Memory Stored in Time: Victoria Trumbull’s Challenge to the Materialist Account
The dominant view in neuroscience and philosophy of mind holds that memory works something like a biological computer. Experiences leave physical traces in the brain — strengthened synaptic connections, modified protein structures, altered neural firing patterns — and remembering is the process of reading those traces back out. The brain is the storehouse, the neurons are the storage medium, and memory is the data encoded within them. This view is so deeply assumed in mainstream science that it rarely gets stated explicitly, let alone questioned. Victoria Trumbull questions it explicitly, and her challenge cuts to the foundation rather than the details.
Trumbull’s central argument is that the materialist account of memory commits a category error. It assumes that because memory can be correlated with physical brain states, memory must therefore be identical to or produced by those physical brain states. But correlation is not identity. The physical changes in the brain that accompany memory formation may be the neural correlates of memory without being memory itself — just as the correlates of a storm appearing on a weather radar screen are not the storm. More fundamentally, the materialist account bypasses rather than addresses the hard problem of consciousness as it applies specifically to memory. It tells you which neurons change when a memory forms but cannot explain why those physical changes are accompanied by the felt sense of the past being present — the specific qualitative texture of recollection, the way a memory carries not just information but the experiential character of the original moment. No amount of additional neuroscience can bridge this gap because the gap is not empirical but structural.
Her alternative proposal is that memory is not stored in space — not located in any physical configuration of matter — but stored in time. Memory is a temporal structure, subsisting in the relationships between moments rather than in the state of matter at any single moment. The past does not leave a copy of itself behind in the brain the way a computer writes data to a disk. It persists into the present through the living structure of time itself, shaping the present moment from within rather than being retrieved from an external storehouse. This places Trumbull in a philosophical tradition that includes Henri Bergson’s distinction between habit memory and pure memory, and Edmund Husserl’s analysis of retention and protention in time-consciousness — but she sharpens and updates these insights for a contemporary audience still largely captive to the computational metaphor. Memory, on her account, is not what the brain stores. It is what time does.
Memory is stored outside the physical. Absolutely. It’s part of the idea behind the holographic theory of the universe.
Suddenly the Akashic Record comes to mind… but accessibility once a moment has passed, idk. It seems to only exist as a 2 dimensional memory. Could the record of things that have already happened, shift from 3 dimensional projections to only 2 dimensional memory at the point of the present? Is the future already written? I hope not.
I kind of think of the brain like a storage medium in a computer, sure if you tamper with the medium that holds the info, it can corrupt.
But the info still exist, just the brain was damaged & it has trouble accessing it… itself, but if you can go back in time or access, it… without using the corrupted medium, it is always there. like burning a piece of paper with notes, they are there, just transformed.
Because when anything is created* they will… always exist. The problem is how to access the info with the media, or before it was corrupted still.
From Kevin Rigley, the first person to respond to Trumbull’s article that you re-posted: “Philosophy serves us best when it sharpens our concepts without outrunning our observations. Trumbull reminds us not to mistake metaphor for mechanism. But we should be equally wary of mistaking a critique of language for an explanation of reality.”
Rigley alludes to Trumbull choosing to attack the weakest theory of how memory is stored in the brain. I’ll call her tactic for what it is; it’s a Straw man logical fallacy. The academic majority, and it is a super majority, describes how memory is stored in the brain as I have previously described it on this forum. It is not a unitary verbatim or semi-verbatim transcript of events. Memory is stored in various brain locations as tokens. To recall past events (aka memory) the tokens need to have a context. That is how memory is stored and recalled. We can see the various areas of the brain “light up” using an electroencephalogram (EEG). The cognitive activity is physically observed as being in the brain not Somewhere in Time. Without context we often experience TOTS - tip of the tongue syndrome. The memory is “right there” but just won’t develop. Several hours later while you’re no longer thinking about the scenario the memory floods out, “Oh for God’s sake. George Smith! Why couldn’t I recall his name before?” TOTS and Tokens.
Rigley properly cautions, “[Philosopher Ludwig] Wittgenstein famously warned that philosophy gets into trouble when language goes on holiday.” And that is present in spades in Trumbull’s article. “Memory is stored in time, not space.” We call that pseudo science word salad in drastic need of definitions.
I’m sorry, my friend, but you chose a very weak article. Philosophers make for poor educators in physical and biological sciences. They tend to fall in love with new labels instead of the underlying science.
Thank you for the helpful critique Darby. I was also suspicious of the article because Trumbull asserts that memory is stored in time but not space and that assertion assumes the Newtonian absolute view of time which is incorrect. I hypothesize that the brain is a transducer. According to some theories, information is structurally encoded in spacetime geometry (perhaps at Planck scale, or in holographic boundaries). Thus brains don’t store memories but access pre-existing spatiotemporal patterns through resonance. Consciousness/memory involves tuning into these patterns rather than computing them
This agrees with:
1. Holographic principle / AdS/CFT correspondence
Information in a volume can be encoded on its boundary. Some theorists (e.g., Pribram’s holographic brain, or more speculatively Penrose’s ORCH-OR) suggest consciousness involves non-local quantum-gravitational effects.
2. Wheeler’s “participatory universe”
Observers participate in constructing reality; the “transducer” view suggests brains participate in actualizing spacetime information.
3. Bohm’s implicate order
Enfolded structures in the quantum field unfold into explicit experience. Memory as accessing enfolded spatiotemporal information fits the metaphysics of brain as a transducer.
I am not a brain surgeon so for now I will accept your view as being the most true.
I also hate it when the memory gaps you describe occur in my brain.
