User:Sparlett/sandbox

User:Sparlett/sandbox

Aristotle was a Greek Philosopher born in Stagirus in 384 BCE. His father, Nicomachus died when Aristotle was a child and he lived under a guardians care. At the age of eighteen, he joined Plato’s Academy in  Athens and continued to stay until the age of thirty-seven, around 347 BCE. During his stay in Athens, Aristotle learned and worked with philosophers of science, such as Plato, and eventually began teaching and writing himself. Shortly after Plato died Aristotle left Athens. With the request of Philip of Macedonia he became a tutor for Alexander in 356-323 BCE.

Aristotle achieved merit through teaching Alexander the Great. This distinction allowed him many opportunities, including an abundance of supplies. He established a libraary in Lyceum with which many of his hundreds of books were produced. His writings cover many topics, including physics,  metaphysics,  poetry,  theater,  music,  logic,  rhetoric,  linguistics,  politics,  government,  ethics,  biology, and  zoology. The fact that Aristotle was a pupil of Plato contributed to his former views of Platonism, but following Plato’s death, Aristotle immersed himself in empirical studies and shifted from Platonism to empiricism. He believed all peoples concepts and all of their knowledge was ultimately based on perception. Aristotle’s views on natural sciences, including philosophy of the mind, body, sensory experience, memory, and biology represent the groundwork underlying many of his works. Many aspects of Aristotelian thought remain an active academic study, however, many of his writing are now lost with only one-third of his original works still surviving.

Memory
According to Aristotle, Memory is the ability to hold an perceived experience in your mind and to have the ability to distinguish between the internal “appearance” and an occurrence in the past. In other words, a memory is a mental picture (phantasm) in which Aristotle defines in De Anima, as an appearance which is imprinted on the part of the body that forms a memory. Aristotle believed an “imprint” becomes impressed on a semi-fluid bodily organ that undergoes several changes in order to make a memory. A memory occurs when a stimuli is too complex that the nervous system (semi-fluid bodily organ) cannot receive all the impressions at once. These changes are the same as those involved in the operations of sensation,  common sense, and  thinking. The mental picture imprinted on the bodily organ is the final product of the entire process of sense perception. It does not matter if the experience was seen or heard, every experience ends up as a mental image in memory

Aristotle uses the word “memory” for two basic abilities. First, the actual retaining of the experience in the  mnemonic “imprint” that can develop from  sensation. Second, the intellectual anxiety that comes with the “imprint” due to being impressed at a particular time and processing specific contents. These abilities can be explained as memory is neither sensation nor thinking because is arises only after a lapse of time. Therefore, memory is of the past, prediction is of the future, and sensation is of the present. The retrieval of our “imprints” cannot be performed suddenly. A transitional channel is needed and located in our past experiences, both for our previous experience and present experience.

Aristotle proposed that slow-witted people have good memory because the fluids in their brain do not wash away their memory organ used to imprint experiences and so the “imprint” can easily continue. However, they cannot be too slow or the hardened surface of the organ will not receive new “imprints”. He believed the young and the old do not properly develop an “imprint”. Young people undergo rapid changes as they develop, while the elderly’s organs are beginning to decay, thus stunting new “imprints”. Likewise, people who are too quick-witted are similar to the young and the image cannot be fixed because of the rapid changes of their organ. Since intellectual functions are not involved in memory, memories belong to some animals too, but only those in which have perception of time.

Recollection
Since Aristotle believes people receive all kinds of sense perceptions and people perceive them as images or “imprints”, people are continually weaving together new “imprints” of things they experience. In order to search for these “imprints”, people search the memory itself. Within the memory, if one experience is offered instead of a specific memory, that person will reject this experience until they find what they are looking for. Recollection occurs when one experience naturally follows another. If the chain of "images" is needed, one memory will stimulate the other. If the chain of "images" is not needed, but expected, then it will only stimulate the other memory in most instances. When people recall experiences, they stimulate certain previous experiences until they have stimulated the one that was needed.

Recollection is the self-directed activity of retrieving the information stored in a memory "imprint" after some time has passed. Retrieval of stored information is dependent on the scope of mnemonic capabilities of a being (human or animal) and the abilities the human or animal possesses. Only humans will remember "imprints" of intellectual activity, such as numbers and words. Animals that have perception of time will be able to retrieve memories of their past observations. Remembering involves only perception of the things remembered and of the time passed. Recollection of an "imprint" is when the present experiences a person remembers are similar with elements corresponding in character and arrangement of past sensory experiences. When an "imprint" is recalled, it may bring forth a large group of related "imprints".

Aristotle believed the chain of thought, which ends in recollection of certain “imprints”, was connected systematically in three sorts of relationships: similarity, contrast, and contiguity. These three laws make up his Laws of Association. Aristotle believed that past experiences are hidden within our mind. A force operates to awaken the hidden material to bring up the actual experience. According to Aristotle, association is the power innate in a mental state, which operates upon the unexpressed remains of former experiences, allowing them to rise and be recalled.