ILovePhilosophy.com

Silhouette wrote:

Zero_Sum wrote:Silhouette, don't dangle that juicy raw meat in front of me without a single reply. I am genuinely curious about seeing your theory on the subject. Don't allow my overall cynicism frighten you away.

I genuinely want to see your elaboration on the subject where we can discuss it even more further. I'm curious to see if we actually agree on some points.

Calm your nips, I was thinking about the best way to respond to your curiosity. I resolved to add to what I've already said with some applications to various common philosophical concepts and stances:

Silhouette wrote:So in case you weren't aware of Experientialism, or forgot about it, it distinguishes between Continuous Experience and discrete experiences - the former being "the truth", which is that experience has no gaps of nothingness to separate things, and if there are gaps of somethingness to separate things, there are no gaps of nothingness to separate these gaps of somethingness from the things they separate. As such, experience is fundamentally continuous. However, to speak of experience in any useful way, one needs to abitrarily dissect it into discrete experiences according to what is deemed a useful way. This is the only way to achieve knowledge, however wisdom reminds us that knowledge is necessarily removed from the truth by virtue of it necessarily being in terms of discrete experiences instead of Continuous Experience. Thus utility is not truth, though "truth" is commonly used in lieu of utility in the "relative transitive" sense: that something is true to experience to a certain relative extent - as opposed to ever "being True" in an absolute intransitive (i.e. "True" not "true to") sense.

This is the foundation behind the theortical framework of Experientialism, as I typed out and you quoted just before you asked about it...

But I take it that since you're still asking about a definition even after that, you want more.

Any definition I give you will be a reformulation of the above quote:
Experientialism derives the distinction between Truth and utility from the fact that experience has no gaps, and is therefore continuous.
It describes the departure from Continuous Experience (Truth) to discrete experiences (utility) by means of arbitrary insertions of gaps in experience to distinguish concepts and thus relate them back to one another in a way that approximates their origin. It is only in such a way that knowledge can be formed about what presents itself as existence, and without knowledge there is nothing useful to be said about the Truth. Yet with knowledge, Experientialism highlights a fundamental departure from the absolute, necessarily requiring that knowledge about experience is relative and transitive. "There is truth" is tautologous and tells us nothing about truth, for which we require its dissection into something else, reassembled as a means to refer to the Truth. This is the foundation of "meaning" as only relatively true to Truth.
It is in such a way that knowledge is constructed in either better or worse ways, dependent on the nature of how experience is broken down into concepts and how well they are modelled as interacting with one another.

Experientialism is thus a synthesis of Existentialism and Essentialism, in that existence is essence, rather than one preceding the other - as Continuous Experience. The specific nature of the existence or essence of Continuous Experience is that which is subsequently deconstructed and reconstructed from it in terms of discrete experiences: an amalgamation of concepts and conceptual models.
Epistemology is thereby a matter of Pragmatism where truth is an asymptote, towards which the hyperbola of knowledge may approach or depart.
Ontology is a matter of how concepts and conceptual models are formulated, and epistemologically there is no absolutely True or False way to do this, only relatively better or worse ways.
Morality and Ethics are therefore formulations of concepts and conceptual models that describe better or worse ways of achieving certain values according to what values are applied to the process of formulating concepts and conceptual models in the first place.
Experience itself is also a synthesis of Materialism and Idealism. Matter and idea are concepts derived from experience, and based on experience. Matter is an idea and ideas can be reduced to matter circularly ad infinitum. However both require a more fundamental substance to be considered in either way, whereas experience is either there whether you like it or not, or it is not in which case there is no foundation to existence in the first place.
Postmodernism and Nihilism are resolved by this fundamental basis of Continuous Experience, which is either existent, or if it didn't exist there could be nothing said at all about anything in any way. Assuming experience is there, you can say something about its fundamental continuity only in terms of discrete experience, only through this act can Epistemology arise, meaning there is both no objective Epistemology or fundamental Modernist knowledge to found anything, only Continuous Experience, which is not "nothing" even though no knowledge objectively and necessarily arises from it in itself, and it is a basis against which to adjudicate the objective privilege of concepts and conceptual models.

Zero_Sum wrote:You do have a sense of humor after all.

Zero_Sum wrote:What do you think of my expression of the competition of values, truths, beliefs, morals, and ethics in the acquisition of power or influence with everything you summarized above?