Extended Consciousness

Extended Consciousness

Much of human memory is unconscious, and it never becomes conscious – though that does not mean that it does not influence consciousness. Most of what we do consciously, in our moment-to-moment lives, depends upon implicit (unconscious) memory systems, which exert their effects on us without us even realizing it. Our every conscious moment is shaped by unconscious events, derived from a personal and biological past of which we usually have no inkling. “Inherited” memories determine the form of the basic-emotion command systems. The “good” and “bad” objects mentioned above determine the contents of those systems. This is the core of a system of implicit learning. Some people (Joseph DeDoux, for example) call the motivational core of this type of memory system “emotional memory”

These are unconscious influences on consciousness, derived from the past. Consciousness itself is extended beyond the immediate present by our capacity to “replay” interactions with objects (good, bad, indifferent) in our mind's eye. This is explicit (conscious) remembering, the most important variety of which (from our subjective point of view) is called “episodic memory” - memory for “personal” events (the other main variety of explicit memory is “semantic memory” - memory of facts as opposed to events).

Episodic memory supplements our immediate experience of core consciousness (self-object couplings derived from current perception) with reminiscences of past moments of consciousness with the fact that you were there and felt something. This is what makes it familiar, a (past self-object couplings). The reactivation of such couplings of the self (inner consciousness) with stored information derived from past events (outer consciousness)seems to be the task, above all, of the hippocampus. Episodic memory links traces of past events (registered primarily in the posterior cortical networks) with the fact that you were there and felt something. This is what makes it familiar, and familiarity is also fallible – hence the déjà vu phenomenon – and perhaps also the problem of “false memories”).

Through complex interactions between our genes and the maturational environment, we develop a personal version of the world – an inner world – that is uniquely our own. Photo by Elena.