Can we experience the past without remembering it?

I would say so. I had the "pleasure" of experiencing a hurricane once and vividly remember going thru it with my mom and my sister as our house was assaulted with gales and rain and shattering windows. That is clearly a memory.

But I can also think about that hurricane outside that memory--how it was tearing up other buildings and homes all thruout our town. It is knowledge of that event that I can access that is not dependent on my memory. It is a third hand knowledge based on what I later found out about the storm, unlike memory which is a first hand knowledge of only what happened to me. Images form in my head of the storm damaging other places that I don't remember happening. But they obviously did.

So what makes my memory anything more than thinking about what happened to us in that house? There is in fact a sort of objectification or third person view of what happened to me, seeing myself and my mom and sister in the house going thru various events as if I was an invisible observer of it all. Is memory then just thinking about what you experienced in the past, reconstructing certain images as having been? Where does the first person knowledge end and the third person knowledge begin? Strangely enough as I think about it now it is just all mixed up together.

(Apr 10, 2026 04:35 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] Is memory then just thinking about what you experienced in the past, reconstructing certain images as having been? Where does the first person knowledge end and the third person knowledge begin? Strangely enough as I think about it now it is just all mixed up together.

People with exceptional memory might or might not keep their excessive details about a distant event close to autobiographical recall, but for the rest of us, it's going to tend to be an error-prone or creative reconstructive memory conforming to an artificial narrative that accordingly mingles the two. Reconstructive memory tends to inherently construe itself as being just the opposite (reliable, accurate, uncontaminated recall).

My sister just astutely pointed out the role of second hand memories. That is the memories we learn about of what other people experienced. The story itself which we share among ourselves about that moment gets more detailed and elaborate over the years. It is believed in as firmly as if remembering it all ourselves. Having gotten so used to imagining all these same events over the years, the fine line between what we actually remember and what we have been told gets easily blurred. Not to say that necessarily makes memory erroneous, but just more objectified from a private experience to a public event.