"Inside" Experience

I first called this “the machinery of experience”.
But I wished to get closer to a ‘human’ point.

There is no experience that isn’t responsive to itself.

Experience is a self-responsiveness.

Am I correct so far?

There’s a lot to unpack in that statement, but I tentatively agree. Let me offer an alternative phrasing, to see if we understand each other:

Consciousness is self-observation.

Same idea?

Same idea.
Let me calibrate:
“consciousness is a self-observing” next to “experience is a self-responsiveness”

The term I chose is an accent on activity, to allow for an explanatory course that can be verified in parallel to the empirical world, in a scientific logic.

Now since I consider both statements to be true, and since consciousness is experience (and experience is consciousness - are the meanings equal?), it is true that if experience is a self-responsiveness, the self-observing of consciousness also implies a response to the observing.

One can not be conscious without responding to that.
One has to respond to consciousness. Consciousness always commands something.

The argument I always use to disprove this is that the subject can never be isolated, because as soon as anyone attempts to isolate their own self as a subject, their self becomes the object, and their “self’s” subject has retreated back away in attempt to conceive of itself - and thus it finds itself conceiving of something else than itself: a memory of itself perhaps. The subject is supposed to be the “doer” of conception and isolation concerning objects, and in trying to overlap the two terms or have one be the other, one can never be successful - there is a necessary distance between the two by virtue of the different roles of “conceiver” and “conceived” as well as by the experience of the subject trying to isolate itself as the subject.

This is why the self is a construct of discrete experiences, and isn’t even formulated in the human brain until a few years into its existence. Until that point, you can debate how conscious these children are, but it should be quite apparent that they are at least experiencing, even if it turned out it was not consciously so. But even after one has developed a sense of self and identity, it is possible to return to such states of obliviousness to one’s self and identity. The more animal states we can enter, states of flow and concentration, certain highs: upon reflection one realises that the self had melted away all that time and there was just pure primal experience where one was “one with the world”. Perhaps it’s similar to enlightenment, but I’m no Buddhist. Even with absent-mindedness, unconscious and automatic actions etc. - the experience is not one of self-responsiveness. You might argue that objectively you’re a person interracting with objects/people even if you’re not thinking about it, but to perceive someone else or yourself in this way first requires experience to be mentally dissected in spite of the fundamental continuity of experience that you’re artificially attempting to mentally dissect.

So I don’t think it’s correct at all to claim experience is necessarily a self-responsiveness - though of course it can be. Self-responsiveness is just not fundamental to experience, that’s all.

I agree but on slightly different grounds.

Inside and outside of experience entails a difference whose boundaries may be perceived and yet not actually acted upon. This interaction, may owe it’s ‘gyneology’ to an automatic , hereditary behavior, not learned in the sense that usually is attributed to it.

So the difference may or may not be noticeable , nor understood. Therefore of, a boundary situation were to occur, there may very well be co fusion as to what needs to be predicated as a follow up.
In addition there may not occur then a reality conjecture as.to the significance of external or internal factors contributing to an evaluation of that significance.

Primal narcissism can not engage in such a dialogue (internal/external) for that reason.

Self responsiveness appears to object to it’s own signification , and place higher objectives within that frame of reference , placing the machine into a Deus-ex-Machina argument, by fiat.

Youve misread me though - I didn’t refer to “a self” but to experience, and experience it-self.

Ok well I don’t know what you mean then.

Oh. Well, if you don’t know what it means for experience to respond to itself then I guess we’re done.
Not much of an expert on Experience, I might say.

Fritz Pearls called it an awareness , and a concurrent awareness of awareness (of) it’s self.

It seems to me that what S calls continuous experience is precisely that which is not experience, from which experience is born.

All experience relates to itself, responds to itself - this relation to previous experience is what it experiences. So it is also by nature a resistance.
Any instant of experience we might try to isolate is thus a compound. It is both part of a continuum, and something with a particular character.

This is because experience is not given to nonliving matter in physics and originates at a certain point which is empirically measurable by responsiveness - “fringe” is, as K knows, a very mellow description for Experientialisms tenets as we’ve learned of them so far.

But also one that prompts to action.

Hence my usage of the term responsiveness, as it indicates how experience causes itself ever anew.

Waiting for Carleas and, in theory, Silhouette - though Experientialism has seemingly been very quickly debunked, as it has been shown to rely on a notion of “experience” which isn’t consistent with experience.

In the meantime, back to the inside of experience.

We’ve observed that experience is responsive to itself.
Someone figured that the word “itself” brings about the notion of “a self”.

If it does, then experience necessitates a self.

As I said on the other thread:

Again, no offense, I have all the time you need to understand how watertight Experientialism is, but the willingness on my part is dwindling on accout of the experience of talking with you.

I simply said I don’t know what you mean by “Experience is a self-responsiveness”, and you simply declared that you “guess we’re done” with absolutely no effort on your part to explain what you meant like an intellectually honest person would, simply claiming expertise and that “Experientialism has seemingly been very quickly debunked”.

What am I supposed to do with that nonsense? Pander to your efforts to get my attention on one hand and your minimal patience to declare your victory on the other? What’s my incentive? Experientialism has already survived criticism unscathed ever since I first opened it up to the public many years ago by now, what more do I have to prove?
Like I said on the other thread: “I’ve never thought of you as unintelligent even if you’re a bit weird about some topics in a way that makes me doubt your sanity more than your logical capability”, which hardly qualifies you as some kind of ultimate arbiter of philosophical validity. You’re “okay” I guess, but I’d stand to gain more from talking with those who aren’t so openly and clearly partial, biased and with their head up their own arse, like Karpel, Carleas and probably Faust. I’ll let you know if I feel you’re as expert on Experientialism as you claim once you’ve figured out how to communicate in an intellectually honest way, and in such a way that the person to whom you’re talking to is actually enabled to comment on the validity of your communication - particularly if said person is the actual creator of the philosophy that you’re talking about(!) I came up with Experientialism, not you. If I’m unclear about VO I’ll go through you, and if you’re actually interested in clearing anything up about Experientialism, just ask me. I know your ego likes to profess knowledge before it actually asks - but you’ve only asked two questions so far in this thread: are you “correct so far?” and “experience is consciousness - are the meanings equal?” to which the answers both appear to be “no” from what I can tell so far.

Out of politeness, I’ll say the reason “There is no experience that isn’t responsive to itself” makes no sense to me is because experience isn’t the subject “doing” the experiencing. I brought up in my first post on this thread how any subject corners itself out of existence and therefore experience - at best it can be indirectly thought of as a placeholder or “empty set” in terms of discrete experiences, and for the purposes of utility - but you simply dismissed this argument as misreading you. You’ll note that an equivalent formulation of what you said is “All experience is responsive to itself” which you rephrased as “Experience is a self-responsiveness” and “All experience relates to itself, responds to itself”. In both cases, experience is the subject of the sentence - the agent that somehow “responds” in some non-specific way “to itself”, presupposing its discrete existence as a subject (which I debunked in response to what you stated I misread). It just sounds to me, instead, like you’ve just not seen the significance of my response that you wrote off as “misreading you”, but I’ll leave it just as open as before for you to explain what you’re trying to say. Your call.

You’re jumping the gun to start with discrete experiences in order to say that Continuous Experience isn’t consistent with experience - this is why VO isn’t fundamental enough, with statements like “experience necessitates a self”. Experientially, experience is the only thing you can’t do away with and subsequently still be able to concretely refer to anything at all (the same goes for its abstract equivalent “existence”, which is the same thing). Logically, meaningful knowledge is necessarily a means between plural experiences, but it must also have a singular basis against which to evaluate truth or else it’s just floating around arbitrarily like Postmodernism and Nihilism, with no grounds to say any truth at all - when clearly some models of knowledge are better than others. Since plural experiences and a fundamental basis are thereby incompatible, a singular pre-knowledge substance must exist - and as I covered, the only thing you can’t escape is experience/existence, which in its concrete and continuous form is “Continuous Experience”. You can’t beat that, I’m sorry - there are no holes. Jump ahead to its dissection to selves and valuators all you want, but doing so just doesn’t seem to be going deep enough.

This snowflake philosophy here recently…

That means the subject must be “made of” something else than experience.

Even where you claim you don’t actually exist, this quasi-existent you, this appearance of your existence, which we call a subject, must according to your own words here, come from something else than experience.

But hey. Real sorry if you feel some fierce, honest critical interest is a sign of disrespect. I guess thats why you didn’t read my work on VO before you formulated your views on it. That was out of politeness.

Forget this investigation was ever offered.

My arguments don’t have feelings to hurt, and you could try as hard as you like to hurt my own personal feelings and you’d fail every time - not least because I have no emotional investment in my arguments, but even if you or anyone tries beyond the scope of my arguments I just kinda don’t care.

Don’t mistake boredom and a lack of inspiration or motivation resulting from what you have to say as evidence of a “snowflake” - snowflakes get overly hyped up and interested, responding with an excess of emotion and a deficit of logical content. This is literally the opposite of what you’re getting from my calm and collected decontruction of what I can only guess you’re trying to say, owing to the lack of explanation by yourself of what you even mean.
What’s instead happening just looks like you’ve dissolved your integrity into this collectively-identifying “cool kid” crowd where you all congratulate each other over how intellectually tough you and your points are - so that as soon as you engage with anyone outside of your tribe who doesn’t lap up your bloated self-perceptions, you just assume they can’t handle how much of an edgelord you are. It’s a genuine shame if there’s some otherwise interesting content hiding behind whatever emotional baggage is causing you to act like you are, but the front that’s compromising any such possibility just makes my interest nosedive, I’m sorry.

I mean, knock yourself out with all the bravado - it’s your choice, but there’s no connection anywhere here with “snowflake philosophy”. At best, it’s possible to irritate me, but you’ve a way to go even on that account.

Any legitimate investigation is of course gratefully received, but impatient presumption isn’t what “fierce” means - nor is it honest.

You’re right that it wasn’t polite of me to put much effort into getting to the bottom of ur VO before I suggested some things I thought were wrong with it, I’m sorry if that offends you. Let me know if and when you resolve to move on from your emotional objections, to enable any possible further discussion of any actual content of yours such as the following:

Selves have at best a vague semblence of “existence” in terms of discrete experiences, at least to the extent that they can as this “empty set” placeholder that I talked about, they just don’t have fundamental existence when it comes to the Continuous Experience from which discrete experiences are mentally dissected. We all know what we each mean when we refer to subjects even if they make no sense when you consider my argument about them - but that’s about all they have going for them. My own words are perfectly consistent with this.

The crux is this:
What else is there than experience, from whence these “subjects” come?

How could you know without experience to populate your knowledge in terms of its content, and the degree to which it can be communicated? Good luck trying to say anything meaningful whatsoever completely devoid of even the suggestion of anything that could be construed as experience - in order to validate this suggestion that subjects can be “pre-experience”.

^^^ hey Jake… that’s not snowflake.

You guys are talking past each other.

I agree that life with discussion requires an experiencer.

However, fixed cross is pointing something out that seems to not be addressed directly:

He’s pointing out that if experience is all that is, then how does the experiencer experience with our type of experience without there being a level of consciousness that transcends experience itself?

It’s not a bad argument when one points out that otherness is required for existence (experience). So what is the other of experience?

Non experience.

It’s a way of saying that we can’t be omniscient and know something.

It’s a way of saying that conditions must exist to experience.

We all know what it’s like to sleep and lose memory for hours at a time. We all know what it’s like to be born, with no memory of the infinite past…
We all know what it’s like to be a non experiencer as an experience.

Stuff like that

Silhouette,

Then experience contains in its essence the power to dissect from itself.
Ill take a yes to the initial question.

Atoms.

Before you go on to say that atoms “are” experience since we can only count with our observation of them (a position that is known as solipsism); experience tells us that atoms come prior to experience.

Investigation of terms.

Sil does this by discounting the experiencer.

Sil might say that the omniscient fools itself into knowing something.

My argument is first that for there to be experience, there has to be an experiencer. An experiencer, as youve nicely syntactisized (you do have cool technique) requires conditions.