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Thursday, 16 February 2017
Subjective experience is a process in time made out of events. These events are the contents of experience, sometimes listed as thoughts, perceptions, feelings, memories, desires, decisions and so on, and they have a dual mode of being. They are one thing in experience and another thing in objective reality, this latter reality being the basis out of which subjective reality is understood to emerge. The boundaries defining an event are different in the two perspectives; in objective reality these boundaries are contingent and observer-dependent, they are not integral to objectivity but they must be tested and honed for efficacy, while in subjective reality they are natural and more distinct, possibly ineffective or nonsensical, but still unable to withstand close scrutiny. For this picture to be true it ought to be possible to specify sufficiently clear terms through which you can assert that this subjective event, A, indicated and delimited in such and such a way, corresponds perfectly to that objective event, B, perfectly indicated and delimited in an entirely different way. This does not appear to be the case and the difficulty may be more than a matter of mastering the complexities involved. The version of objective reality invoked here is itself a mental construct and hence an internal object, and what entitles it to be called objective is the rigourous system to which its categories are subjected. Such a system, a hygienics of objectivity in any instance, is an evolving cultural project, an emanation of the hive-mind, a project of objective reality, which is at the same time the project to colonise subjective reality. When the levers of mind are fully understood, even if only operationally, then the privilege of the subjective, the claim to any sort of irreducible access to reality in pure subjectivity, will have been undermined once and for all. The term 'event' however is already shaped by the system of objectivity, it carries an enormous amount of baggage. Is experience really made out of events? Unlikely. In fact the experience/event distinction is already part of experience. By reflecting on experience we withdraw ourselves from it and view it as an internal event, a quasi-object, but we know in doing so that we have lost the essence of the original experience. The unexamined life is certainly not worth living, but the examined life is not life at all.
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