Continuous Experience is already real and concrete whether I want it to be or not - no conversion or “making” on my or anyone else’s part is required.
Discrete experiences are what is “made” or converted from Continuous Experience - that’s where the process of reification occurs: not in the existence of Continuous Experience before reification occurs, and to which reification must apply in order for reification to have a starting state (pre-reification) as well as a resulting state (post-reification).
Not so. Knowing is by definition meaningful. Means imply a transition from one state to another. Fundamentally meaning therefore requires a pre-meaningful state from which to create meaning in the form of a different state to what was started with. Such a state that precedes the meaningulness of knowing must therefore be immediate and unavoidable. Both meaning and knowledge must first of all have the property of existence, therefore existence precedes meaning and knowledge. The immediate and undeniable state of existence is experience (Continuous Experience). So logically there must exist an immediate and unavoidable state to found everything that subsequently follows, making experience both directly undeniable, empirically speaking pre-knowledge, and necessarily existent logically speaking post-knowledge. You can derive Continuous Experience post hoc, but it presents itself unavoidably ante hoc regardless, so deriving Continuous Experience indirectly from discrete experience can be done (as I am doing here) but it is not reliant on doing so due to its direct confrontation as existence.
If I’m understanding this criticism, gaps are only negative: the “existence” of a gap is literally a contradiction in terms, which is why there are no gaps - logical contradictions don’t exist. This is why experience is fundamentally continuous, because it is free from logical contradictions like gaps.
No.“Experience” is irreducible (except to its singular quality which is valuing) but the argument for its continuousness is, as I see it, merely syntactic, which does not amount to a foundational idea in my book.
But we can agree to disagree here, at least you’re actually invested in your idea, and it isn’t hollow semantics.
Of course it isn’t hollow semantics. There’s a reason why it resolves so many formerly paradoxical philosophical dilemmas.
Yes, experience is irreducible - that’s why I’m proposing it as the fundmental substance. Valuing is what you do to “make” it into something in terms of discrete experience. This is why I’ve always rejected VO as fundamental, however much sense it makes to propose valuation as “relatively” fundamental. Value has to apply to something, just the same as logic - indeed we did have this discussion in 2013 or 2014 on Humanarchy. How can you “like or dislike” without something against which to apply said like or dislike? How can you logically reason without anything to logically reason with? There needs to be something first, before you can value it, or refer to it as “a value”. You can only isolate a thing as a value after there’s a something to isolate from. Experience happens first, valuation and logic happens to that. How can you know what you value first before it exists? You’ll remember, hopefully, my criticism of VO that existence precedes value because value has to first of all exist, else it’s fundamentally non-existent. Experience is the concrete form of existence in the abstract - I’m posing them as the same thing. Value isn’t existence, value is of or about existence.