Introspection & Memory
Psychology began as a science in Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory during the 1870’s using physiological measures of reaction time and sensory thresholds to discover the basis for individual differences in psychological functions. Franz Brentano offered an alternate approach at that same time that involved accessing psychological phenomena directly through an introspective method he called “inner perception.” Persistent efforts in both directions were largely unsuccessful. Both approaches relied upon psychological constructs that did not define a sufficiently coherent functional space to either explore directly or to correlate with physiological data.
Psychologists gradually moved away from both the physiological and phenomenological methods and defined themselves first as behavioral scientists and then cognitive scientists. They investigated broad areas of functioning like perception, memory, decision making and problem solving as if these loosely defined behavioral functions were entities, things that could be examined in their own right. Within the construct of memory, for example, memories were thought of as things that we possess and use as needed. Like money in the bank, memories could be deposited and withdrawn, while specific questions about the processes involved avoided.
The cognitive model of memory, based on storage and retrieval in the brain, has been successfully used to design computer memory storage systems, but it fails to capture the human process of remembering. Remembering, a behavioral process, is something we do, not something we transact with entities called memories.
We gain empirical knowledge of the realities we encounter as we actively engage them. We are guided by sensory and visceral processes as we physically encounter these realities, observe how they respond and learn how to use them. We accumulate empirical knowledge from these behavioral interactions and only through them. We are literally testing the limits of our ability to function in the world, learning what we can and cannot do as we physically encounter unknowable realities.
Can we gain empirical knowledge of our own first tier processes? We cannot initiate an activity like remembering and observe the processes that take place at the first tier of consciousness; we can only observe the results of these processes. The processes involved in remembering take place at the unvoiced core of experience, and they do not exist as differentiated entities and events. We have no conscious access to the undifferentiated processes that generate pre-empirical movement sequences at the first tier.
Consider the difference between gaining empirical knowledge of an egg compared to gaining knowledge of a memory. We push the egg and it rolls, we hit the egg and it cracks, we hit it harder and it breaks open. We learn about the egg by observing its responses to what we do. What is available for observation when we are remembering? The process of remembering is inaccessible apart from the results expressed in the products that we identify as memories. It is a classic “black-box problem” except that we don’t realize that we are outside of the box observing only the results of our own remembering processes.
Our attempts at introspection thus lead us around in circles. We imagine that we are observing our own processes of remembering and deepening our understanding of how memory functions when we have no access to what is going on inside. We are constrained to surface manifestations of processes that remain inaccessible.
We enter into what Douglas Hoftstadter calls a strange loop. This occurs at the intersection between the continuous flow of physical experience at the first tier of consciousness and the differentiated world of discrete entities and assumed events at the verbal-symbolic tier. We are on a Mobius strip of introspection, imagining that we are penetrating deeper into an understanding of ourselves when we are turning around in circles of surface designations and descriptions.
Comments (0)