Marsha --
to expand a tiny bit...
Right from the dictionary: Experience
5. Philosophy. the totality of the cognitions given by
perception; all that is perceived, understood, and
remembered.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/experience
Why is this a problem? Why don't you accept experience as reality?
I DO accept experience as existential reality. But that's not the point.
To say "experience is reality" doesn't tell us anything about experience or
reality. It's like Pirsig's aphorism "some things are better than others",
which doesn't tell us what morality is.
Your on-line "dictionary" is far too broad to be definitive. No. 2 comes
closer to defining what we're discussing: " the process ... of personally
observing, encountering, or undergoing something". Unfortunately, it's tied
to "business experience" and raises questions as to whether the act of
looking through a microscope is "observing" or participating in an economic
recession is "undergoing something", thus qualifying as "personal
experience".
Such lack of specificity makes our concept of experience fuzzy at best and
subject to spurious interpretations. For example, is the reality of
experience illusionary? Is experience the only reality? And who's
experience are we talking about -- mine, yours, or "the totality of ...all
that is perceived and remembered? How does experience differ from
intellectual knowledge, or the accumulation of knowledge throughout all of
human experience? (A library is full of such knowledge, but it isn't
experience.) Don't you see the ambiguity here, and how it leads to models
of reality constructed from loose assertions that have different meanings
for different people? That's an exercise in folly, not philosophy.
I submit that there is nothing vague or ambiguous about being-aware. This
definition
encompasses sentience, perception, cognition, and apprehension in the
"immediate" sense, avoiding misconceived allusions to intellect, conception,
memory, or behavior. More significantly, it relates the individual subject
(self) of experience to its objective content: Being. This affords an
epistemological foundation for philosophical development, without limiting
"reality" to existence or forcing either a phenomenalistic or a
materialistic ontology.
Words and phrases may evoke emotional responses, but they add nothing to
ontology unless they express a concept or proposition. The "problem" is one
of communication and understanding. The distinction I'm trying to draw here
is between descriptive prose and dialectic principles.
But you still haven't answered my question, Marsha. Can you accept
"'being-aware" acceptable as a definition for experience?
Essentially yours,
Ham
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