Friday, September 18, 2009

Memory as Perception


I have a memory of the past, this allows me to understand that time has past. Memory allows me to keep images with me as they pass from present view. Now as a way of coping one could say I deal with my world temporally and that I am a temporal being. But the operation of memory itself needs also to be looked at. I know I see with my eyes because when I cover them I can no longer see (in the context of where seeing means anything). If I plug my hears I can no longer hear. If I damage my frontal lobe, my parietal lobe, and my hippocampus will I no longer remember these activities. And if time on a clock changes I will no longer perceive this change or the duration of stasis. In one sense, I can no longer see reality in terms of time. But this no different from losing an eye. Content was not structured in terms of time, I saw time. Memory brought this aspect home to me. But now that I lack it, there is no time. I might stumble in time like a blind person stumbles in space. Others who see time would pity me, not because I could not fit into their world (though I could not), not because I would be different, but because I would fail in taking an essential feature rightly. Time was a perception as much as anything else. It was not any condition of my experience. As blinking makes one blind, so too a kind of forgetfulness or another mental state or a distraction may make one blind to time, making time as having a similar character to what we call perception. If time is a perception, and the organ we call memory allows us to have it, when does time lie to us like other perceptions sometimes do?

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