How do you refute this?

[Dovekin]

I was reacting to your assertion that “We both understand…”

i do not understamd not because I lack imagination, but because you provide contradictory information. If you provide a definition of “experience” that does not depend in any way on an experiencer, your question might make sense. As it is, with your definition, it is logically unimaginable.

Can God create a rock so large that God cannot carry it?

 

[Gorgias]

So you get what I mean. How you could refute it?

An experience implies a transaction, either between participants or between an observer and an environment.

If you have no participants, or no observer, then you have no ‘experience’. You might have a backdrop or a scene, but no experience per se.

 

[Magnanimity]

Dovekin, I originally thought STT was getting at something akin to how any Modern phil skeptical approach would start (like Descartes or Berkeley). If he was going in that direction, STT would be correct in asserting that you cannot easily move from “experiences” or “thoughts” to a singular, separate and individuated “experiencer” or “thinker of the thoughts.” Iow, just because you seems to yourself to be a singular entity separate from others, there’s no way to establish that with absolute certainty. However, the proposition that thinking (experiencing) is occurring is actually undeniable. Maybe this is what STT was getting at.

Or, maybe he’s getting at something like what the atheist Sam Harris argues for—you are your thoughts. There is not, actually, a separate “thinker of the thoughts.” There’s just the thoughts themselves, and the culmination of your thoughts is what we mean by YOU. So, there’s no distinction between your ‘real’ self and your thoughts—rather, you are your thoughts.

STT…?!

 

[Roseeurekacross]

All I can say for sure is that there is an experience.

There you go, if you are experiencing reading this reply, you are an experiencer of this post, , as is everyone else reading this reply

 

[HarryStotle]

Roseeurekacross:

Do you sit here and are you experiencing your world right now.

All I can say for sure is that there is an experience.

Tell us what you experience sitting at your device and typing to us

I can say that there is certain experience but I cannot prove that there is an experiencer.

The experience itself is predicated upon the experiencer.

There is not just the existence of the post or thread. There is the experience of someone posting and the experience of someone reading the post. The very nature of the experience depends upon the perspective of the experiencer.

There is no experience without a point of view, and therefore no experience without the subjective perspective of the subject having the experience. An experience involves, by its very nature, the perspective of the one having the experience that brings to the event the means by which it is interpreted.

 

[Benadam]

Yep to the post above. You can’t make an emotion in a lab.

 

[neophyte]

I can write those sentences without using “we” and “our”.

You can substitute other words that mean substantially the same thing, yes. That doesn’t relieve you of the dilemma.

“There is no experiencer but mere experience” is sophomoric nonsense.

 

[STT]

i do not understamd not because I lack imagination,

So could you imagine this or not?

but because you provide contradictory information.

I don’t think so.

If you provide a definition of “experience” that does not depend in any way on an experiencer, your question might make sense.

I already did. I think my definition is correct and convey the message. Experience is an event. That you agree with it. It is also informative which means its content has information. It is not a dark event, it appears that there is experience once it happens.

As it is, with your definition, it is logically unimaginable.

There are things which are difficult to define.

Can God create a rock so large that God cannot carry it?

What I am arguing does not belong to such a category.

 

[STT]

An experience implies a transaction, either between participants or between an observer and an environment.

If you have no participants, or no observer, then you have no ‘experience’. You might have a backdrop or a scene , but no experience per se.

You agreed that God can create experience.

 

[STT]

Dovekin, I originally thought STT was getting at something akin to how any Modern phil skeptical approach would start (like Descartes or Berkeley). If he was going in that direction, STT would be correct in asserting that you cannot easily move from “experiences” or “thoughts” to a singular, separate and individuated “experiencer” or “thinker of the thoughts.” Iow, just because you seems to yourself to be a singular entity separate from others, there’s no way to establish that with absolute certainty. However, the proposition that thinking (experiencing) is occurring is actually undeniable. Maybe this is what STT was getting at.

Yes.

Or, maybe he’s getting at something like what the atheist Sam Harris argues for—you are your thoughts. There is not, actually, a separate “thinker of the thoughts.” There’s just the thoughts themselves, and the culmination of your thoughts is what we mean by YOU. So, there’s no distinction between your ‘real’ self and your thoughts—rather, you are your thoughts.

STT…?!

I don’t see how this is different from what I suggest. We experience thoughts. So you can either say that you are thoughts and emotions or you can say that you are mere experience.

 

[STT]

The experience itself is predicated upon the experiencer.

It might not be.

There is not just the existence of the post or thread. There is the experience of someone posting and the experience of someone reading the post. The very nature of the experience depends upon the perspective of the experiencer.

You agree that all we have is just experience? You agree that all that attaches us to so called reality is experience? We of course see a correlation between the experiences and what appears to be experiencer but we cannot deduce that there is an experiencer.

There is no experience without a point of view, and therefore no experience without the subjective perspective of the subject having the experience. An experience involves, by its very nature, the perspective of the one having the experience that brings to the event the means by which it is interpreted.

It could be.

 

[STT]

“There is no experiencer but mere experience” is sophomoric nonsense.

It is not. So far you have no argument against it.

 

[Gorgias]

You agreed that God can create experience.

In what context?

 

[STT]

In what context?

God can create an illusive feeling of existence?

 

[Francis]

Sounds like new age to me!

 

[Benadam]

What is experience without an experiencer?

 

[Gorgias]

You agreed that God can create experience.

God can create an illusive feeling of existence?

No, I would never assert that God merely creates illusion. He creates physical reality, though.

 

[HarryStotle]

You agree that all we have is just experience? You agree that all that attaches us to so called reality is experience? We of course see a correlation between the experiences and what appears to be experiencer but we cannot deduce that there is an experiencer.

Actually, no I do not agree. There is a difference between

1. being so absorbed in the experience that the role of the experiencer is minimized.
2. being cognizant (focusing on the experience of experiencing) of being in the role of experiencer (awareness of being aware or meta-cognition as in thinking about thinking)
3. direct awareness of one’s own thoughts and reflections without any mitigating or immediate external (name removed by moderator)ut

For you to claim that there is no qualitative difference between these different kinds of awareness and they all reduce to mere “experience” is plain being dishonest about your own internal conscious existence.

In fact, if you wish to get simplistic, there is a stronger case to be made that it isn’t that there is just the mere fact of “objective” experience, it is that all experience is subject-based and not objective fact, at all. Quite the opposite of what you are claiming.

We don’t need to “deduce an experiencer” because we have immediate and direct existential verification of being one of those. It is much harder to deduce “so called reality” which is what you want us to assume is the underlying strata when you claim “all we have is the fact of experience.” Again, that is opposite to what we have been handed.

 

[neophyte]

It is not. So far you have no argument against it.

Tell yourself.

 

[PetraG]

There is no experiencer but mere experience.

If there is no experiencer, but only experience, there is no importance to the experiences, then, is there?

Who would they impact? No one. Who would there be to care? No one. Who is there to care whether the premise is true or false? No one. How is the insentient universe impacted, even? Not at all.

In other words, if you believe that, give up philosophy, because it is more pointless than self-obsession. It is experience turning itself into the greatest emptiness and futility imaginable. It is pointlessness, par excellence. It is the Ultimate in Futility, Achieved.

Go experience a bath, or something. If you have to be useless and pointless, at least refuse to torment yourself about it. Better yet, go help someone who is too ignorant to know they have no capacity to know life, someone who does not suspect that their existence is imaginary and without meaning. They might appreciate it, and being useful might be a revelation to the has-been philosopher, too. There is nothing like a callous on the hand to remedy an excess of unbridled conjecture.