Tuesday, 17 May 2022

The terms 'experience' and 'consciousness' are used loosely here and sometimes conflated, but they ought rightly to be clearly distinguished. Consciousness refers to the waking intentional life, it is focused and centred, although it also takes in the existence of a fringe or horizon consisting of a vague and uncentred version of itself. The 'I' is at the centre of consciousness and is behind everything with which it is concerned. Its nature is to be concerned about things, but always in order to somehow come back to itself. Experience, on the other hand, refers to the total context in which something like consciousness can occur. It is the world in the most general sense and embraces everything that can possibly appear or be relevant. It has an odd correlate in brain theory, since if one accepts the idea that all experience is constructed by the brain then its action must extend far beyond consciousness to include everything apparently objective which needs to be in place so that consciousness can be and act within its world of relevance. The problem with this way of looking at it is that the brain is a thing within a putatively prior world as well as being the container of that world. That is why you must do away with that idea of the brain. Experience is not however like any sort of full-field anamorphosis. I does not correspond to any analogy from the world of the senses. It is not a 'space'. Trying to imagine the true shape of experience is no more or less than a sort of koan.

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