Experience Itself
The most intimate of all things, experience is ours in an essential way and yet it eludes rational understanding. Everything we know passes through experience, otherwise we are unaware of it, and yet experience itself remains unchanged. As the very window for exploring reality, experience poses an irresistible challenge to physical science, at once beckoning, ever present and yet receding, never yielding concrete data.
The attempt to render experience in terms of materialist science it usually described as “explaining consciousness”. Consciousness is a broad term which covers everything including the capacity for experience. Here we are talking about consciousness in its most basic sense, as awareness or perception, that is to say, consciousness as such. We are intentionally avoiding any consideration of the apparatus or infrastructure that might be involved in experience, i.e., the experiencer.
We are speaking of experience itself.
That experience itself does exist, I think we are safe in saying. It vouches for itself at all times, and we all have access to it. The challenge is to understand it. It’s always there as the frame, rather than the content. This characteristic makes it strangely invisible most of the time. We just experience continually a stream of stimuli, usually not turning attention to the basic, ongoing nature of the whole process.
The attempt to encompass experience in logical or physical terms generates a lot of content, which fills experience with stimuli, but in the end, the content goes on changing, becoming something else, leaving experience unmarred. We go on being imprinted with things, within that apparently indestructible, elastic non-thing, experience.
What is this infinitely malleable thing? How can we understand it? Is it a thing at all? (It does exist, right? Of course it does!)
It can be focused to the minutest sensation, cast a gaze that takes in the starry heavens, bend to comprehend intricate mathematics, indolently drift on the couch or feed the hummingbirds. All of the things that experience can accommodate, the astounding variety of life, can only ever alter the shape of experience, but never exhaust — or explain it. This is the point we are after here. It is of primary importance to our age of materialistic science. (Our age, at the very extreme logical outcomes of that science).
This science attempts to reduce experience by explaining it with its content. The truth is, only experience itself is powerful and flexible enough to apprehend it. Experience is different in kind from its content. It must turn to contemplate its own nature. This turning begins an important process. But this is not our present subject. Instead, we want to press our description of the futility of reducing experience, that is, of explaining Experience (the big E), with this or that experience (the little e’s).
That it is futile to explain experience itself with the content of experience is just as obviously true as the fact that modern science persists in the attempt. In fact, modern science seems to view this attainment as the last big achievement that has eluded it. It is inevitable, thinks science, that experience will cough up its secrets. It must, because experience is so essential. Without it as a successful conquest, the project remains unfinished, the great work of explaining everything has failed.
Usually, as we noted, the quest is framed as explaining consciousness. This brings it closer to a thing in the world. We can say with medical clarity that such a person is conscious or not. Nothing too slippery here — yet. The person exhibits the traits of consciousness or not. Clinically, as an observer, it can be rendered in terms of sensory information.
But it becomes trickier as we try to nail down the underlying process: consciousness itself. Usually, we just impart to the subject under observation what we ourselves partake of. But what exactly is that? It means: the capacity to experience. Or even better: ongoing experience. That is, the person or being has an inner world, apart from just a physical body.
Honest thinkers in the modern science vein have described the “hard problem of consciousness”, but even that is a long way from the truth. No, what we have is the impossible problem of consciousness, at least, using the tools of material science.
We try to reduce experience to the brain. It seems promising. But the promise is ultimately just correspondence between experiences (little e’s) with one another. Little e’s that cohere. I taste an apple here, the brain scan shows an area of the brain lights up there. They don’t ever rise above the fact of being experiences themselves, no matter how sophisticated or complex; they depend upon being presented to experience itself.
Technology that scans the brain might make a very strong case indeed for correspondence. Let’s grant it and for the sake of argument say we have the ultimate brain scanning device. It reliably shows that this area of the brain is active in such a way when, say, the color red is experienced. Person in the examination chair sees the color red: machine shows this area of the brain scan lights up. We are convinced that the brain being active in this way corresponds to the experience of red. There may be some question around which came first and causality, but to make the physical science case as strong as possible, let’s assume the red experience follows the brain activity.
All the scanning will never communicate the red experience to the technicians. Even if it did, though, it wouldn’t affect our “experience as such” problem. Even if a little man in the brain scan raised a little red card, the problem remains: the technicians running the machine are dependent upon their experience to witness whatever occurs. They themselves can never escape the nature of experience, to get outside it into a non-experiential frame from which to objectively observe the scan subjects’ experience.
Even if we posit the ideal brain scanner, one that enables the technician to actually experience precisely what the subject is currently seeing, experience for experience, it doesn’t help explain Experience itself. We are confronting a real difficulty in the modern worldview: the observing and thinking being finds that it knows absolutely nothing about its own means of understanding.
We can, though, make observations about the world we see, including how people and their biology operate and make reasonable judgements about ourselves. I can conclude that I myself am an instance of such as I see in other people. I am a human like they are and my experience arises somehow in the same way. This seems promising also, but if we dwell on it long enough, we’ll see that it is a wild assumption. Not that we are like other people, but that we or they have experience as a result of biology (or what have you). It could be the other way around. Or something else entirely.
Science presses on, however, and “Emergence theory” is the most powerful model that scientific philosophy has proposed for this purpose. In essence, consciousness is an “emergent” property of the activity of the brain, rather than a result of a particular structure or process. (Perhaps like a magnetic field arises.) So the modern materialist scientist says, “I see in the world many people whose consciousness is affected by the brain and it seem plausible that Experience itself arises from such activity and therefore it is likely that I myself, as I think and perceive right now, am also such an entity arising as an emergent property of the brain.”
Emergence, all its data and its ideas are still only content of experience. The trick is to imagine all of that is existing outside of experience, doing its work to make us aware. How can that be? Can the content of experience exist outside of experience? Or perhaps, we mean the matter and force that we suppose exists behind experience exists out there, accounting for consciousness? Here we seem to be required to use a great deal of imagination to put our observations outside of ourselves and our experience.
Even if we accept this imagining, all such extrapolations remain in the realm of experience. Whatever powerful idea we propose as to what underpins experience as an existing reality in itself — quantum mechanics, let’s say — whatever it may be, only has being as it has it in experience. The simple fact of perceiving just goes on, completely familiar and utterly irreducible.
It’s ok. We don’t really want to explain away experience. We want to avoid Solipsism on one end, where my experience alone exists, and materialism on the other, where experience doesn’t really exist at all, only as a curious side effect. We want to give room for the real nature of experience, which can encompass far more than just sensation and its related thought processes, while not rejecting the importance of the world of matter and its sciences.
The truth about experience is that it is our own most precious companion, able to carry us through the great diversity of life. Its character as not capturable in material phenomenon is a blessing and a clue as to how we have to proceed in understanding both our own nature and that of our universe.
You can’t see it, hear it or feel it, but everything we see and hear and feel reveals it. The truth about experience is that it is who we are.
Experience, what we may call consciousness so long as it does not thereby imply any metaphysical infrastructure, is the same in essence for all. There is the diversity of people we encounter. Each person having their experience. In the actual fact of witnessing, being conscious, experiencing, they are the same. Your experience is the same as mine, though the content may differ.
In that sense, the true inner sense, we are of the same essence.
