Re-membering and Un-forgetting: Memory, Anamnesia, and the Sciences of Cognition

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A Historical Echo of Memory and Forgetting

The concepts of memory and forgetting, or anamnesis, have echoed through the corridors of human thought for millennia, inspiring philosophers, artists, and scientists alike. From Plato’s theory of recollection to Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence or Bergson’s concept of durée, the interplay between remembering and forgetting has been a central theme in our quest to understand ourselves and our place in the world. In the age of cognitive science and technology, this exploration has acquired new dimensions, with various paradigms offering distinct perspectives on memory, and how it is intertwined with its apparent opposite. This article will explore these perspectives, focusing on the evolution from traditional cognitivist views to the embodied enactive approach, and how the latter is coherently integrated into the scybernethics regulatory paradigm, including the crucial role of “hypomnemata“.

Paradigms of Memory in Cognitive Science

Since its emergence in the mid-20th century, the field of cognitive science has been characterized by different approaches to understanding the mind, each with its own way of conceiving memory. Here, we will discuss how memory is conceived in each of the three main paradigms of the sciences and technologies of cognition: cognitivism, connectionism, and enaction.

1. Cognitivism: Memory as Information Processing

Cognitivism, which dominated early cognitive science, views the mind as an information processor akin to a computer. In this framework, memory is seen as a system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information. Memories are treated as representations of the world stored in the brain, and recall is the process of accessing and retrieving these stored representations.

• Key Features:
  • Representation: Memory is composed of mental representations of external reality.
  • Storage and Retrieval: The process of remembering involves retrieving stored information.
  • Linearity: Cognitivist approaches tend to emphasize linear processing of information.
  • Localization: Mental representations are often assumed to be localized in specific brain regions.

2. Human memory has nothing to do with computer metaphorical “memory”

While computer “memory” is localized and accessed by it’s location (tech. its “address”), human memory is “content-addressable“, meaning that one can retrieve/remember it through a partial version of the content. This characteristic allows for flexible and robust recall of information, often reconstructing complete memories from fragments or cues.

Key aspects of content-addressable memory in human cognition include:

1. Pattern Completion: The ability to reconstruct full memories from partial or corrupted inputs.
2. Associative Recall: Stored information can be accessed by presenting related or incomplete versions of the memory.
3. Context Reinstatement: Recalling a memory can partially bring back the context present when the memory was formed.

3. Connectionism: Memory as a Network of Associations

Connectionism emerged as an alternative to cognitivism, drawing inspiration from the structure and function of neural networks (McCulloch). In this view, memory is not about storing discrete representations but about strengthening connections between nodes in a network.

• Key Features:
  • Distributed Representation: Information is represented as patterns of activation across a network of interconnected nodes.
  • Associative Memory: Memory works through the strengthening of connections between associated concepts or experiences.
  • Parallel Processing: Information is processed in parallel across the network, allowing for more flexible and context-sensitive retrieval.

4. The “Natural Attitude”

Both cognitivism and connectionism, however, share a commonality: they reflect the phenomenological “natural attitude” (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc). That is, they operate primarily from a third-person perspective, often treating the mind as an objective entity separate from the observer. The observer’s role and subjective experience tend to be backgrounded in favor of objective, quantifiable processes.

The Enactive Turn: Memory as Embodied Action

The enactive approach represents a radical departure from these traditional views, emphasizing the embodied, embedded, and experiential nature of cognition. Enactivism posits that cognition is not about representing the world internally but about skillful engagement with the world through action.

• Key Features:
  • Embodiment: Cognition is grounded in the body’s sensorimotor interactions with the environment.
  • Action-Oriented: Memory is not a passive storage system but an active process of constructing meaning through action.
  • Situated: Cognitive processes are always situated in a specific context and shaped by the apparent agent’s goals and intentions, which themselves could also be understood as the post hoc interpretation of inner homeostatic process of regulation and environmental feedbacks (cybernetics principle), leading to coherent rationalizations.
  • Emergent: Expressed memories are not pre-existing entities/things (form) but emerge dynamically from the ongoing interplay between the agent and the environment.

The Enactive Conception of Memory

So, from an enactive perspective, memory is not about retrieving stored representations but about enacting skillful and adaptive behaviors in the present. Memories are seen as the products of actions taken to account for them in a given situation, emphasizing the agent’s active role in constructing their memories.

• Key Implications:
  • Dynamic Construction: Memories are continuously revised based on the synergy between previous and present experiences.
  • Reusable Processes: Memory remembers reusable processes rather than recoverable content.
  • Sensorimotor Coupling: Emphasis is placed on the role of sensorimotor couplings, the body, and the generation of cognition through action.
  • Body Memory: Implicit, tacit and “procedural” (Tulvin) / processual memory, related to skills, habits, and dispositions acquired through bodily experiences, plays a central role.
  • History of structural coupling: Cognition is understood as effective action, as the history of structural coupling that enacts/bring forth a meaningful world (Varela).

Scybernethics: Integrating Enactive Memory into a Regulatory Paradigm

Scybernethics integrates second-order cybernetics, embodied enaction, and critical reflection on technology to develop a comprehensive framework for personal and scholarly transformation and deeper understanding. It provides a way of regulating cycles of distinctions in a reflective way. Scybernethics considers itself a “regulatory meta-paradigm” (meta-dualism and meta-epistemology).

How does scybernethics integrate the enactive and distributed conceptions of memory?

• Tekhnicus Sedimentation: Scybernethics introduces the concept of “tekhnicus sedimentation,” which aligns with the enactive understanding of memory by emphasizing the embodied and action-oriented nature of cognition and memory. The “Tekhnicus” is enacted through reverse cognitive engineering of gestural externalizations (like reasoning, computer coding or skillful activities) to re-embody and remember them.
• Processual Knowledge: Scybernethics stresses iterative processes, echoing the enactive focus on reusable processes rather than recoverable content. Computer simulations are used to think iteratively about thinking processes, analogically with processual knowledge.
• Experiential Epistemology: Scybernethics uses models and computer simulations as experimental and experiential epistemological tools. This involves linking knowledge of dynamical processes to one’s own feeling of internal gestures, in an effort to cycle between questions of how one feels thinking in terms of enaction and distributed representation and schemes.
• Conceptual Dipoles and Dialogical Thinking: Scybernethics utilizes conceptual dipoles (e.g., form/process, inside/outside) as analytical tools and emphasizes dialogical thinking. This approach aligns with the enactive view of memory as a dynamic interplay between the agent and the environment, where meaning is constructed through ongoing interaction and negotiation.
• Ambijective Gesture: The “ambijective gesture” in scybernethics describes a cycling between culturally deployed objectification and phenomenological subjectification. This cyclical process mirrors the enactive emphasis on the continuous revision of memories based on the interplay between past and present experiences.
• Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP): Scybernethics draws inspiration from emergent and complex PDP models (like ANN, CA, Swarms, etc) to understand how memory functions in a parallel and distributed way. These models simulate biological memories, which are not localized but distributed and evolve dynamically/temporally in an analogical way.
• Hypomnemata: Scybernethics uses “hypomnemata” (memorial self-writing techniques) in conjunction with scholar knowledge and computer simulations, to design (top-down & bottom-up) and enact a formal genetical / generative ontology resulting from reflective activities of learning, to bring forth original conceptions based on enacted invariants and schemata.

Conclusion

From the cognitivist view of memory as information processing to the enactive perspective of memory as embodied action and distributed processes, our understanding of memory has undergone a significant transformation. The scybernethics framework provides a way to integrate the enactive and parallel distributed processing conceptions of memory into a broader regulatory paradigm, emphasizing the embodied, processual, action-oriented, and distributed nature of cognition and memory. By recognizing the active role of the organism in constructing memories through sensorimotor interactions with the environment, by understanding the distributed nature of memory, and by using “hypomnemata” and the heuristics of cognitive simulations (techno-hermeneutics of AI) to enhance and extend our cognitive capabilities, we can gain a deeper appreciation of the dynamic and continuously evolving nature of this fundamental aspect of human experience.

Through the lens of scybernethics, memory is not just a repository of the past, but a living, breathing process that shapes our present and guides our future. It is in this continuous cycle of action, reflection, embodiment, distribution, and externalization that we truly come to re-member ourselves.

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References

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von Foerster, H. (1963). Memory without record. In Observing systems (pp. 133-175). Intersystems Publications.

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Havelange, V., Lenay, C., & Stewart, J. (2002). Les représentations : mémoire externe et objets techniques. Intellectica, 35(2), 115-129.

McCulloch, W. S., & Pitts, W. (1943). A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5(4), 115-133.