I saw this man years ago: now I have seen him again, I recognize him, I remember his name. And why does there have to be a cause of this remembering in my nervous system? Why must something or other, whatever it may be, be stored up there in any form? Why must a trace have been left behind? Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concepts of causality then it is high time they were upset (210).He continues this same idea a bit farther on:
The text would not be stored up in the jottings. And why should it be stored up in our nervous system? (211)I've had issues with what this seems to imply. Is Wittgenstein saying that there's nothing our brains store, it's all just a linguistic fact, the fact of our remembering? This seems incredibly hard to maintain. How can he explain what is it to remember, to know something? I just can't see how there could be a "psychological regularity," as he calls it, without any correspondent "physiological regularity." It seems there has to be something in our mind, in the physical makeup of our brain, that allows for what we call "remembering."
I'm not trying to say that there has to be some mental object in the mind. And maybe that's what Wittgenstein is really arguing against when he denies this "physiological regularity." But his way of saying it makes it seem that he wants to deny any physical cause of psychological states. Ok, so Wittgenstein says that this should upset our ideas of causality, but I'm just wondering what good his account does. Would it really matter that there's some sort of physical activity going on in the nervous system that constitutes our psychological states? What harm does this do to his theory? It's not like there's some separate physical activity going on in the brain that we think about, and this is what we call thinking. No, it is this very physical activity that is thinking.
1 comment:
Nice post.
Perhaps it would be fair to LW to say that remembering is not merely a "linguistic fact" but one involving practice and that maintaining that the memory is stored in the *mind* in effect has no additional explanatory power. We might also think of the mind-brain/body relationship in terms of two mutually irreducible ways of looking at the phenomena. If that's the case, then the answer to your question would seem to be that the brain, physiologically described, does not store information, at least not the sort we usually say it does.
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