Memory, Consciousness and the Self. Consciousness as a continuum of states.

This article addresses some open questions about the self, development, consciousness and memory, especially episodic memory, and is meant to make an attempt to clarify on a descriptive manner these phenomena and especially the relationship between them. In particular, cognitive child development of memory and current theorizing on semantic and episodic memory and related developmental states of consciousness teaches us here to see how different levels of development of the self, identity and memory relate to the ontogenetic development of different stages of consciousness of being in the world. A gradual distinction becomes outlined: from a rudimentary state of autonomic awakeness or unknowing consciousness as a biological adaptive function with a first sort of "self-experience" already apparent at an anoetic level of consciousness relying on implicit experiential and procedural memory, towards "knowing consciousness", including "noetic" and "autonoetic" consciousness based on semantic and episodic memory systems.

Publication year:2009

Keywords:semantic and episodic memory, autonoetic awareness