Radical Embodied Memory (Wilford & Anderson, 2025)

Of all the representation-hungry problems out there, memory seems to be the hungriest. It is clearly a fact that we can organise our present behaviour with respect to things that happened previously; we learn, I can shape my talking behaviour to be about what I did last summer, and so on. In order for this to be possible, something has to persist from the past into the present, and it seems intuitive that what persists is some sort of record of that past event. That seems like it has to be a representation, by the very definition of the term. 

Obviously, I don't think that ecological psychology can't find a way to talk about memory. I've done it a bit (Rob and I had a chat on his podcast, I've thought about it a little in papers) but never anything formal; all just thinking through the problem. So I was excited to see a preprint on the topic by Robyn Wilford and Michael Anderson. In this post I want to review the basic approach (overall I like the paper and I think the basic idea is exactly right) and list a few suggestions I would make if I was reviewing this paper. It's exciting to see this topic getting some attention, even if it is still very early days.

Lecture 16: The Computational-Representational Perspective: Preliminaries (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on Perception)

The next four Lectures are specifically focused on the modern form of the Cartesian programme - the computational-representational approach. It's important to spend some time here, because this is the ecological approach's current opposition, and because the fact it is just yet another Cartesian programme matters, and is at the heart of most of our objections to it. 

In Lecture 6 we learned about the 3 grades of sense. First, there is reflex. The second is limited awareness of secondary qualities. The third is full mental awareness of what it all means. The proposed solution (Hobbes) for building the third grade out of the other two is the manipulation of symbols to do inference. In modern times, this is implemented as computation, and implemented in a representation.