The Wild Region in Life-History

I don't know much about the wild-region, as discussed in the book The Wild Region in Life-History, but it is an interesting approach to a problem that I've been thinking about from a completely different direction.

See, it turns out that memories aren't simple things, that there isn't a single sort of memory or a single way of encoding memory traces. The distinction between episodic memory and semantic memory (and any other variety of non-episodic memory that a psychologist might investigate) are a distinction between those memories with traces in the medial temporal lobe and those which are encoded through other mechanisms.

If we accept a multiple drafts picture of the mind, there's not guarantee that there even are discrete physical tokens corresponding to the neural "engram", the physical memory trace. It may be the case that information, in the sense of causal processes orginating with the distal object of perception go there own ways once they get into the nervous system. Some bits about go off to the area looking to recognize spatial orientation, other parts go off to process colors, to serve as memory cues, to answer questions in concert on with other processes ("what's that smell?") or "Seeing the turkey" becomes a relatively distributed task, not distributed in the sense of not correlated to a physical structure, rather decomposed into a set of functions which correspond to what the various parts of the nervous system actually do (as oppossed to what we tend to think they do when we're doing whatever it is that we might be doing, such as looking at freshly roasted turkeys.)

There's always the functional answer, that what's human is what tends to do human things. Some form of this answer has been popular, even dominant, since the time of Aristotle. This answer is good for a lot of practical purposes, but the functions that we find important might not correspond to the one's that our brain is actually carrying out. It also opens an interesting discussion about the relative worth of various functions. Not all of the functions develop in the same way or at the same time. Depending upon what we want to consider the valuable aspects of human development, the critical functions could be formed either early in pregnancy or not for several years after birth. (A lot of what I'm thinking about here is motivated by a book I'm reading right now called The Development of Implicit and Explicit Memory by Rovee-Collier and others).

Which brings us to the question of "who are we?", the cognitive and physiological data is obviously of critical importance, so is the input of naive or folk phenomenology (what we get when studying phenomonological experience without using words like alterity), and more developed phenomenological theories as well. None of these however can be decisive. It would be nice if the anatomical evidence could provide knock down evidence to answer these questions but, for reasons I've been hinting at, there's no probably no "I" operating at a much lower level than my entire self. (In other words, there's no smaller "me" somewhere inside pulling my strings.)

I was recently having a discussion with someone about physicalism and after-death experience. (I am now convinced that these two topics have even less to do with each other than they may at first appear.) He didn't quite pick up on how odd this formulation was, since by dead, he meant not exhibiting life-signs (heart beat, brain functions), while the functions that are of most interest or value tend to be the one's that allow experiences, the traditional life-signs are just more easily observable functions that tend to correlate strongly with having experiences (rather having experiences tends to strongly correlate with having a heart beat). Of course, there's no evidence that there was any experience during the period of clinical death, just after the fact memories.

In any case, continuity of memory seems a critical part of self-identity. I don't care to examine this at the moment since it would require a consideration of Locke and Hume. In any case, this brings us back to the wild-spaces, a phrase taken from Merleau-Ponty. Once again, I'm reminded that I should get around to reading Merleau-Ponty. The anatomical evidence seems to converge with the historical debate, memory by itself is insufficient for telling our stories in a useful way, perhaps the wild region could be useful in this regard as well.

Just a thought.