Alison Gopnik: belief

Transcript context

…People who have very weak episodic memories — as you know, that’s a thing — are those people less conscious? No. I think arguably, if you think about the children, for example — they don’t have as much episodic memory, especially the little ones, like the two-, three-year-olds. I think that may actually be making you more conscious in the sense that, again, this adult tendency is to try to . . . You could think of it as trying to reduce, to compress the information around you into a particular narrative, like the kind of narrative you have in an episodic memory. A lot of times, as adults, what we’re trying to do is take all this information, all this data, and just compress it into a single narrative, which is a very useful thing to do. I think babies, before they develop a lot of episodic . . . They have some episodic memory even from very early on, but it’s around three or four that they develop the kind of autobiographical memory that grown-ups have. I think that actually makes them more conscious in the sense that they’re more focused on the present, and they’re experiencing the present more. If someone has aphantasia, they don’t retain images very well, are they also more conscious for that reason?…

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