Can you remember with your leg, and is that part of who you are? An interesting piece by Ben Platts-Mills in Psyche suggests it might be so. This is not Psyche the good old journal that went under in 2010, alas, but a promising new venture from those excellent folk at Aeon.
The piece naturally mentions Locke, who put memory at the centre of personal identity, and gives some fascinating snippets about the difficult lives of people with anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories. These people have obviously not lost their identities, however they may struggle. I have always been sceptical about the Lockean view more or less for this reason; if I lost my memories, would I stop being me? It doesn’t quite seem so.
In the cases mentioned we don’t quite have that total loss, though; the subjects mainly retain some or all of their existing memories, so a Lockean can simply say those retained memories are what preserve their identity. The inability to form new memories merely stops their identity going through the incremental further changes which are presumably normal (though some of these people do seem to change).
Platts-Mills wants to make the bolder claim that in fact important bits of memory and identity are stored, not in the brain, but in the context and bodies involved. Perhaps a subject does not remember anything about art, but fixed bodily habits draw them towards a studio where the tools and equipment (perhaps we could say the affordances) prompt them to create. This clearly chimes well with much that has been written about various versions of the extended or expanded mind.
I don’t think these examples make the case very strongly, though; Platts-Mills seems to underestimate the brain, in particular assuming that the absence of conscious recall means there’s no brain memory at all. In fact our brains clearly retain vast amounts of stuff we cannot get at consciously. Platts-Mills mentions a former paediatric nurse who cannot remember her career but when handed a baby, holds it correctly and asks good professional questions about it. Fine, but it would take a lot to convince me that her brain is not playing a major role there.
One of the most intriguing and poignant things in the piece is the passing remark that some sufferers from anterograde amnesia actually prefer to forget their earlier lives. That seems difficult to understand, but at any rate those people evidently don’t feel the loss of old memories threatens their existence – or do they consider themselves new people, unrelated to the previous tenant of their body?
That last thought prompts another argument against the extended view. The notion that we could be transferred to someone else’s body (or to no body at all) is universally understood and accepted, at least for the purposes of fiction (and, without meaning to be rude, religion). The idea of moving into a different body is not one of those philosophical notions that you should never start trying to explain at the end of a dinner party; it’s a common feature of SF and magic stories that no-one jibs at. That doesn’t, of course, mean transfers are actually possible, even in theory (I feel fairly sure they aren’t), but it shows at least that people at large do not regard the body as an essential part of their identity.
Related to the concept of “body memory”. https://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799
An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planarians and its persistence through head regeneration
Tal Shomrat, Michael Levin
Journal of Experimental Biology 2013 216: 3799-3810; doi: 10.1242/jeb.087809
SUMMARY
Planarian flatworms are a popular system for research into the molecular mechanisms that enable these complex organisms to regenerate their entire body, including the brain. Classical data suggest that they may also be capable of long-term memory. Thus, the planarian system may offer the unique opportunity to study brain regeneration and memory in the same animal. To establish a system for the investigation of the dynamics of memory in a regenerating brain, we developed a computerized training and testing paradigm that avoided the many issues that confounded previous, manual attempts to train planarians. We then used this new system to train flatworms in an environmental familiarization protocol. We show that worms exhibit environmental familiarization, and that this memory persists for at least 14 days – long enough for the brain to regenerate. We further show that trained, decapitated planarians exhibit evidence of memory retrieval in a savings paradigm after regenerating a new head. Our work establishes a foundation for objective, high-throughput assays in this molecularly tractable model system that will shed light on the fundamental interface between body patterning and stored memories. We propose planarians as key emerging model species for mechanistic investigations of the encoding of specific memories in biological tissues. Moreover, this system is likely to have important implications for the biomedicine of stem-cell-derived treatments of degenerative brain disorders in human adults.
Maybe it helps to think in terms of control systems. A limb, or a tool external to the body, can participate in a control loop, by bringing in sensory data and taking motor actions. It may even do some local control itself, as with reflex actions, or control systems within tools. However the control loop does not top out until it gets back to the brain which is where what is good for the organisms is determined, and appropriate links between senses and motor action are established.
Personally, I think the extended mind people are confusing or conflating two seemingly related concepts–namely subjective, first-person experience (i.e. consciousness), and cognition.
I agree with them insofar as I think it’s fair to say that there is no distinct point where cognitive activity ends and the “outside” world, including the rest of the body, begins. For instance, does the processing of sensory information begin where world meets sense organs? Where sense organs meet nerve fibers? Where nerve fibers meet the spinal cord? Where spinal cord meets brain stem? Where one brain region meets another more involved brain region? Etc. (Please excuse any poor understanding of anatomy here…)
But why start our inquiry where world meets sense organs? Why not include the immediate cause of the part of the world that meets the sense organs? Or the cause that caused that cause? Heck, why not start with the cause of all other causes–the Big Bang?
So I agree that the proper starting point of cognition can be seen as a grey area. But that’s very different than consciousness. I don’t know how consciousness works, but I don’t see how my experience, if it is indeed spatially located, could be so diffuse. Consciousness may be identical to brain processes (although I seriously doubt it), but if my conscious experience is spread out beyond my brain, and even beyond my body, then there’s at least one thing I can know for certain: consciousness is non-physical.
If the extended mind people are right, I don’t see how they can consider their idea to be a materialist explanation of consciousness. Maybe they should change the name of their theory to “extended cognition” or “extended brain”.
For most of human history, people situated the self in the heart. The idea that it might be in the brain was a minority opinion, until the scientific revolution. But the switch has never sat well with a lot people. It seems to defy our intuitive sense of self. With many pushing cognition more and more back toward the body.
In the 19th century, people thought consciousness might be in the spinal cord, until people living with spinal cord injuries spoiled that notion. Even today, many insist that it’s in the brainstem, seemingly trying to get consciousness back as close to the body as possible. When I read assertions by the embodied cognition folks, the sense I get is that of a similar romantic revolt against the modern view of the brain and self.
None of this is to say that the relationship between the brain and body isn’t a tight one. There are important resonances between the brain and body. But we shouldn’t get too carried away with this notion. There’s no one part of the body you can lose and not still be the same self (assuming you live), except the brain.
Peter, I am not sure what you mean when you write ‘people at large do not regard the body as an essential part of their identity’. Whilst that may not be yours or my personal regard, it unfortunately does seem to be the modern opinion, as the body fitness, cosmetic and surgical industries thrive on people who regard their bodies as an essential part of their identity. For some, it seems as if it is sadly their only identity.
There are more and more transplants, modifications and mechanical additions to humans, so who knows how it will evolve. I don’t, but we can imagine. Quote ‘This is an original old axe, true its had a new handle and perhaps a new head, but it is a real old original axe’.
There is of course memory in all living bodies. They remember how to form, grow old, maintain, repair and recreate due to their inheritance. Living bodies existed long before brains! A living body originally evolved nervous systems and a brain because it was advantageous for moving around in its environment, in order to help it cope with its existing inherited bodily needs.
Consciousness was the eventual natural result of the interaction between the sensed bodily needs and the sensed environmental conditions. All sensed by the senses connected to the brain, which hopefully would connect the correct action, or not, depending on the physical need and the sensed environment.
The brain did not of course initially grow a body and nervous systems, but once the body evolved nervous systems and a brain, it all evolved together. This is often ignored, not only by the religious, but by people who should know better. Subsequently causing themselves muddle and confusion, resulting in their mind body problem. Which to spell it out is because they assume the brain is the homunculus responsible for the initial causation of action, completely ignoring the autonomic, biological physical needs of their body, which is the initial origin of causation. Until this is realised, people will remain confused, preferring to think it is all about the brain for reasons best known to themselves.
http://www.perhapspeace.co.uk