Points of View 177

causally affect present experiences/thoughts. It requires that they do so in
a way that makes them recognized as past experience/thoughts. The grasp
of a primitive notion of the past is built into the ascription conditions of
conscious memory: to attribute conscious memory is ipso facto to attribute
a grasp of times other than and prior to the present.
So, the distinction is between, on the one hand, the processing of retained
information derived from past experience and, on the other, the
registration of past experience as past experience in conscious awareness.
When we apply this distinction to the matter in hand, our working notion
of a point of view demands that conscious memory be involved in the
recognitional abilities at the heart of having a point of view upon the
world. Reflect on the case of a creature, perhaps a swallow, that is perfectly
capable of performing complicated feats of navigation (like finding
its way back to its nest or to the warmer climes where it spends the winter)
but that nonetheless has no conscious memories of repeatedly encountered
features or objects* at particular places. Such a creature is clearly
sensitive to certain facts about the places, features, or objects* in question,
because those facts determine behavior. Moreover, it is quite possible
that its occurrent experiences should be causally affected by its
previous encounters with those places, features, or objects*. Nonetheless,
it is important to recognize that we are applying the concept of reidentification
here in a restricted sense. In the case of a creature capable
only of nonconscious memory, that creature’s capacity to reidentify a
place is exhausted by its capacity to find its way back to that place.
But when we consider place reidentification that involves the operations
of conscious memory, the situation becomes fundamentally different.
When a creature finds its way back to a particular place that it then
consciously remembers (or when it consciously remembers an object* or
feature at a place to which it has found its way back), it is emerging from
a continuous present and moving toward possession of a temporally extended
point of view. This is so for two reasons. First, consciously to
remember a particular place, object*, or feature is to be aware of having
been at that place or encountered that object* or feature before. A creature
who can remember having been somewhere before has the beginning
of an awareness of movement through space over time. And that in
turn is the beginning (and certainly a necessary, although not sufficient,
Points of View 177
condition) of being able to draw what Strawson terms the distinction between
the subjective route of one’s experiences and the world through
which it is a route. Second, recall that part of the significance of the notion
of a point of view is that it provides a sense of self-world dualism
richer than the minimal registering of the distinction between self and
nonself that emerges from somatic proprioception. As I mentioned earlier,
the richness of the self-awareness that accompanies the capacity to
distinguish the self from the environment is directly proportionate to the
richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being
distinguished. And what is significant about place reidentification that
involves conscious memory is that it makes possible a richer form of
awareness of the environment. Without conscious memory, no creature
would be able to conceive of their environment as composed of items
that have an existence transcending the present moment. What conscious
memory offers is the possibility of conceiving of objects as having existed
in the past.
These two reasons for why place reidentification involving conscious
memory is so central here depend on how conscious memory implicates
a form of temporal orientation toward the past. There are, of course, different
types and degrees of temporal orientation toward the past, and
one question that arises is, what type of understanding of the past does
conscious memory contribute to the acquisition of a nonconceptual point
of view upon the world? An important distinction in this area has been
made by John Campbell (1994, section 2.1). Campbell distinguishes between
what he terms temporal orientation with respect to phase (henceforth
phasal orientation) and temporal orientation with respect to
particular time (henceforth particular orientation). He illustrates the distinction
as follows:
Consider an animal that hibernates. Through the part of the year for which it is
awake, it regulates its activity depending on the season. Such an animal certainly
has a use for temporal orientation. It can recognize that it is late spring, perhaps
by keeping track of how long it has been since winter, and realize that soon it will
be summer. But it may not have the conception of the seasons as particular times;
it may be incapable of differentiating between the autumn of one year and the
autumn of another. It simply has no use for the conception of a particular autumn,
as opposed to the general idea of the season. So while the animal is capable
of orientation with respect to phases, it is not capable of orientation with respect
to particular times. (Campbell 1994, 38)
178 Chapter 7
At issue here is the capacity to think about event tokens, as opposed to the
capacity to think about event types. Phasal orientation does not involve
distinguishing between event types and event tokens. Phasal orientation
is concerned simply with where one is on a given temporal cycle and does
not provide the resources for thinking about the relations, temporal or
otherwise, between that temporal cycle and another. In a particular orientation,
in contrast, event tokens are discriminated by means of a temporal
frame of reference that places all event tokens within a single linear series
ordered by the relations of temporal priority and temporal simultaneity.
Does the work to which I am putting the concept of conscious memory
require a phasal orientation or a particular orientation toward the past?
Conscious memory offers the beginning of both an awareness of movement
through space over time and an awareness that the environment is
composed of items that have an existence transcending the present moment.
Temporal orientation toward the past is at the heart of both of
these forms of awareness. There seems no good reason to think that phasal
orientation will not be sufficient here. The creature described by
Campbell in the passage just quoted has both an awareness of movement
through space over time and an awareness that the environment is composed
of items whose existence transcends the present moment, despite
its inability to orient itself toward particular times. Although place reidentification
involves reidentifying a particular place, it does not follow that
if reidentification is to involve conscious memory, then the memory in
question must be a memory of having previously encountered that place
at a particular time. A memory of having previously encountered the
place at a particular stage in a temporal cycle would be quite sufficient.
Certainly, a conscious memory of having previously encountered a particular
place is a memory of a particular happening or event that occurred
at a particular time. But it does not follow that the memory must refer to
a particular time within a temporal frame of reference, as associated with
the particular orientation toward the past. This is tied up with the fact
that memory is a causal notion. The causal dimension of memory is captured
particularly clearly in the influential and widely accepted account
of memory offered by Martin and Deutscher (1966), which I will use
to illustrate the point. The core of the account is given by the following
three conditions: