§78. Memory in Experience

The reason we think of perception as inner and subjective has a lot to do with memory, and there are several points to make about this. To begin with, all the phenomenal qualities (e.g., color) are effects of memory and its contribu­tion to competent perception, arising from how the nervous system formats ambient events in terms we can respond to, which are qualitative differences like color or odor.

Memory veils as much as it stitches together, concealing the complexity of the information it contrives to present as a simple quality like a color. Memory contracts an enormous number of material vibrations into one con­tinuous duration even though they are really successive. For instance, red light is electromagnetic radiation at a frequency around 400 THz, or 4 x 10¹⁴ cycles per second. Physically, in nature, in the energized matter between the source and our eyes, these are distinct events, over and done each before the next. How else could we count them so precisely? Memory contracts all of this change into the apparent continuity and simplicity of red.

Seeing red is like hearing a bell toll the hour. The first toll is no longer pre­sent when the second sounds, yet to an attentive listener the first survives in the consciousness of the series. Replace the tolling bell with the exchange of photons and we have Bergson's thesis on the melodic character of sensory qualities. The series of photon exchanges between our eyes and environing surfaces is a sequence of distinct physical events. They happen with insen­sible speed, but apart from the briefer interval, it is the same as a bell tolling the hour. Each transient electromagnetic event detected by the eye survives in a visual perception of red, as past tones survive in the consciousness of a melody.

The subjectifying work of memory goes further. Unlike inanimate bodies, organisms do not merely react to action received from other images; they ab­sorb some of the inbound energy and have to retain integrity despite an ener­getic influx. That accounts for affective life, and why no perception is entirely without affective quality (pleasure or pain). These affects are the source of all our passions, everything that makes us oscillate between joyous and sad. Sensations are also the beginning of freedom, “nascent freedom,” Bergson says. With pain, for instance, we become aware, before survival compels a response, of the imminent requirement to act. There is an interval during which memory may come to bear and a preferable response be selected. This is the matrix of freedom and the occasion of its first practice. If we never felt pain we would know nothing of choice.¹⁵

The sensory qualities of the image purely perceived are a mnemic synthesis. Affects induced by the inbound energy of sense associate perceptions with a physiological response that affects consciousness with joy or sadness. If we could remove all memory from perception, nothing would be left except the image, and this image is physical, material, an array of bodies and surfaces. Remove memory, then, and all that is left of perception are the images we perceive. The objectivity is perfect, albeit unconscious and ineffectual. Of course natural perception is shot through with memory and recognition, as pure perception uncontaminated by the past would be maladaptive. To be a resource, to be adaptive, perception cannot always be starting over, and must instead be perfused by memory. All the individuality of memory, our per­sonal history and experience, mixes with each perception to create the sub­jectivity of sensory consciousness.

Bergson denounces the assimilation of memory and perception, as if memory were just perception pale and faded, as for instance in Hume. “Every one will readily allow, that there is a considerable difference between the perceptions of the mind, when a man feels the pain of excessive heat, or the pleasure of moderate warmth, and when he afterwards recalls to his memory this sensation.” Hume's very way of distinguishing memory and perception makes them continuous. Referring to memory and imagination, he says, “These faculties may mimic or copy the perceptions of the senses; but they never can entirely reach the force and vivacity of the original sentiment” No more than a continuous difference of intensity distinguishes perception from memory. Memories are faded perceptions.¹⁶

Perception is actual, an event in the body, and theorists tend to approach memory the same way, as something actual, a pallid image, remnant vibra­tion, trace, engram, resonant cell-cluster—some thing, actual and present, yet somehow about the past. No one has ever explained how that works. How is an actual present something “about the past”? No image can indicate by any pictorial feature that it is past. The supposed reference-fixing power of its cause begs the question—what is “past” about that representation of cause? Perhaps the simplest thing is to say we know an image is a memory when it comes to us from the past, or when we interrupt action to think about the past. If that explains the obscure by the more obscure, well, memory is obscure.

Memory and perception are not the same, are not continuous, are in fact outright different, yet they interact, memory enhancing perception and per­ception evoking memory. To follow Bergson’s argument further requires ad­herence to some stipulated usage:

Perception. An image simplified to a perceiver’s virtual action.

Recollection. An actual image, not perceived but recollected; for instance, your recollection of Barack Obama’s face.

Memory. Your memory of your childhood, of your kitchen, of a New Year's Eve. This memory is not any one recollection or any set of them, being an uncountable virtual field of potential recollection, images you could recol­lect once you start to think back.

Perception and recollection are actual, occurrent events and are contin­uous with each other. The difference Bergson emphasizes is between percep­tion and memory. Recollection supplements actual, present percepts with actual, present memory-images. But memory itself is all virtual, and different in kind from images actual and present. I will say more about this virtual later, but first I want to unfold the difference between memory and perception.

Perception anticipates and initiates action, being responsive, effective, ac­tive even in seeming stillness, while memory is pure idea, impassive, without efficacy, preparing nothing, initiating nothing, doing nothing. Our attitude toward these is also completely different since perception rapidly elicits a response from practically the whole body, while memories, unless allied with present perception, are no more than a dream. Perception is localized and a cause of movement, while memory is neither. It is without location— where is your memory of your kitchen? (“In my brain” means “I'm sure it's somewhere!”) Memory is also without power. Your memory of your kitchen prepares no action, being deprived of power to interact with anything pre­sent, and becomes active only with perception, when under the stimula­tion of the body's response to sense energy virtual memories become actual recollections, adding their experience to present perception and the problem of choice it poses.

Without perception memory would make no difference to action, and without memory perception could not learn from experience. Memory contaminates perception with subjective history, but it also makes the percep­tion experienced. Perception without memory is perception without experi­ence, perception that is always starting over again, and is so unavailing that perception “ends up being merely an occasion for remembering.” Bergson analyzes the interpenetration of perception and memory in three phases.

Our guide to the past in drawing recollections from memory is the pro­prioceptive feeling of preparatory changes that sensory stimulation auto­matically initiates. From its earliest phase, sensory signals have prepared adjustments that anticipate interaction. The feeling of these internal changes opens a channel for virtual past images similar in felt quality to find their way from the past to the present, to be revitalized, literally re-membered, given new legs by the experience they contribute to perception. We feel our body preparing action. We have not yet done it, and may not do it; it is one of those virtual actions. But it is readying, tending, and we feel that. The feeling is a lure to adaptively appropriate recollections, past images of bodily adjustments resembling those currently felt. If we are experienced, if we have prepared this action before, then we have felt this way before, with that feeling to guide adaptive recollection.

These are the feelings by which James said we perceive relations; for ex­ample, the relevance of past to present images. We feel a recollection’s rele­vance before we clearly attend to it; indeed it is because of the feeling that we begin to attend. We apprehend it in the past not by recognizing an outline or corresponding form. Memories, past images, have no “form,” this word being a metaphysical abbreviation for “fully present and actual.” We feel past images, feel their relevance to current sensation, obscurely yet distinctly. We could be wrong and stumble, though the point is that we feel a conti­nuity among images without perceiving the images in attentive detail or as distinct forms.

Felt relation is the lure, opening a channel for the recollection of past images. Such recollections are present images, compiled not of sense data but of remembered perceptions, images past yet surviving in memory. Bergson compares recollection to focusing a camera. “Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on color, it tends to imitate perception.” In recognition, when recollection and perception meet, recollected images line up behind the schematic sensory image, informing it with their experience, inserting themselves so thoroughly “that we are no longer able to discern what is perception and what is memory”¹⁸

Bergson says memory makes perception subjective. But why do I recollect only my memories? Why not those of others, or the past in general? He says images survive the passing of the present, enjoying virtual existence in the past, and that in recollection we place ourselves in the past, that is, in the vir­tual, among past images. So how come the only ones I find are mine or from my past, and not the past in general? Why can't I help myself to your expe­rience? Isn't it all out there in the virtual past? Bergson never considered the question, but we can assemble a likely response.

To recollect is to be prepared to act, so I can recollect only what I can vir­tually perform. Any past I have never experienced and any action I have not actually performed are necessarily unconscious to me. Nothing about the feeling of my body in the present leads back to the feeling of any other body except my own. Your memories are in the past, as are all of them, but because I cannot feel your body I cannot feel your body's past and therefore cannot use that past, which remains unconscious to me. When we visit the past and recollect, we visit the realm of all memory, the past in general, virtually min­gling with uncountable surviving images. Most of this is unconscious. It cannot be perceived because perception is virtual action and we cannot enact memories that have no felt continuity with our present.

We are unconscious of the memories of others for the same reason the film characters in The Matrix would be unable to do their kung fu unplugged. Since they are not actually trained in martial arts, they have never actually moved their bodies that way, so they have no memory of moving that way, and therefore cannot move that way.¹⁹