I wrote: "I'm talking, in effect, about two other > kinds of images: Memory images, and imagined images."
Michael replied: [What's the difference? Are you thinking of the memory of specific objects (your first house, e.g.) and images of things you never actually witnessed? For me, they are not very dissimilar, except to the extent that for "imagined" images, I can add or remove discrete objects at will, whereas in a "memory" image, I would feel constrained to recall only objects that I remember being present. But in both cases, they are imagined scenes.] I agree, in that my kitchen-English implication that the two kinds of image are entirely discrete sorts of entities is misleading. After a while memory images, and imagined images are effectively the same. Perhaps we can say this: When we see a photo of Lincoln we've never seen before, then put the photo aside, then try to "recall" it, perhaps what we're trying to recall is the original raw data, the original sense impression. But, over time, we seem to working to recall memories of that raw data experience and not much from the experience itself. For example, my earliest memories are from when I was three or four. When I try to recall them now, I have no conviction I'm remembering the original experience much at all. Each time in the interim, I suspect my imagination, confronted with some blank patches, was filling in the newly conjured image with imagined detail. Similarly with grown up memories of actual events. I've known myself to believe I was recalling, say, a photo of a gathering of college mates. When I later came up with the very photo, I see my memory had put someone there who wasn't there. Presumably if I'd try to remember the photo an hour after I saw it, I would not have done that. In other words, consonant with something William just wrote, each time we try to recall an experience or memory of that experience we are reconstructing it. The "material" from which we take elements of the image is not confined to the last memory -- with its already spurious items. It can be a mix of the original experience plus memories we've had of the experience in the meantime. I now see I've conveyed an unclear idea of "notion". My original thought was that I cannot maintain, absolutely unaltered, a conscious image (visual or otherwise) even in "one sitting" -- i.e. I may try to keep the picture constant in my mind, but it morphs despite my efforts. This is what I had primarily in mind in saying that "notion" morphs like a writhing cloud. As William puts it: "Whatever consciousness is, it's changing moment to moment and thus whatever it fashions from memory is reinvented moment to moment. There are no "frozen moments" in memory as there are, seemingly, on the canvas." When William adds the following, he loses me a bit: "A memory is, they say, like a cage that encloses thoughts but since the context of those thoughts is always different, and thus the cage alters, the recollection is different even when we think it's not." That's unclear to me, among other reasons because the word 'memory' is ambiguous until clarified in a particular use. The user may have in mind a faculty/apparatus, as in "My memory isn't what it used to be." Or it may be a specific "notion", as in, "My memory of what he said is not the same as yours." Or it may blurrily be a general kind of notion, as in, "I prefer my rosy imagination of my late husband to my actual memory of him."
