Use of Memory as an indication of Personal Identity in Sankara's Advaita

 This is so straightforward and simple an assertion of the rationality of diachronic identity that it requires no gloss and can be reproduced directly. Incidently Sidney Shoemaker has a similar argument in his book ‘Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity’.

Who denies diachronic identity anyway?  David Hume asks himself the question: How is a series of conscious states conscious of itself as a series?  His bundle theory of states of consciousness creates this problem which it is unable to solve.

It is important to note that Sankara is not offering memory as a criterion of personal identity.  He is merely using memory as sufficient to refute the momentariness (annica) doctrine of Buddhism namely that there is no connection between the string of conscious states that are had by a person.  His self identity is pure consciousness itself that remains unchanging through all states of awareness including that of deep dreamless sleep known as ‘sushupti’ in Vedanta. Follow the topic heading on Deep Sleep for more notes on that angle unique to Advaitic Vedanta.

Sankara’s Commentary on the Brahma Sutras in which he refutes Buddhist Realism (B.S.B. II.ii.25)

25. And (a permanent soul has to be admitted) because of the fact of remembrance (i.e. memory).

Moreover, when the nihilist asserts all things to be momentary, he willhave to assert the perceiver also to be momentary. But that is an absurdity because of the fact of remembrance. Remembrance means recalling to mind something after its perception, and that can happen only when the agent of perception and memory is the same; for one person is not seen to remember something perceived by another. How can there be an awareness of the form, "I who saw earlier see now", arise unless the earlier and later perceiver be the same? Moreover, it is well known to all that direct experience in the form of recognition, such as "I who saw that, see this now", occurs only when the agent of seeing and remembering is the same.             

Memory and Identity

I am I. I was I. Do I need evidence for this? Could memory be evidence?? How might that be wrought? Might I look back and having a series of inward images, me climbing a wall, stealing pears, stuffing my shirt. And then my assessment: yes, that’s definitely me, no mistake about it. However as we and the bad cop know, memories can be induced and a person can be brought to believe a story in which they are the chief actor. Even if there was a movie made of my life that was the the same length as my life would that establish self-identity i.e. my identity for myself? It would prove that I was not in Bangkok on the day in question, maybe but should someone splice in a double boating down a canal even I might be bamboozled. Whether in Thailand or not I was still I. If that knowledge resists true evidence in the sense that we do not have to use a memory to establish identity then false evidence does not undermine identity either. It is immune to evidence. The empiricist hunger must rest unassuaged.

A.D. Woozley on Memory

- Who is that you are playing?

- Nick Drake. He died in the 1970‘s.

- Never heard of him. When you come to your autobiography write 'my father was musically illiterate. Books were his life. He lived in a world of books. Unfortunately he died a raving lunatic.’

- That book there< A.D. Woozley’s Theory of Knowledge : An Introduction pub.1949) looks weighty.

- It is only an introduction. The main thing would be too much for me.



Woozley’s (1912 - 2008) Introduction is a sly thing and owes more to the English habit of understatement than to the import of its content. By the way he was the last surviving member of the group of philosophers who started what became known as Ordinary Language Philosophy.

Woozley was the last surviving member of the original group of seven philosophers whose informal discussions from 1937-39 were the beginnings of Oxford ordinary language philosophy.  There is an account of these original meetings in Isaiah Berlin's *Personal Impressions*, the chapter on J.L. Austin.  Austin and Berlin organized the group; besides Austin, Woozley and Berlin, the members were A.J. Ayer, Stuart Hampshire, Donald Macnabb and Donald MacKinnon.

(from Cora Diamond his widow)

There are two chapters on Memory which might be worth anyone’s consideration. He makes the point that although memory is fallible yet:

All collection of evidence, all theories, depend on memory, as Descartes found to his distress when he was trying to elaborate an error-proof method of attaining knowledge in any sphere

Memory is not regarded as a pramana (valid means of knowledge) in Hindu systems which is odd given that for the orthodox Smirti (remembered i.e. Tradition) is revered next only to Sruti (heard i.e. Scripture).

Memory has that mark of the individually dubitative which the sense of familiarity does not dismiss, in Woozley’s opinion. More anon.

Thomas Reid on Remembrance

Scepticism, Animal Faith, and Fog

Is global scepticism or unrestricted methodic doubt actually rational if it forbids us doing what we do and saying what we say in our everyday lives? Is the purported bowing to reason and rationality and the elevation of knowledge to the incorrigible precisely the opposite of what draws us on to clarity. We accept the foggy and fuzzy under advisement hoping by judicious repair to achieve progress. To feel you are doomed to security only in the thin atmosphere of mathematics is the original Platonic error that continues to fascinate philosophers.

The Daddy of contemporary insecurity and the writer of its finest prose is Santayana. Scepticism and Animal Faith is a most comfortable bed and we barely feel the winding of its Procrustean windlass. In discussing the cognitive claims of memory he writes:

I have already accepted the belief in memory ; indeed, without accepting it I could not have taken the first step forward from the most speechless scepticism. But since such acceptance is an act of faith, and asserts transitive or realistic knowledge, I will pause to consider somewhat more explicitly what the cognitive claims of memory are, on which all human beliefs are reared.

As is often the case with Santayana we are brought up short at the sudden chilling of the warm prose bath by an insight put with much less suavity by Sidney Shoemaker in Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity.

Santayana:

A frame or foreground is accordingly indispensable to the projection which renders a present image a vision of some past fact : I must stand here to point there. Yet if my present station were explicitly perceived, if the whole immediate datum were focussed equally in thought, the picture would seem flat and the perspective merely painted upon it, as upon a cheap drop-curtain in a theatre. It would destroy the claim and, if you like, the illusion of memory to remember that I am remembering ; for then I should be considering myself only, and only the present, whereas in living remembrance I am self-forgetful, and live in the present thinking only of the past, and observe the past without supposing that I am living in it.

‘You cannot remember that you are remembering’. Similar points have been made by Thomas Reid and Elizabeth Anscombe cf. http://ombhurbhuva.blogspot.ie/2012/07/reid-and-anscombe-on-memory.html
I am at the stage in the reading of Animal Faith where he has admitted memory whilst still holding on to the reality of the flux of essences which are the creation of imagination. Are essences concepts or ideas? To which I answer 'pass’. Here I must call on Coleridge in Biographia Litteraria Chap.XII:

In the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by a resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with the allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus: until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. This golden rule of mine does, I own, resemble those of Pythagoras in its obscurity rather than in its depth. If however the reader will permit me to be my own Hierocles, I trust, that he will find its meaning fully explained by the following instances. I have now before me a treatise of a religious fanatic, full of dreams and supernatural experiences. I see clearly the writer's grounds, and their hollowness. I have a complete insight into the causes, which through the medium of his body has acted on his mind; and by application of received and ascertained laws I can satisfactorily explain to my own reason all the strange incidents, which the writer records of himself. And this I can do without suspecting him of any intentional falsehood. As when in broad day-light a man tracks the steps of a traveller, who had lost his way in a fog or by a treacherous moonshine, even so, and with the same tranquil sense of certainty, can I follow the traces of this bewildered visionary. I understand his ignorance.

The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates

Henri Bergson told us that we forget nothing which seems fanciful when we may spend a morning looking for our keys. What he meant and here I am open to correction because there are opaque elements in his thought, was that we 'virtually' remember everything which is another way of saying we remember nothing if we construe memory on the model which is presented to us by the standard neuro-science of our day. Memory other that motor memory or stuff that is learnt by heart is not 'in' the brain. Where does that leave the ancient practice of memory loci as elucidated by Frances Yates in her magisterial Art of Memory?

I still can't find my keys though. I did not leave them in my usual place. They are good and lost. If I had left them in their usual locus, a place which I have by heart, then that motor connection between place and keys would allow them to merge together. So it is with information that I wish to remember. The use of a well known and gotten by heart room, to use a simple example of the Classical technique that Yates writes about, has placed on all its elements the varied items of information that may have no direct associative connection with each other. Then to recover the information I merely walk through the room picking up each item as I go. Does this not prove the associationist thesis that Bergson impugns? What he would reply to this is that what is happening is that motor memory has so to speak absorbed the item to be recalled and therefore the usual efforts to focus and condense what is virtual is obviated. Is this not the point of advertisements that by repetition make an indissoluble connection?

Now that everyone with a smart phone is a googleamus we need to ask whether the ancient skill of forgetting should be revived wherever we left it. Bacon in his 'Advancement of Learning avers:

There has been laboured and put into practice a method, which is not a lawful method, but a method of imposture, which is to deliver knowledge in such a manner, as men may speedily come to make a show of learning which have it not. Such was the travail of Raymundus Lullus in making that art which bears his name......

(quoted in The Art of Memory)

Haven't we all met them and do they not infest our centres of higher learning? I mean those rote learners by whatever means. Poetry should be learnt by heart and lectures should be orations to be most effective but what is the point of memorising the Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhyasa by Shankaracarya and applying over that a standard interpretation? That means you are locked into a certain unfolding. There is very little chance of a reconfiguring of the elements within it which lead to a genuine understanding.