model is not obligatory and it fails to capture the active and selective nature of memory. No doubt there are states of the brain that correspond to memories, but it is a further step to identify the two. And the existence of such brain states is quite compatible with the idea that remembering is essentially a communicative process (there are obviously correlated brain states in individuals that communicate). The important point is that remembering is a kind of listening: thus the aptness of Nabokov’s title. In remembering your mind speaks to you of the past.