At 12:29 AM 9/25/2008, you wrote:
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?
No, Ham. Experience creates subject and object.
Marsha
.
.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.........
.
.
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