I-Jan Wang

This paper provides a defense of intentionalism about episodic reference. This is the view that a person’s intentions and self-interpretations determine the singular events to which their episodic rememberings and future directed episodic thoughts refer. Intentionalism distinguishes itself by providing a single account of reference for memory and imagination, where some other approaches result in an awkward disjunction. The view is also shown to be compatible with the spirit of both simulationist and causalist approaches to memory and coheres well with the experimental methodologies and empirical findings that motivate those approaches. Intentionalism is able, in addition, to accommodate the phenomenon of unintentional remembering, be it during intrusive memories or mind wandering.

Consciousness studies have relied on the subject’s remembering capacity as the primary tool for identifying and measuring selfless states, i.e., conscious states without self-consciousness. This paper critically examines whether memory can serve such a role. After outlining the requirements that remembering must meet when deployed in studies of selfless consciousness, I evaluate its competence accordingly. On this basis, I argue for three epistemic challenges to the use of remembering in the study of selfless states: one corresponds to the well-discussed memory challenge of selfless report in the literature, while the other two—the zero-inflation challenge and the measurement challenge—are newly introduced. Specifically, the memory challenge concerns avoiding false negatives—selfless states misclassified as self-conscious. The zero-inflation challenge concerns avoiding false positives—self-conscious states misclassified as selfless. And the measurement challenge concerns reliably capturing the non-self-related aspects of experience within selfless states.

Dream experiences are heterogenous and involve a complex and varied phenomenology. While mental states like belief and desire can be easily characterised by their attitudes and contents, dreaming seems to involve a variety of attitudes, including beliefs, desires, and more. How do we make sense of dreaming itself as well as its relationship to the attitudes involved? We outline an attitudinal pluralism about dreaming. Attitudinal pluralism is the view that the dream self can adopt a variety of attitudes—beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, etc.—towards the content of the dreamscape. On this view, there are multiple attitudes that the dream self can adopt within the simulated dream world. The best way to understand this pluralism is not by narrowly taking dreaming to just involve thinking itself, but rather by taking dreaming to involve a dream self experiencing thoughts within the dream. The attitudes belong to the dream self (the character one identifies with in the dream) not the dreamer per se (the sleeping subject). This attitudinal pluralism has consequences for thinking about the nature of dream experiences and the content of dream memories. First, the attitudes we experience as part of the dream world seem to go beyond mere phenomenology and may be part of the ontological structure of dream experiences. Second, accuracy in dream memories will involve recalling the various attitudes that one adopted while dreaming. Understood in this way, accuracy in dream memory requires a condition of authenticity, such that the dream memory represents not just the content of the dreamscape, but the way in which the dream subject experienced the dream world. Accurate dream memories will be authentic dream memories.