Memory as a Source of Knowledge: The Case of an Alzheimer Patient

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The approach of the empiricists with regards to memory is slightly different. They would regard the human being as a “tabula rasa” at birth, in which the ideas or images are being imprinted as they grow older and accumulate experiences. That is why the empiricists like Locke or Hume would reject the innate ideas, because they claim that we are born as a blank board.

Locke’s views on memory are very interesting because they extend their influence beyond epistemology and enter into the realms of personal identity, with the ethical implications that this could signify. Certainly, for Locke memory played an essential role on understanding the self, since he would regard it as “the ordered flow of sense experiences that the mind recorded”. This is known as the Lockean Memory Theory of Personal Identity. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke defines the self as “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” for further defining personal identity as “the sameness of a rational being” (Locke). So long as one is the same self, the same rational being, one has the same personal identity. If we accept that, any change in the self implies a change in personal identity, and the same the other way round: any change in personal identity implies that the self has changed. But because one needs to be a thinking thing (res cogitans) to be a self and because consciousness always accompanies thinking, the personal identity extends only so far as ones consciousness. And in here Locke equates consciousness with memory. Certainly, he asserts that “as far as [a] consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now as it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done” (Locke). He goes on to conclude that if one cannot remember some experience it is because one did not have that experience. For Locke, then, memory is a necessary condition of personal identity.

In contrast to the rationalists, empiricists as Locke would view memory as a storehouse which keeps sense experiences without processing them.

In both cases, however, they would regard memory as a secondary source because it refers to knowledge from the past which has entered our minds through the senses (empiricists), the intellect (rationalists) or through both. Only Plato and his followers, with his conception of the immortality of the soul and his World of Forms, would regard memory as a primary source by means of which all the knowledge we acquire is a mere recollection of what the soul learned from the world of Forms or ideas.

With regards to an Alzheimer’s patient, according to the American Alzheimer’s association the effects of the illness in the brain varies in intensity but falls into the following four categories: Amnesia (memory loss, starting with short term and ending by not recognising family or friends), Agnosia (inability to recognise or identify objects through the senses), Aphasia (language disturbance in understanding and expressing spoken words –can be expressive or receptive) and Apraxia (inability to perform motor activities).

It would seem, therefore, that a person on a very advanced stage of Alzheimer not only would not be able to remember previous knowledge but it would also be unable to acquire new knowledge, highlighting once more the essential role played by memory as a source of knowledge.

That would reconcile with the personal identity theory from Locke in some way, although as a great-grandson of an Alzheimer’s patient and witness of several patients suffering from dementia as volunteer at the Little Sisters of the Poor I would personally have difficulties to accept that they have lost its identity by them not remembering being loved and cared for and I would be more inclined to agree with the traditional continental philosophical tradition that puts the accent on the relational dimension and argues that we are “beings-in-the-world”.

On the other hand, the effects of the illness not only on memory but on motor activities would support the insights of Descartes on the role played by the pineal gland on different mechanical functions of the body such as sense perception, memory or bodily movements, all of which are being hindered by the Alzheimer’s disease.

References

http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/275/the-lockean-memory-theory-of-personal-identity-definition-objection-response

Chapter XXVII, p.335, John Locke edited with a foreword by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, The Clarendon Edition of the works of John Locke, Oxford University Press 1975

Ibidem same page

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