In memoriam Stephen Braude (1942–2025)

On January 3, the philosopher, jazz composer and jazz musician Stephen Braude died. A sad beginning of the year. I learned a lot from Steve and was glad to have him as a friend. Some of you may have known him too or may be acquainted with his work that included a philosophical analysis of dissociation and dissociative disorders.  

Steve made me highly aware of the major flaws of memory trace theories and related models. These include representational and information processing theories. Despite their serious shortcomings—that mostly go stubbornly unrecognized or ignored—these approaches constitute the core of most contemporary psychology. All basically hold that the individual and his or her world are two systems, that individuals react to ‘stimuli’ or ‘information’. But are we essentially split off from our environment and is our environment something that exists objectively and independently from us? 

You may want to think twice. I’ve composed a book on Longing. In this frame, I suggest that each living being is an ecological system that intrinsically includes the subject and the subject’s Umwelt as the subject’s object. Timo Järvilehto’s new book is called You are not an island: Organism-environment system theory. It goes to print soon. Both works seek to overcome the two systems model that haunts much of psychology and seek to replace it by a one system approach.

And memory? Well, don’t we encode experiences and facts, store the codes in neural traces, that we retrieve when needed? Isn’t that what much of neuroscience and cognitive psychology tell us? In this frame, aren’t we basically physical brain-based machines? Fancy devices, perhaps, but mechanical structures? 

If you feel that somehow something’s going very wrong here but find it hard to lay your finger on the core of the problem, read Braude. Read Howard Bursen, John Heil, Alfred North Whitehead, Timo Järvilehto. 

Or, if that’s too much given your busy life, read a wonderful thesis that colleague psychologist and friend Steinar Svoren recently composed as part of his path to become a philosopher. It’s titled Memory without memory traces. Steinar’s lucid and well-structured work is full of Steve Braude’s critique of memory trace theories but elaborates it as well. You will find the thesis included in my free online library (ask for the password here). 

Having listened to Steve’s firm critiques in the 1990-ties, I asked him, almost in desperation, how do we know yesterday? He looked at me with a faint smile and said, “we remember”. I didn’t get the point of his answer. Now, I appreciate more that science and philosophy do not have answers to every possible question. As philosophers say, some things are ineffable, irreducible. Memory may be one of them. We cannot cast or explain experience in terms of something else that is more ‘true’, that tells a better story. What could better capture my feelings for Steve than my feelings for him? No set of neurons could ever excel it. 

Steve has died. It’s the way it is. Does that mean you’re dead, Steve? Given his profound analysis and study of the emerging evidence for and against post mortem survival, I hear him say, with another faint smile: “That remains to be seen. For you, that is.”