The past five days or so have been one of those rare times in my life when my social life expands to the exclusion of all my concrete projects. It's been real good.( Read more... )
Re. explicit/declarative vs. implicit/procedural memory, I'm not sure that these two are exhaustive. Surely there can be memories that are implicit/not-declarative, but not purely procedural, i.e. attitudes, beliefs, feelings, which we can't declare or be explicitly conscious of - extreme case being classical Freudian repressed stuff? And similarly, surely there can be procedural memories that are also explicit/declarative, in that we can explain what we're doing while we do it? What I'm getting at is: could there not be two roughly perpendicular distinctions here, between descriptive and procedural, where, probably, most memories have some aspect of both (i.e. most knowledge influences what we can do), and the difference is more of how we use things (the memory I use in saying that there's a wall there and the memory I use to navigate around the wall and not walk into it would seem to be the same memory, used in different ways), and also between explicit and implicit, where the issue is something to do with self-consciousness/higher-
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I think that the Wikipedia articles don't do justice to the current debate about the two kinds of memory. It's been a while since I studied this, but I think I recall it being controversial exactly what the types were and what they included.
That said, these distinctions come from empirical psychology, so they aren't meant to be exhaustive of all the theoretical possibilities. They are (reasonably well-supported) empirical theories about the way our memory really works.
Surely there can be memories that are implicit/not-declarative, but not purely procedural, i.e. attitudes, beliefs, feelings, which we can't declare or be explicitly conscious of - extreme case being classical Freudian repressed stuff?
Although I haven't thought about it very hard, I would say that attitudes, beliefs, and feelings are not memories per se. And Freud was a fraud. So I can't think of an example for this case.
And similarly, surely there can be procedural memories that are also explicit/declarative, in that we can explain what we're doing while
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I would say that attitudes, beliefs, and feelings are not memories per se. Well, I guess, but then I'm not too sure about any distinction between memory and knowledge. If I learn that south american monkeys have a different kind of nose from old world monkeys, and I remember that, is that memory or knowledge? Similarly, if I learn to ride a bike, is that procedural memory or procedural knowledge? I'm honestly asking, is there some clear distinction that's drawn? 'Cos it seems to me that 'memory' can be stretched to any information stored in the mind that's derived from past experience, which is almost all of it. And if knowledge counts, then belief would have to count, insofar as they differ in terms of how reality is. And I think beliefs and attitudes blur into one another ('I hate him' blurs into 'he is a bastard').
And Freud was a fraud. You take that back!
if your hypothesis (that most memories have some of each), it would be much harder to explain these cases.Well fine, I guess - I'm not (yet) an empirical neurophysiologist,
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If I learn that south american monkeys have a different kind of nose from old world monkeys, and I remember that, is that memory or knowledge?ok, here's where psychologists would deploy the semantic v. episodic memory distinction, sort of a weak-ass attempt to separate abstractions and propositions from the garbled mass of associations which can't be distilled into simple sentences/propositions or beliefs, but still kick around in our head
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That said, these distinctions come from empirical psychology, so they aren't meant to be exhaustive of all the theoretical possibilities. They are (reasonably well-supported) empirical theories about the way our memory really works.
Surely there can be memories that are implicit/not-declarative, but not purely procedural, i.e. attitudes, beliefs, feelings, which we can't declare or be explicitly conscious of - extreme case being classical Freudian repressed stuff?
Although I haven't thought about it very hard, I would say that attitudes, beliefs, and feelings are not memories per se. And Freud was a fraud. So I can't think of an example for this case.
And similarly, surely there can be procedural memories that are also explicit/declarative, in that we can explain what we're doing while ( ... )
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Well, I guess, but then I'm not too sure about any distinction between memory and knowledge. If I learn that south american monkeys have a different kind of nose from old world monkeys, and I remember that, is that memory or knowledge? Similarly, if I learn to ride a bike, is that procedural memory or procedural knowledge? I'm honestly asking, is there some clear distinction that's drawn? 'Cos it seems to me that 'memory' can be stretched to any information stored in the mind that's derived from past experience, which is almost all of it. And if knowledge counts, then belief would have to count, insofar as they differ in terms of how reality is. And I think beliefs and attitudes blur into one another ('I hate him' blurs into 'he is a bastard').
And Freud was a fraud.
You take that back!
if your hypothesis (that most memories have some of each), it would be much harder to explain these cases.Well fine, I guess - I'm not (yet) an empirical neurophysiologist, ( ... )
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