Recall the Memory Argument for Inner Awareness

Abstract

An intuition about consciousness known as the 'Awareness Principle' states: For any mental state M of a subject S, M is conscious only if S has an 'inner awareness' of M. Some have recently defended this principle by revising the 'memory argument' first offered by the sixth-century Buddhist philosopher Dignaga: From the fact that an experience can be episodically remembered, it should follow that a subject must have been aware of that experience. In response, I argue that defenders of the memory argument haven't convincingly established the episodic memorability of experience, because they haven't defused a countervailing claim that conscious perceptual experience is phenomenologically 'transparent'. This claim, if true, would suggest that what one can episodically remember is just how the (external or internal) world appeared through one's 'outer awareness', rather than how the past experience itself appeared through one's inner awareness. I further argue that the memory argument can accommodate phenomenological transparency only at the expense of making the Awareness Principle trivial. The memory argument defender may then claim that there is some non-introspectible feature of a past experience that is episodically memorable, namely, that experience's subjective character or phenomenal 'for-me-ness'. In response, I develop an objection from the tenth-century Saiva philosopher Utpaladeva against the possibility of recalling a past experience's subjective character as such. Overall, while the objections this article raises cannot falsify the Awareness Principle directly, they may motivate its proponents to recall their support for the memory argument.