Bergson’s Many Problems with Wu’s Many-Many Problem

I am preparing a paper on a philosophical problem I discovered working on the First chapter of my dissertation. Here I use work from the history of Continental philosophy to help rethink assumptions and problems in analytical philosophy. Wayne Wu wonders how, among so (1) many memories over a lifetime, that we bring a memory to awareness and how does this memory influence us to select from the (2) many actions from the behavioural space open to us? With (1) many and (2) many, Wu calls this the “many-many” problem. Wu ultimately thinks that attention, what he considers a “mental action,” does the work of selection and bridges perception, memory and action. In a manuscript entitled, Bergson’s Many Problems with Wu’s Many-Many Problem, I argue that over one hundred years ago, Henri Bergson already posed the many-many problem in his book Matter and Memory. I use Matter and Memory to critique a central assumption that Wu makes. That memory is a discrete, bounded thing that can be brought up and selected individually. In Matter and Memory Bergson shows that memory is in fact a holistic continuum that cannot be separated through mental action. This changes the many-many problem such that attention can no longer be the answer.