[FRIAM] experience monism

[Nicholas Thompson]

to friam

Dear David and other helpful persons,

Thanks again for your help here.  Man! Do I look forward to your definitive
work on experience!  All this cogitation is exhausting me.

Your comment that I might dismiss your questions has an edge that I didn’t
see when you first made it.  There is, perhaps, a sense in which I* should*
dismiss them.   The questions you ask have the feel of metaphysics.  You
know, How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?  Pragmatists try to
dissolve metaphysical questions either into non-questions or empirical
questions. “After all, if the answer to the question isn’t to find some
angels and measure their feet, then what *are* we talking about, eh?”  Perhaps
we might devote our time to a more productive discussion?  Notice that the
whole notion of a “productive” discussion itself reeks of pragmatism with
its convergentist aspirations.



The only thing that can be positively asserted about metaphysics – by which
I mean that vast spongy fetid cloud of supposition that surrounds and
infects everything we explicitly believe -- is that it is inevitable.  Thus,
though debating metaphysics is useless, failing to own up to it is
dishonest.   Metaphysics is not something we propose; it’s something we
confess to.

So, I feel obligated to go on and answer these questions, even though their
answers may indeed be unrelated to the proper thrust of “experience monism”.
Whatever metaphysics might be offered to support my experience monism,  it’s
value will always be in its capacity to root important concepts such as
truth and reality, not in relations between our experiences and some
notional world-beyond-experience, but in relations among experiences,
themselves.







*The eloquence and perspicacity of Professor Thompson has convinced me to
become an Experience monist. In my naive sophomoric enthusiasm, I have set
about writing THE definitive work on Experience. But I have a few
questions:*



*   1A) If an Experience is is a composite- there must be
'atomic' Experience from which it is composed. Is it possible to Experience
and "atomic Experience" in isolation?*

Any whole with different properties can be analyzed into parts.  If your
first experience of  apple pie your gramma took from her oven and sliced,
then all of that is apple pie in the first instance. As cinnamon is
experienced in other contexts and apple pie is eaten in other contexts, the
experience of apple pie can be analyzed into parts, meaning that one can
begin to experience cinnamon as something apart from the experience of
apple pie. The analysis of any experience into component experiences is as
much a cognitive achievement as its unification.



*2) Does an Experience have duration, or is each Experience akin to a frame
of a film and continuity simply an artifact of being presented at some
rate; e.g., 30 frames per nanosecond?*

I like, for the moment, to think of experiences as successive
lightning-like illuminations of a landscape of associations.  I would call
these associations “signs” if my grasp of semeiotics were not so protean.

You did not quite ask me, but I must answer the question of time, or order
of experiences.  Peirce at one offers the quasi-neural notion of the fading
of nodes in the network of associations since each was last illuminated.  So
parts of this landscape of associations gets harder to illuminate as they
are illuminated less often.

But these questions seem like candidates for empirical investigation using
tachistiscopes, and that sort of thing.

*3) Can Experiences be differentiated as "potential" and "actual?" To
illustrate: I turn on the camera on my phone and images pass through the
lens and appear on the screen, but a photograph does not come into
existence until I press the shutter button. Does something similar happen
with experience? They are potential until I "press the conscious awareness
button" at which point they become actual?*

Potentiality and actuality are themselves cognitive achievements and
experiences in their own right.

*4) Can Experiences be categorized? To borrow vocabulary (somewhat
tortured( from Peter Sjostedt-Hughes' pentad of perception;*

Peters’s pentad doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, laced as it is
with apriorist dualist appeals to physiology and an external world.  I
think a disrupted experience is one that doesn’t fit well with existing
networks of association.

   - *Experience grounded in/originating from the spatio-temporal
   environment (Sensed Experience)*
   - *Experience of an atemporal quality, e.g., color or scent (Perceived
   Experience)*
   - *An Experience partly caused by an external physicality—e.g., motion
   of molecules partly causative of the Experience of heat (Ecto-Physical
   Experience)*
   - *An Experience that is partly caused by an internal physicality—e.g.,
   synapses firing in the brain (Endo-Physical Experience)*
   - *Experiences not grounded in/originating from the spatio-temporal
   environment, e.g., imaginations (Demeteption Experience)*
   - *A sixth, of my own, a variation of Endo-Physical, where the internal
   physicality is "disrupted," e.g., by taking a drug.*

*5) Does Experience 'exist' apart from an experiencer?*

   Sure, as mediated from speaker to speaker via signs.    One experienced
hunter says to another experienced hunter, “I saw a deer down by the crick
this afternoon” the second hunter, unless he doesn’t speak the language,
has a deer-by-crick experience.  The second of those two people receives
that experience with a “George-told-me-that” qualifier attached to it.  If
you are raising the question, can there ever be “generals,” I agree that
that’s a heluva difficult question.  But I think we monists have to answer
the question in the following way:  As speakers of a language we aspire,
whenever we use a noun in a conversation with another speaker of our
language, to use that noun in the same way.  We aspire to a time when the
overlap of associations that occur whenever the word is used will be 100
percent.  Because of that aspiration, the asyntote of usage is that 100
percent overlap, in the same way that the asyntote of inquiry is the truth.




*5A) if not, how can we have "common experiences"*

*    5B) if yes, do we not have a faux monism, with two metaphysical
things: experience and experiencer?*



*6) Do Experiences persist? Perhaps as memories?*

*    6A) If yes, what exactly is the difference between an
Experience-in-"memory" and one "being experienced?" Analogy to a computer
program executing and the same program stored on disk.*

I hope I answered these questions above.



*I would have asked Professor Thompson these questions, but I fear he would
have dismissed them as "tending not to edification."*

I feel thoroughly edified.

*davew*

Thanks, Dave. Nick



On Sat, Feb 4, 2023 at 8:46 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> The eloquence and perspicacity of Professor Thompson has convinced me to
> become an *Experience* monist. In my naive sophomoric enthusiasm I have
> set about writing THE definitive work on *Experience*. But I have a few
> questions ...
>
> 1) Is an *Experience* a whole or a composite? I.e., (scent of
> cinnamon)—(heat of oven)—(grandmother's smile) OR (scent of cinnamon) +
> (heat of oven) + (grandmothers smile)? Another analogy a single photograph
> or a Photoshopped collage?
>    1A) If an *Experience* is is a composite- there must be 'atomic'
> *Experience* from which it is composed. Is it possible to *Experience*
> and "atomic *Experience*" in isolation?
>
> 2) Does an *Experience* have duration, or is each *Experience* akin to a
> frame of a film and continuity simply an artifact of being presented at
> some rate; e.g., 30 frames per nanosecond?
>
> 3) Can *Experiences* be differentiated as "potential" and "actual?" To
> illustrate: I turn on the camera on my phone and images pass through the
> lens and appear on the screen, but a photograph does not come into
> existence until I press the shutter button. Does something similar happen
> with experience? They are potential until I "press the conscious awareness
> button" at which point they become actual?
>
> 4) Can *Experiences* be categorized? To borrow vocabulary (somewhat
> tortured( from Peter Sjostedt-Hughes' pentad of perception;
>
>    - *Experience* grounded in/originating from the spatio-temporal
>    environment (Sensed Experience)
>    - *Experience* of an atemporal quality, e.g., color or scent
>    (Perceived Experience)
>    - An *Experience* partly caused by an external physicality—e.g.,
>    motion of molecules partly causative of the *Experience* of heat
>    (Ecto-Physical Experience)
>    - An *Experience* that is partly caused by an internal
>    physicality—e.g., synapses firing in the brain (Endo-Physical Experience)
>    - *Experiences* not grounded in/originating from the spatio-temporal
>    environment, e.g., imaginations (Demeteption Experience)
>    - A sixth, of my own, a variation of Endo-Physical, where the internal
>    physicality is "disrupted," e.g., by taking a drug.
>
> 5) Does *Experience* 'exist' apart from an experiencer?
>     5A) if not, how can we have "common experiences"
>     5B) if yes, do we not have a faux monism, with two metaphysical
> things: experience and experiencer?
>
> 6) Do *Experiences* persist? Perhaps as memories?
>     6A) If yes, what exactly is the difference between an *Experience*-in-"memory"
> and one "being experienced?" Analogy to a computer program executing and
> the same program stored on disk.
>
>
> I would have asked Professor Thompson these questions, but I fear he would
> have dismissed them as "tending not to edification."
>
> davew
>
>
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