Philosophy Research Seminar - Lea-Cecile Salje (Leeds)
| Dates: | 21 February 2017 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Lea-Cecile Salje (Leeds) |
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Title
Abstract
- Let’s say that the following is a conceptual possibility: an advanced team of neuroscientists succeed in identifying and removing the parts of your brain associated with a particular memory and transplanting them into my brain, such that I have an apparent memory of something that happened in your past. Such cases of ‘quasi-memory’ or ‘Q-memory’ are typically taken to undermine the claim that past-tensed first-person memory-based judgments are immune to error through misidentification. If we take immunity to error through misidentification to be an epistemic marker of forms of self-awareness in which we are aware of ourselves as ourselves, then cases like this threaten to challenge the idea that we are aware of ourselves as ourselves as things with temporal extension into the past.
In this talk I argue that a more biologically situated understanding of memory gives us reason to think that apparent memories in such Q-memory cases always uniquely refer to the memory transplant recipient. This gives us a way of holding on to the claim that memory is a form self-awareness in which we are each aware of ourselves in a distinctively first personal way.
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Roscoe Building
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