"Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience"
About this Quote
Expectations and memories get treated like internal photo albums: passive snapshots we consult to navigate the present. Alexander refuses that comforting metaphor. By insisting they are "more than mere images", he’s pushing back against a popular empiricist picture of the mind in which yesterday stamps a neat impression and tomorrow is just that impression replayed or projected forward. The phrase "founded on previous experience" concedes the obvious - we don’t imagine from nowhere - then immediately denies that the foundation explains the building.
The intent is philosophical housekeeping with real stakes. If memory is only an image, it’s a private cinema: vivid, yes, but inert. If expectation is only an image, it’s fantasy dressed up as forecast. Alexander’s subtext is that both are active, structured relations to time. Memory is not simply stored content; it’s a reconstruction shaped by current needs, concepts, and attention. Expectation is not a mere mental picture of what might happen; it’s an orientation, a readiness, a stance toward an unfinished world.
Context matters: writing in a period when British philosophy was wrestling with the limits of associationism and the rise of more dynamic accounts of consciousness, Alexander (a key figure in emergentism) treats mind as something that does, not just something that contains. The line quietly argues for the mind’s creative, organizing power: experience doesn’t just leave residues; it gets metabolized into dispositions, meanings, and commitments. That’s why the sentence works - it sounds modest, almost technical, but it smuggles in a radical upgrade to inner life: time in the mind isn’t replayed, it’s remade.
The intent is philosophical housekeeping with real stakes. If memory is only an image, it’s a private cinema: vivid, yes, but inert. If expectation is only an image, it’s fantasy dressed up as forecast. Alexander’s subtext is that both are active, structured relations to time. Memory is not simply stored content; it’s a reconstruction shaped by current needs, concepts, and attention. Expectation is not a mere mental picture of what might happen; it’s an orientation, a readiness, a stance toward an unfinished world.
Context matters: writing in a period when British philosophy was wrestling with the limits of associationism and the rise of more dynamic accounts of consciousness, Alexander (a key figure in emergentism) treats mind as something that does, not just something that contains. The line quietly argues for the mind’s creative, organizing power: experience doesn’t just leave residues; it gets metabolized into dispositions, meanings, and commitments. That’s why the sentence works - it sounds modest, almost technical, but it smuggles in a radical upgrade to inner life: time in the mind isn’t replayed, it’s remade.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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