Consciousness, Memory, Life

Further reflections toward a memorial realism

As long-time readers of this Substack are aware, we have together had occasion to consider, in light of some scientific developments to date, the essentially memorial character of consciousness, of conscious awareness. An implication, as we have noted, is that we are mistaken in living our lives and thinking of our lives as better or more fulfilled in the extent to which they approach and enjoy the immediacy of presence and present experiences, and that our lives are on the wane or poorer the further we move from such presence and present experiences. For, rather, the unfolding of our lives always takes place in the past and in the realm of memory; the experience of presence and the immediacy of presence is an illusion; we are essentially creatures of the past, creatures who live in the past, and our living is the active development and unfolding of memory.¹

No doubt unsurprisingly, the above has wide-ranging implications for how we understand conscious experience, the dynamic structure and ordering of conscious experience and the acts that unfold therein, and even our lives considered singularly and together. This is especially true if, as did Aristotle well over 2,000 years ago, that what we experience in consciousness, what is given in conscious awareness, is identical in act with our own activity of experiencing it or being aware of it—which, of itself, has its own set of wide-ranging implications. We cannot here inquire into all, or even most, of these implications; I would like us to consider only one, namely, that the totality of our lives are simply different dimensions or modes of active and self-present memory—nothing more, nothing less.

As we noticed in the first piece linked to above, there is good reason to understand immediate conscious experience—which includes not only the immediate, living experiences of touching, tasting, smelling, seeing, hearing, and our immediate awareness of being involved in these activities, but also: our immediate experience of attending to our experiences and the things of our experience, as well as our experience of insight into the givens of experience, our reflection on and inquiry into these givens and insights thereinto, and our judgments regarding these activities of ours and their objects; as well as our awareness of all of this; and the acts of love or hate we consciously undertake and reflexively experience before, during, and after such activities—conscious awareness and what is found and unfolded within immediate conscious awareness, as the bleeding edge of memory and what is found and unfolded within the bleeding edge of memory.

What exists and unfolds within consciousness, within conscious awareness and conscious experience, is one by the unity of consciousness, even if the mode of its existence is distinct in relation to the modes of existence of all other things found within conscious awareness and existence. Consider conscious acts of touch and sight: I may focus on one more than the other while I am experiencing both, thus allowing one to fade in intensity while allowing the other to come into greater focus (as while I am typing right now and moving my focus back and forth from what I am seeing on the screen to what I am moving my fingers across the keyboard and feeling them strike the keys beneath them), but it is not as if there are two fields of consciousness, two sets of conscious givens, but a single field of consciousness, a single set of conscious givens; otherwise, unless such distinct fields of consciousness or sets of conscious givens were unified in a higher or more comprehensive field of awareness or field of conscious experiences, my existence would be deeply schizophrenic and lack cohesion, for it is recognizing, both in the depths of memory and at the bleeding edge of memory, my acts as proceeding from me as agent that I recognize the unity of myself, and this recognition occurs first, before any conceptualization thereof, through my awareness of my actions in consciousness and in the memory of prior conscious experiences.² Other combined actions could also be considered—such as thinking while walking, reflecting while listening, loving while touching, and so on. I can focus on one act rather than another and thus allow it to become sharper, more intense within the field of my awareness, or I could fail to reflectively remember, even before I reflectively realize that I am so doing, that one action accompanies another given within the totality of the bleeding edge of my memory, but neither destroys the prior and fundamental unity of consciousness or conscious awareness itself. Attend to the field of awareness or consciousness, and, empirically, we find a single field in and through which a variety of actions unfold, through which we unfold and form memory.

As object and subject are one in act and so, as such, exist by the same existence, so too does all that occurs or unfolds in consciousness exist by the same existence as that consciousness, the same being as that conscious awareness. What is sensed is the same in act, and so in existence, as the activity of sensing; what is understood as understood exists by the same existence as the act of understanding whereby it is understood; what is reflected upon, as reflected upon, is one in being with the act of reflection; and so on for each act where an acting subject acts, or is acted upon, vis a vis an object. If this were not so, if subject and object were not united in the basic act of existence as what they are but distinct, then there would be a divide, a gap, between subject and object, and the perceiving, understanding, etc., subject could not verify that what he is perceiving, understanding, etc., is in fact as he is perceiving, understanding, etc., it. In such a case, as knowledge is an act that all the acts of intelligence prior to it, including those of sensing and perceiving, no knowledge would be possible—including of the divide or gap, the non-unity, of subject and object in act or existence. And this, thus, is true for both the activity of consciousness or conscious awareness and what the one who is conscious or aware is conscious or aware of: of one’s acts of perception, understanding, etc., and even, necessarily, of one’s awareness or consciousness of being such. If it were otherwise, one would run into the same problem as with knowledge: one could not verify that what one thinks he is conscious of is in fact what he is conscious of, and a profound form of solipsism would be inescapable.

As the activity of consciousness is united in existence, in act, with its various objects and so the various activities that unfold or are unfolded within it, the for-oneself of another’s existence, the existence of any other being or finite person as existing for another in our world, exists by the existence of consciousness or awareness; this is true, moreover, for the for-oneself of each and every one of us. That is, the community of existents that we call our world, as that community and its individual existents exist for ourselves in our acts of perceiving, understanding, etc.—of which we are conscious or aware when we perform them—exist by the existence of our consciousness or awareness by virtue of the identity in existence of consciousness and its objects. To be conscious of another is, as a for-another, to give existence to that other, and this by the different modes through which we are conscious of him, her, or it—by sensation, perception, understanding, even love.

Furthermore, insofar as we ourselves are conscious of ourselves, we exist by the existence of consciousness or awareness, and insofar as others we are aware of, insofar as we are aware of them, also exist by the existence of consciousness, our lives, too, exist by the existence of consciousness. For, insofar as we can say we are alive, we are aware of ourselves living; or, perhaps, in coming to understand what it is to live, and thus to ascribe this to ourselves, we look elsewhere and consider that which we or those in our community would call “living”—which is just to consider what, insofar as we have any awareness of it, exists by the existence of the awareness by which we are aware of them. Thus, life and consciousness or conscious awareness are united in the unity of existence.

But, as we have had occasion to notice in prior posts (as linked to above), consciousness or conscious awareness simply is the bleeding edge of memory. The activity of consciousness simply is the reception into memory of what will be remembered, sorted, interpreted, our of which the past is constructed. We are creatures of the past, and our activities are the activities of those who build the past.³ Thus, consciousness is but a mode of memory, and as to be conscious or aware is to be remembering, the existence of consciousness is also—and even firstly—the existence of memory. Thus, life, all of our acts, and all of consciousness, exist by the existence of memory; and, therefore, as consciousness is memory, so too is life, sensation, perception, understanding, and all the rest.

1. Header image: Volanakis Constantine, Sailing Ships at Dawn (date unknown)

2. One of course runs into cases of fragmented consciousness, of people who do different things and do not recognize that they are the same ones doing those different things. Without wading into territory I have no business wandering into, I would note two things all of us can verify for ourselves empirically (“empirically” in a broad sense, as simply noticeable or observable reflexively at the bleeding edge of memory): 1) what occurs in consciousness, conscious awareness, is complex, even if consciousness is consciousness AND the same consciousness across the breadth and depth of that complexity; 2) memory simply as understood as the recollection of the past, immediate or distant, which is a key component in recognizing the agential and conscious unity of oneself over sets of personal and world acts, is a queer thing insofar as it is liable to all sorts of interruptions, failures, errancies—which can, in the main, find correction (which possibility, which is a possibility for returning oneself to a recognized and recognizable unity, is a “bringing back to earth,” a bringing back to a unitary and non-chaotic ground).

3. On this view, the future, which is often thought of as something we are moving toward is merely the set of possible pasts waiting to be made real in memory.