Echoes of memory: discouraging robust past experience in perception

Temporal Realism (TR) advances two interlocking theses: (1) certain hallucinations are not about nothing but indeed are experiences of past-perceived objects, and (2) long-term memory functions as an integrated sensory modality so that every perceptual episode partly presents the past. Together, these form a robust account of the mind and world. In this paper I argue that both theses founder on the same two defects. First, they overextend causal ancestry into intentional content, rendering experience disconnected from epistemic grip or phenomenal clue. Second, they dissolve essential phenomenological and functional boundaries between hallucination and imagination and between sensory modality and memory, thus undercutting the distinctions that make perception cognitively and clinically intelligible. I sketch a modest hybrid alternative in which memory remains causally indispensable yet phenomenally backgrounded, shaping but not injecting discrete past entities or patterns into our current phenomenal experience.