William Hirst's reflections on amnesia in chapter 14 may come as a shock to narrativists. The "anterograde" amnesics he studies are essentially in-capable of acquiring new information, whether about themselves or any-thing else. To demonstrate that incapacity Hirst enlisted them in a kind of diary experiment, the first such study ever run with amnesics. Each subject carried a "beeper," and wrote down what he or she was doing whenever the beeper went off. Unsurprisingly, they remembered virtu-ally none of those experiences later on. Such amnesics have no current autobiographical memories and no ongoing self-narratives: They are not "remembering selves" in the current sense at all. Nevertheless each of them has, and is aware of having, an obvious and distinct identity.
Devoid of memories, these patients are not devoid of feelings. In par-ticular, they are often depressed about the impoverishment of their lives that amnesia has produced! They know what they have lost, even though they cannot remember it. They do not need to remember it, because the circumstances of their lives make it obvious every day. You might say (indeed, Hirst does say) that the social situation remembers it for them. On this point at least, he is in accord with the social constructionist view shared by many other contributors to this volume. Information is to be found in the social world that individuals establish together, not just in their separate heads. Precisely for that reason, selves are not supported by narrative alone.
In the mental life of such an amnesic, someone is "at home" (i.e., there is conscious self-awareness) although no one is remembering. How many individuals are "at home" when remembering does take place? According to Edward Reed (chap. 15), there are at least two. This claim is Reed's way of solving a problem with which I myself have much sympathy: the problem of the relation between perception and memory. As J. J. Gibson's biographer (Reed, 1988), Reed is even more committed to the ecological approach than I am. Unfortunately, Gibson's (1966, 1979) ecological ap-proach to perception is difficult to generalize to other domains. By definition (Gibson's definition), perception is based on the ongoing activity of organisms that are in direct contact with their environments. Also by definition, that is exactly what memory is not.
My own solution to this problem has been to make a sharp distinction. Perception is one thing - direct, embedded, realistic, and veridical; memory is quite another thing. Unwilling to accept this distinction, Reed tries to use the same conceptual apparatus for both activities. He does it by giving up the unity of the self that is experienced in perceiving: "Perception is to self as memory is to selves.11 He regards this as a radical move. In my view it doesn't work out that way: His duality is not very different from Mead's / and me, or even from the remembering and remembered selves. But Reed does take it in a different direction than Mead did, not-ing the similarity between this duality and other interesting bifurcations of experience. In akrasia, for example, there is one self who intends and another who acts; in empathy, one self who shares someone else's feeling and another who is aware of it; in shame, one who has done something regrettable and another who, in the role of an outsider, condemns it. For Reed, all these conditions have something interesting and fundamental in common with remembering itself. Maybe they do.
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