Lives in Pieces: Subjective Experience Through Time

Thomas Nagel, an NYU professor of philosophy and ethics, states that an organism has consciousness if there is something that it is like to be that organism; he calls this the subjective character of experience. We cannot know what another person’s subjective experience is, or even if they have one; this limitation of knowledge is called the epistemic barrier. It exists because consciousness is not currently measurable by anything physical. Though we may assume that someone who has the ability to perceive the world has some experience of the world, we cannot know how similar their subjective experience is to our own. David Chalmers, an NYU professor of philosophy and neural science, argues that our only knowledge of consciousness stems from our own experience of it—even if we believe that others have a subjective experience, we cannot know for certain. In this paper I will endeavor to show that there is an epistemic barrier not just, as we know, between ourselves and others but also even between ourselves and our past and future selves; because we do not have accurate, objective memory, it is impossible to know what our past subjective experiences were like or even if we truly had them.

It is fairly easy to access our own subjective experience in the moment, and it may seem like memory allows us to access our subjective experiences from the past. However, this is not true. When we remember our own past, we view it through our current consciousness and that past loses its subjective perspective. Reconstructive memory theory states that as we recall things, we pull from our prior experiences in the form of schemas. Schemas are ways that we understand and apply structures in our minds where information is organized and grouped; people form schemas for everything they experience about how the world works, like how you know how to open a door you have never opened before because you have a schema for opening doors in general. As we remember, our memories are altered to fit what we expect them to be based on these schemas. Memory is not a way of accessing past experience, but is actually a part of the current subjective experience. Every time you remember something, you insert some part of your current consciousness into that experience and the resulting memory no longer seamlessly reflects your past subjective experience. For example, Loftus and Palmer’s 1974 study showed that the way a person is asked to recall something can affect one’s memory of the event. They showed participants a video of a car crash, and asked half of them to estimate the speed of the cars when they collided. The other half heard the question with the word “smashed” instead of “hit.” Later, all participants were asked if they remembered seeing broken glass in the video; participants who were asked how fast the cars were going when they “smashed” more often reported broken glass. The schemas the participants had for the words “smash” and “hit” were a part of their current consciousnesses, and these schemas affected their memories of the event, even though while they were watching the video they were not influenced by language.

Subjective experience is constantly changing; it is reflective of what it is like to be you at this one specific point in time. At any given moment, you are constantly taking in information and events, and these things combined are your experience. This means that we have a different subjective experience, a different consciousness, from each instant of our past selves. If we do not remember exactly what it was like to be us in the past and unless that memory is the same as the experience, we cannot access our past subjective experiences. We cannot know what it was like to be those versions of us because we can only access our own subjective experience, and have no way of accurately recalling a subjective experience we used to have. Nagel gives the example: “Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision… In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves.” You cannot know what it used to be like to be yourself in the same way that you cannot know what it is like to be a bat; it is a separate subjective experience.

However, it seems difficult to believe that our subjective experience from just one minute, or even one second ago, is completely separate from our current subjective experience. Consider though, how you would remember a subjective experience, assuming your memory is accurate and objective. In order to conceptualize what it was like to be you at that point in time, it must become factual memory. When you recall that memory, you are converting it to a format that is understandable from an objective point of view. This is the same as trying to explain a subjective experience to someone else; you can recall the things you were experiencing and explain them, but not what it was like to experience them. An example is that when you remember a time you were so sad you cried you do not actually cry; there is a distance between the memory and its actuality in the past.

Thus, we can see that there is an epistemic barrier between your current self and your past and future selves. If you are a person, you know what it is like to be that person, so if you cannot know what it is like to be someone, you cannot be them. Therefore, there being an epistemic barrier between yourself and your past self implies that you are a different person at every moment in time. This raises questions about moral and ethical implications. For example, can you be blamed for past actions if you are not the same person who did them? If your past self is not you, this would be exactly like blaming someone for someone else’s crime. If you cannot be held accountable for your past actions, there would be no justice system or ethical punishment for crime. This also implies that the person who decides to take an action and the person who takes that action are not the same person, which brings up questions of free will. Does the person who takes the action but did not decide to take it have autonomy? Do they have the ability to change the decision at their point of existence, or are they trapped in the decision made by someone before them? This also implies that you have the same moral duty to not harm your past or future self as you do to not harm someone else. This has huge implications on our system of justice and punishment, such as how we should punish people and for what. If everyone operated under the assumption that we are different people at every moment in time and are unable to fully understand our past and future selves, the way we interact with the world and our bodies would completely shift. Though I have shown this to be true, the world would not necessarily be better if we operated as such. It would be a strange dystopia where there is no way to hold people accountable for their past actions. How would we build relationships between people who only exist for a tiny sliver of time? How would we ever be able to change if we stopped thinking of ourselves as continuous and permanent in our flesh sacks? We have brains, bodies, and memories that are constantly reminding us that we have grown and moved through time, and completely disconnecting these bodies from our concepts of self would be extremely difficult. For example, how can you look at a piece of artwork your body created, remembering every brush stroke and decision, and think, “Someone else made that, with my hands and my brain?” However, it is important to not treat our memories of the past as fact, and to not believe in our own ability to completely understand what it was like to experience something exactly as you would experience it as you exist in the present. Being aware that the way you are remembering something is not the same as how you once experienced it or even how it happened is important in reducing confidence in potentially false memories, and keeping a sense of personal distance from the past that you can no longer experience. The epistemic barrier between yourself and your past and future selves is important on an individual level, if not societal.