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Last weekend I met with a Bergsonian philosopher and...

... fell in love with him. He gave a talk on a Bergsonian account of Time and after that we conversed a little. He was energetic, warm-hearted, open-minded and so true to his academic passion. He comfortably opens up a discussion with whomever he feels worth interacting. Be it a philosopher, a scientist, or a complete lay person like me.

We talked about memory. He told me that "memory" is a vastly unexplored territory for both philosophy and science. And that "philosophy of memory" is just starting to blossom.

It may strike one as odd to hear that "memory" is an unexplored topic in science. Are you kidding? What about all those neuroscientists and psychologists who study memory as their day jobs? Isn't memory THE most well researched topic about the brain? Surely we should have acquired considerable knowledge about it.

Yes and no.  Neuroscience and psychology study some aspect of memory, only to the extent that can be defined within the experimental paradigms of those fields. Researchers put a mouse in a particular box and test its "spacial memory". Or they show human subjects some random numbers and test the duration of their "working memory". But do these experimentally defined memories cover all the aspects we want to know about the memory?   If we continue our neuroscience and psychology, will the nature of memory be known eventually?

Maybe. Maybe not.

My hunch (perhaps shared by many of the philosophers of memory) is that memory is not completely understandable in purely naturalistic terms. In particular, it is difficult to explain "what memory is" within the physics domain. Physicist Sean Carroll has an argument to explain why memory exists in physical world, but in my opinion his argument is not completely flawless (I may be wrong, but I have spent considerable amount of time thinking about this).  And as for the psychological memory we have in our minds, it seems to be even more difficult to naturalize. I believe we need philosophy.

In what sense is memory an issue of philosophy? At first glance "memory" is such a simple concept. But maybe that's because we are accustomed to the notion of "computer memory" in our digital devices. The information of the past is stored in transistors, and can be read out when needed. Isn't the same thing happening in our brains? 

That analogy does not hold as well as it seems at first. In the computer, "memory" is encoded and readout by a sequence of programmed operations. But the in the brain, who does the encoding? And who gives meaning to the so-called "memory trace"? What does it mean for a group of neurons (or synapses or whatever) to represent a memory of the past?

Also, we tend to think that memory is one of the faculties of the mind. But that may be an underestimation in terms of the role of memory. Can a mind exist without memory? I'd say no. Even amnesic patients and people with dementia have SOME kind of memory. A complete memory-less subject, in my opinion, doesn't have a mind at all. I can imagine some philosophers start to wonder whether THE WORLD itself can exist without memory, though I would not go that far. 

Consciousness is often considered as the last puzzle the science has to solve, and it is sometimes portrayed as a frontier where natural science and philosophy (i.e. two cultures) collide. But to my mind, "memory" is equally challenging, and equally demanding the contributions from the both cultures. 

The Bergsonian philosopher once explained to me via email that "memory" was a long ignored subject in philosophy until recently. Why was that? Maybe people underestimated the profoundness of memory. Or maybe people tried,  but failed. Or both. But now philosophers are ready to tackle this head-on in a team, working together with scientists. And I have the impression that first rate neuroscientists are starting to think more and more like philosophers.

Maybe, in the next few decades, we will witness a surprising discovery or a radical re-conception on the nature of memory, something that even Bergson himself could not have imagined.

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