Reconsidering the 'Memory Argument' for Reflexive Awareness

Abstract

Higher-order and self-representational theories of consciousness presuppose a basic intuition about consciousness, known variously as the Transitivity Principle or Awareness Principle: For any mental state M of a subject S, M is conscious only if S is aware of being in M. While advocates of the principle often take its truth to be intuitively self-evident, Uriah Kriegel has positively defended the Awareness Principle by revising an argument offered by the 5th century Indian Buddhist philosopher Dignāga. Known as the “Memory Argument”, it roughly claims that: You can episodically remember some event only if you were aware of it at the time of its occurrence; in addition to episodically remembering some consciously experienced object, it is possible to remember your conscious experience of that object; therefore, you must have been aware of your conscious experience at the time of its occurrence. Dignāga additionally argues that the awareness of the conscious state could not be due to some other mental state, on pain of infinite regress; so, the conscious state must have been reflexively aware of itself. In this paper, I reconsider the soundness of these arguments. On their own, they may fail to convince someone committed to the phenomenal transparency of experience, or a higher-order theory of consciousness. Instead, I propose that the Memory Argument can be revised by considering the role of attention in structuring conscious experiences such that they can be remembered episodically. This revised argument would go some way toward demystifying the awareness principle and reflexive awareness, by showing them to be symptoms of attentional activity and phenomenology.