Trumbull’s Memory of the Soul

Philosopher Victoria Trumbull understands human phenomenal consciousness as the lived duration of an individual soul: an active unity in which the past persists through memory, the body situates perception and action in the present, and the will opens experience toward a future that is not fully determined. Drawing on Augustine and Henri Bergson, she argues that the brain enables and selects recollection without containing the personal past, and that the soul is present to itself even when it is not explicitly thinking about itself. Her “dualism of duration” distinguishes mind and matter as opposed tendencies within reality that converge in embodied action. This synthesis makes memory the route to understanding both what it feels like to endure as a person and why she takes that person to be spiritually irreducible (Trumbull, 2025a, 2026b).

Trumbull revives the “argument from memory” for the existence of the soul, synthesizing Augustine’s analysis of memoria with Bergson’s Matter and Memory into a contemporary case that personal recollection cannot be reduced to the brain and therefore reveals a spiritual principle in the human person (Trumbull, 2026a). Thus, phenomenal consciousness, on her account, is essentially temporal: to be conscious is to hold the past in the present, perception presents qualities that belong to the world rather than representations manufactured by neurons, and the brain is an organ of action and “attention to life” that enables recall without containing memories. Mind and matter are distinguished not as two substances but as two inverse tendencies of duration, concentration and relaxation, making her position also a “dualism of tendency” rather than substance dualism. The soul so discovered is personal, a dynamic unity of memory, understanding, and will whose activity is creative, and whose depth opens, for Augustine, onto eternity and God.

The Argument from Memory

Trumbull declines to begin with a definition of the soul, arguing that rival definitions, Aristotelian form or Cartesian thinking-thing, cannot be adjudicated a priori, while the denial that there is a soul is equally “only a hypothesis.” She instead follows what she calls a recurrent argument, from the Delphic “know thyself” through Plotinus to Augustine’s Confessions, where the mind is declared to be “the very memory itself,” and to Bergson, for whom memory is “the intersection of mind and matter” (Trumbull, 2026a, p. 3). Her method is that of Bergsonian “spiritualist realism”: direct observation of inner life, disciplined by empirical facts and expressed in images where concepts fail, with the aim of reaching a reality beyond psychology from within it. She uses “mind,” “soul,” and “spirit” nearly synonymously and treats her two sources less as objects of exegesis than as partners in a constructive argument addressed to present-day neuroscience and philosophy of mind.

Habit, Recollection, and the Brain

Following Bergson, Trumbull distinguishes two kinds of memory. Habit is a motor disposition acquired by repetition and retained by the body; recollection is the persistence of a unique past moment as an image marked by “pastness” and belonging to the whole of a personal history. She argues that the neuroscientific evidence usually offered for memory storage, such as conditioning in rodents and sea slugs, concerns habit, and that moving from motor habituation to conscious episodic recall requires “a distinction in kind” rather than more neurons (Trumbull, 2025). Correlations between brain activity and recall do not establish storage, any more than the correlation between a piano and a sonata shows that the sonata is stored in the piano; the inference presupposes the identity it claims to prove. She cites recovery of language after stroke and the sudden return of memories in dementia as evidence that lesions impair the mechanisms of recall rather than destroying recollections themselves.

Memory-images, moreover, are not things and need no container: memory is “a fact of time,” and “because memory overflows the brain, mind overflows the body” (Trumbull, 2025). Beneath images lies an imageless “pure memory,” which Trumbull identifies with Augustine’s memoria and with the unconscious, from which recollection descends through planes of consciousness toward action. The brain, in Augustine’s phrase, is the soul’s instrument and, in Bergson’s, the “organ of attention to life” and “of pantomime alone” (Trumbull, 2026a, pp. 80, 91). Reading the brain would be like reading a play’s stage directions: positions of actors and props, but not the play.

Perception, Quality, and the Hard Problem

Trumbull holds that the hard problem is aggravated by representationalism, the assumption that perception produces an internal copy of the world so that we perceive our brains rather than things. Drawing on Plotinus’s account of perception as grasping the object “where it lies,” Augustine’s claim that “sensing is not of the body, but of the soul through the body,” Bergson’s theory of pure perception, and Gibson’s ecological psychology, she argues that what we perceive are “presences,” not representations, and that quality is “not an emergent property that the mind or brain imputes to matter, but … intrinsic to the material field,” varying in tone and depth with the organism’s possible action and its memory (Trumbull, 2026a, p. 79; Gibson, 1979; see Gibson’s Ecological Psychology).

Memory nevertheless enters perception constitutively. Conscious perception contracts innumerable rapid material events, such as the vibrations composing a flash of light, into stable qualities at the rhythm of the perceiver’s duration. Perception thus sits where the faster duration of matter meets the more concentrated duration of mind. Trumbull endorses Leibniz’s formula that an instantaneous mind, lacking memory, would be unconscious: wherever there is consciousness, there is memory (Trumbull, 2026a, p. 4). Phenomenal consciousness is therefore not a property of a momentary brain state but the temporal synthesis by which the past is held within the present.

Duration and a Dualism of Tendency

The decisive distinction is between time and space. Following Bergson’s two multiplicities, psychological life is a qualitative multiplicity whose elements interpenetrate, whereas spatial things are quantitative and external to one another; to treat thoughts, emotions, or memories as storable atoms is to spatialize what is essentially durational. Mind is defined as the tendency to concentrate a maximum of duration within interiority; matter as the relaxation of that tension toward instantaneity and dispersion, “a total discontinuity of moments without memory.” Because both are degrees of one movement of duration, they meet in action and perception, like rails that curve into one another rather than cross at right angles. Trumbull states explicitly: “It is not a ‘substance dualism’, but rather a dualism of tendency or dualism of duration” (Trumbull, 2026a, pp. 126, 196; see Bergson’s Multiplicity, Duration, Perception, Memory).

The Soul as Dynamic Unity

From Augustine’s De Trinitate, Trumbull takes the mind as a triad of memory, understanding, and will that are “not three substances, but one substance.” Substance here is not an inert substrate but persistence through change, which Bergson called a “continuity of change,” so that “both the substantiality and incorporeality of the soul are captured in the fact that the self is duration” (Trumbull, 2026a, pp. 158–164). The self gathers its past through memoria sui(Latin for "memory of oneself"), acts in the present through the body, and presses toward the future through the will, always drawing from its history more than it contains. Personal recollection, as memory infused with understanding, is proper to human beings, whereas images belong to “that part common to beasts and men” (Trumbull, 2026a, p. 182). The soul is accordingly personal, not a share of a diffuse world-soul; the body “instrumentalize[s] this unique consciousness” (Trumbull, 2026a, p. 197).

Consciousness as Creative Choice

In her public writing, Trumbull extends the view to agency. Defining consciousness only as “what it is like” risks making it passive spectatorship; following Bergson, she ties consciousness to indeterminate action, so that consciousness, choice, and creation coincide (Trumbull, 2026b). Consciousness intensifies where behavior is not fixed in advance, from reflex through habit to learning and deliberation, and across species it accompanies a widening “zone of indeterminacy.” Genuine novelty is neither recombination nor the realization of a pre-existing possibility, since the possible is posterior to the real. She treats libertarian freedom and mechanism as poles of a continuum of “degrees of freedom” and “degrees of consciousness,” and argues, after Ada Lovelace, that computation recombines rather than originates, a contrast she draws between human creativity and generative AI.

The Augustinian Horizon

The argument’s terminus is theological. For Augustine, memoria is the means of self-recovery and of recovering the self in relation to God, who is “more interior to us than our innermost self.” The persistence of personal memory suggests the soul’s survival as a person, and Augustine holds that the blessed retain their earthly memories (Trumbull, 2026a, pp. 190–198). Trumbull presents the progression as one from psychological intuition to metaphysical intuition, from the persistence of memory to eternity and from the will to creative love. She also argues that the Bergsonian lineage through Maine de Biran and Ravaisson is indirectly Augustinian, and reads Bergson’s corpus as a sequence of affirmations convergent with Christian metaphysics.

Assessment

Trumbull’s account belongs to the tradition of Augustinian and French spiritualist realism, reformulated against brain-storage models of memory and representational theories of perception. Her distinctive contribution to consciousness studies is to locate the problem of phenomenal consciousness in time rather than in the generation of qualia, and to connect three aspects of human experience often treated separately: the felt presence of a past, the implicit ownership of a life, and the experience of acting into an open future. Viewed another way, consciousness is the persistence and contraction of the past, quality belongs to the world, and the mind is a tendency of duration rather than a substance.

Her thesis is strongest as an account of temporally extended personal consciousness. Its empirical commitments, that recollection differs in kind from habit, and that lesions impair recall rather than abolish memories, are interpretive claims about neuroscience; she engages engram and synaptic-plasticity research directly, reading its paradigmatic animal studies as evidence about habit rather than recollection.

Trumbull’s wider metaphysical claims require further argument: the temporal character of experience does not alone establish that it cannot be physically realized; self-presence does not alone establish a surviving soul; and the experience of agency does not establish irreducible causal power. The account also leaves open how much of this structure is needed for elementary feeling, as distinct from mature personal experience.

References

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Trumbull, V. (2025). Memory is not stored in the brain: Time, not space, contains memory. IAI News, 17 November. https://iai.tv/articles/memory-is-not-stored-in-the-brain-auid-3420

Trumbull, V. (2026a). On the Memory of the Soul: Augustine and Bergson’s Metaphysics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. [Page references follow the first page proofs.]

Trumbull, V. (2026b). Consciousness is the only truly creative thing in the universe: The birth of novelty. IAI News, 21 May. https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-is-the-only-truly-creative-thing-in-the-universe-auid-3581