Experiencing of experience
I am sure that we can agree on the fact that we can experience experience. I have two questions here: (1) If experience is product of brain activity then how possibly we can experience experience? and (2) What is the use of experiencing of experience?
Comments (53)
Consciousness of self happens to us, whether it has any use or not. We do not make it happen, and we are not responsible for it, and we didn't have use in mind. Be that as it may, being able to experience experience, being conscious of what is happening to us and what we are doing, is the means by which we guide further experiences, and is one of the keys to the difference between ourselves and other animals.
Maybe other animals have some limited self-consciousness, but "it is thought by some people" that they don't have a lot, if they have any. Personally, I think some animals have at least a glimmer of self-consciousness. For instance, some animals (like elephants) pass the "self - mirror test". (An elephant is familiarized with its image in a mirror; later, a mark is applied to its forehead. Will the elephant notice the mark when it next looks into the mirror? Yes. Most animals don't.)
There is no dichotomy between experience and experiencing experience.
We experience; that is enough.
If by experience experience, you really meanreflecting on memories then you have something. So an experience remembered, "re-lived" though with the partiality of narrative limits, then that's your question. I think.
I am not sure if there is an "I". There could be only simple experience. There is still a problem even if I agree with your interpretation, that there is an "I". The "I" is simply the experiencer of what it is provided by brain whether what is provided by brain is perceived through sensory system or it is thoughts or feeling. Everything which "I" perceives is external to "I". Our brain in reality should simply feed "I" with what it perceives or process. The problem is how the brain could perceive "I" in order to feed "I" so "I" can watch "I" doing things.
You can of course reflect on your memory but you can even experience what you experience at instant you experience them. You just need to focally focus on your experience rather than content of your experience.
Not supplying the article where it belongs usually doesn't change meaning a great deal, but it is slightly jarring to read text where "the", "a", and "an" are missing.
Quoting bahman
There is someone (you, bahman) who is speaking as an "I". If there is no "I" speaking as bahman, then who is speaking?
Quoting bahman
Right. This is complicated. We could, as the expression goes, "quickly get lost in the weeds" with this. But... There is the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. Both of them "are you" 100% but one function of the conscious mind is to project a person--"I"--to the rest of the world. The unconscious mind (not the Freudian unconscious, but the unconscious part of the brain that does the work) does not represent itself directly. It provides the "I" with a steady flow of organized data. The conscious mind doesn't see or hear "raw" sensory information, because it doesn't mean anything until it is processed by the hearing, vision, language, and memory centers, etc.
The problem in talking about "I" and "you" is that we just don't know where in the brain the "conscious representation of self" is located, or how it is created by the brain.
According to Britannica, "According to one modern version of the assumption, developed by the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes, all experience is subjective, an exclusively mental phenomenon that cannot provide evidence of the existence or the nature of the physical world, the “matter” of which is ultimately nothing more than changeless extension in motion."
One can deduce anything from what's going on around.
I somehow agree with Bitter Crank. Yes, it's like observing oneself from above. Imagine you are talking with someone, and at the same time your attention goes to a higher level in a way you can see yourself and the other person from another perspective, so that it may help you in the way you respond and react.
And experiencing something inevitably puts in data in our memory, so that we can analyze it and point out something useful for future.. One can simultaneously experience something and also analyze its data. it depend on where the attention is focused.
Thanks for the correction.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I am sorry for my bad English. I am just reflecting as I am writing. I don't have any article on this.
Quoting Bitter Crank
The only thing which I can certainly say that experience exists. The "I" is construct of the brain activities so it doesn't have any essence but it can be experienced.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Well, are you a dualist or monist/materialist?
The problem that I mentioned in OP is related to materialism. The experience is byproduct of brain activity in this system. It seems absurd to me that we can experience experience. Its function also is not clear to me. At the end we are just sorting and processing data. That as you mentioned is duty of subconscious mind. What does conscious mind useful except projecting a person to the rest of the world?
Later, I mentioned the problem related to dualism when you have an "I" as separate substance.
This is dualist picture when there is a separate substance--"I"--which is experiencer. In another picture, experience create by the brain activity is the only thing which is real. Experience is the first thing which attaches us to the reality. I can doubt "I" and say that it is byproduct of brain activity. But I cannot doubt experience.
Quoting phrzn
I agree with what you stated. My question is however is that what is the use of experiencing "I" in materialism.
Experience, memory, data and the whole idea of oneself all are the same. Experience exists for you as far as your brain processes the information and keeps the necessary parts in short-term or long-term memory due to its practicality!
About materialism, I don't specifically believe in it, actually!
Experience requires a division between what is self and what is world. To know where the world and its recalcitrant nature starts, the brain has to know where the body and its intentionality leaves off. So to experience the world requires the equally primary experience of the self.
My favourite example is chewing your dinner. Somehow you have to be very sure which bit is your tongue, lips and cheek, which bit is the grisly steak, as your teeth chomp away with savage abandon.
But as has been said, you seem to be talking more about self-consciousness rather than just conscious awareness.
All animals have a sense of self as part of their states of experience. In seeing the world, they see it from their own point of view - the view that includes themselves in the sense of an embodied intentionality that contrast with a world of external material possibilities.
But self-consciousness is a linguistically-structured and culturally-evolved learnt skill. It is not biological but social. We humans learn to objectify our being so as to be psychologically self-regulating. So the reason we are self-conscious is that society needs us to have that habit of attending introspectively - to be policing our own behaviour as socially-constrained creatures.
Biologically there is every reason to make a psychological self~world experiential distinction, but no particular way that this experiencing could be experienced as experiencing. Animals lack the meta-structure that language can provide.
Socially, you can't be a proper human unless you have mastered self-regulation through language. Objectifying your own psychological being is the central skill required to be part of a social order.
Quoting bahman Because we can talk about what we experience.
The mirror test tests self-recognition, not consciousness, and even that based solely on the visuality. A robot has been built that passed it, even.
I doubt we can simultaneously be aware of, as well as aware of our awareness of, anything. I seem to be able to switch instantaneously from one to the other, but not to hold both together.
You cannot experience what you experience. This is getting silly.
Could the elephant succeed in the self-recognition test, if it had no self-consciousness?
Regarding the test-passing robot... Who and how was it programmed?
It is correct to make the distinction between self-recognition and what we really mean by self-conscious.
It is quite natural for big brained social animals - like chimps, elephants and dolphins - to have a sense of self that goes beyond just a perception of their bodies and intentionality in contrast to the world about them. They are also aware of this difference in terms of their social world too. They are aware of being surrounded by individuals who are also loci of intentionality that must be factored into the equation.
Indeed, the primary reason for having metabolically-costly big brains is to underwrite these kinds of complex social computations.
So the mirror test is a test of an animal's ability to see the world in terms of the presence of other minds - other social actors. And then to recognise an image in the mirror is that of themselves - their own embodied presence.
But self-consciousness goes way beyond this in being a linguistic structuring of the whole of the mind. Language use underwrites a narrative or autobiographical approach to memory. It allows "voluntary recall" of our past history as a self. The animal brain can only apply past experience to the present moment. So recognising - making sense of the flow of the present - is the biological-level ability. Recollection is the learnt language-based skill that only humans properly have, and the one that culture cultivates so as to ensure we "never forget ourselves" in polite company. :)
Considering the philosophical zombies, why not?
Are you saying that these are all physical state resulted from neurons activity? I would agree with you in this sense otherwise you need to be more specific about what do you mean with same.
Quoting phrzn
No. I think experience exists when conscious mind gets involved.
Quoting phrzn
I have problems with dualism as well as materialism but I am inclined more toward materialism because it makes more sense.
I like this and I agree with it.
This is hard to formulate verbally but I give it a shoot. The experience is a brain state. Brain can experience things/physicals and each experience related to a brain state. It seems absurd to me that brain can be aware of its internal states, experience, because a state is not physical but rather the result of physical activity.
Quoting Purple Pond
And what is the practical use of this?
That is true. We need to switch.
So you disagree that you can experience experience? Are you aware of being able that can experience?
Yes, somehow. I do still think that there are unknown parts we have no idea...
I don't actually see any difference between what we both said! Yep, it's conscious, selective and subjective process.
Quoting bahman Are you kidding me? How often did you tell someone "you've got to try this, it feels amazing"?
We have physical and each physical system is in a state. Physical state is different from physical. A state simply states what is the response of a system to a stimuli. Iron for example is physical but its solidity is a state. We experience physical and our content of our experience in most case reflect the state of physical. Experience is a physical state so it cannot be experienced within materialism.
Quoting Purple Pond
The thing which feels amazing must have a good functioning in your body. The question is why it should come with an experience? Why things doesn't go in dark? This is hard problem of consciousness as far as I understand.
Quoting bahman If everything goes in the dark then it would be impossible to communicate what is happening. We (humans) are a social species and we need experience in order to communicate what happens.
I'd say self aware, but experience itself, I think is of the inside or of the outside, there is always a distance between us and what we are experiencing on the outside, but no such distance appears on the inside. The differential is the body, whose position is kinda like a vague limit, it works.
The ego is not one "I", it is many. The unity of the ego is tied up in the specificity of the body to a large extent, and as it changes we change, what comprises our understanding of ourselves changes, over time.
Brain is physical therefore brain state is physical state.
Quoting Purple Pond
That as I mentioned is related to hard problem of consciousness. It is not clear to philosopher that why we need consciousness in order to communicate for example.
Quoting bahman I don't agree that the so called "hard problem" is harder than the "easy problem". I believe that they are the same problem.
How is consciousness different than awareness? It's hard to imagine how we can communicate properly if we aren't aware of what's going on.
The number of physical states is enormous, superconductivity, Superfluidity, solid, gas, liquid, etc.
Quoting Purple Pond
Consciousness is similar to awareness.
It is not difficult to imagine that since most of the things which we communicate is the result of unconscious mind activity. We just are conscious of them when we communicate.
I don't agree. You mean no communication, no consciousness?
No. We can communicate for a long time without being aware of the content, very similar to deriving. It seems that consciousness only comes into play when there is a difficulty that unconscious mind cannot resolve or handle. What is the exact functioning of consciousness in such a situation is not known. That is called hard problem of consciousness.
I think the difference is being aware of the input data, that's why they call it unconsciousness. You become aware of it when it comes to the surface. But both are playing parts in human's acts and decisions.
I don't see why you consider a "difficulty" in between! Anyway.
Why it should come to the surface? As I mentioned we can do complex tasks without being aware of them.
DO you want to parse that again??
I mean that we are able to focus on experience and be aware of it, in another word experience it.
Quoting bahman So you don't think consciousness plays a role in communication?
I see. That is a very interesting point that resolve the problem that I have with materialism. So we can never catch the moment and experience the subject matter?
Quoting charleton
You mean recalling?
Quoting charleton
I don't understand what is the relevance of what you said in here.
1) we have experiences.
2) we can recall those experiences.
3) Recalling experience is not the same as experiencing a second time.
4) If we define experience as interaction with the outside world, then we avoid the confusion of thinking we are experiencing experience.
I agree.
Quoting charleton
I agree.
Quoting charleton
I think you are contradicting yourself here. Do you mean that we can recall at the moment we experience something?
Quoting charleton
So you consider memory as external?
I am not sure there is a difference, but I think we often act without really thinking about what we are doing, such as turning on a light switch, when we enter a room. If someone says "Good day" to you, do you think they thought this out?
We act habitually all the time, so if there is a distinction it has to do with why we pay attention, become invested in some acts/events and not in others.
RE- call. Implies memory. Remember last week?
No memory is internal, but recalls experiences we conceive of as external.
I did not think I could be more obvious in the way I wrote that.
Can you tell us why awareness is needed?
I see. How about recalling and the fact that it is not second experience?
Because you can react to being aware of the way the world is rather than stimulus and response (knee jerk reactions).
Let me ask you the question another way: Have you ever done anything unconsciously? Of course yes, deriving for example. We however sometimes do things consciously too. What is the difference between these two cases? In another word, why we don't always do things unconsciously if we could do it in some occasion?
If you were totally unconscious when your driving you'd crash the car.
I think that thinking is an unconscious activity. We just become aware of thoughts when they completely formed. I am not sure what is the use of consciousness when all the process for formation of a thought is done unconsciously.
Quoting Purple Pond
I can derive for miles thinking of other things.
Quoting bahman So you can vocalize and write precise the thoughts that you are focused on.
Quoting bahman I bet you can't do that in your sleep when you are not conscious.
That I agree. So we can do things without focus. You can focus on your internal world, what unconscious mind delivers, but that could be empty or full depending on whether there is something deliverable there.
Quoting Purple Pond
Yes, it seems that we become conscious of thought when they are complete.
Quoting Purple Pond
Sleepwalker can do complex things.