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Sunday, 1 March 2020


The term 'experience' is not just a euphemism for 'everything or 'being', but is already an advance on the doubts that belong intrinsically to those more natural terms. (Of course it is educated foolishness to doubt being in its simplicity, but it ignorant foolishness not to do so.) If you want to start out a naturalist then you put the brain before its product, consciousness, but then you have to admit that this wet computer constitutes all you know as the world, including brains, etc. and so you end up having to think of strange topologies to account for it all, and even if you think you have succeeded you end up relying on much that is inherently doubtful, for example the noumenal 'thing in itself'. It's probably enough to point to the impossibility of excluding that all is a dream, or that the world and its entire history was created a moment ago, etc. to find the fault-line of doubt. To speak instead of experience is a way of acknowledging such doubt without he need to solve or reduce it in any way. You could say that reality clearly has an inside and an outside and that without prejudice to the reality or otherwise of this distinction it is simpler to take the inside as primary. So, start from experience, and then see that the experiencing must be more real than the experienced. So the question is, what is the experiencing, or more simply, what is it that experiences? Then you must admit that it is not 'you' since you are experienced. Again, someone might reply that it is language, or life, or evolution, or dissipative structures of entropy that is the experiencing. Responses of this kind may be far too abstract, but they have the virtue of indicating the kind of shift required away from the intuitive sense of an individual self.

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