Introduction

The goal of this short piece is to highlight some special aspects of the question that makes up its title. More specifically the goals are (a) to consider a hypothesis that examining approaches to answering the question may shed light on the nature of experience and consequently (b) to draw some conclusions from our the outcome of the consideration of the hypothesis.

Experience and consciousness

In this piece word ‘experience’ is used the common sense of ‘I like the experience of the warmth of the sun’ and not in another common though related sense of ‘She is a woman of much experience in teaching mathematics’.

Consciousness has almost the same meaning as this sense of experience except perhaps that experience is more general in that does not distinguish cases where I am aware of having an experience from cases where I am having an experience without being (especially) aware of it. Experience tends to emphasize awareness of something in the world. Consciousness is not essentially different but we do perhaps tend to emphasize when talking of consciousness that there is also awareness of being conscious. The differences are not insignificant but I have pointed them out first in order to ignore them. We approach experience and consciousness as the same thing.

What are experience and consciousness?

What is experience? How do I first approach this question? I can begin by giving examples. I have an experience of the fragrance of a rose, of the feeling of the warm sun on my back, of recollecting my father’s voice, of thinking through a puzzle. These are all experiences but they do not tell me what experience is. Some philosophers would, perhaps after talking around the topic a little more, leave it at that with the remark that while an analytic definition has not been given, enough has been said to show what experience and consciousness are. For many purposes that is enough. However the present purpose is see what may be learned from trying to define experience.

Difficulty of the definitions

I can try for example to explain the fragrance of a rose in terms of something else. However, I cannot. I can define ten square feet as the area of a ten individual square feet and one square foot as the area of a one foot square. I cannot do this for the fragrance of a rose or experience generally. Why? It is perhaps because experience is so fundamental that there is nothing else in terms of which to define it. Perhaps it is for this reason that some writers are willing to ‘define’ experience by showing what it is rather than by defining it in the traditional ways of definition.

Approach to definition and explanation

I look to experience but I do not see it ‘out there’; it is something I have!

I mean that there is a sense in which experience is looking at the world. It is different from a material object. I have experience of a material object but an experience itself does not appear to be such an object.

Similarity and difference between experience and matter

In this experience is like a material object: I know experience and material objects in the first place by having experience of them.

In this, however, there is also dissimilarity. I experience matter but I do not matter experience (the latter phrase seems to lack all meaning); I have experience of experience but ‘I have matter of matter’ has no meaning.

One difference is that experience is of something while matter simply is. This is an immense clue. Experience is of something and therefore (perhaps) a relationship; matter is in and of itself (but may have relationships).

Therefore (1) if I try to formulate a material explanation of experience and consciousness I should not expect to explain them in terms—for example—of material particles but in terms of relationships among particles. However (2) when I examine my own experience or consciousness I tend to look my consciousness in isolation and this tends to show up consciousness as pure consciousness but not as consciousness of something. Perhaps there is no ‘atom’ of consciousness as in pure consciousness or as in stream of consciousness but only consciousness as relation between a perceiver and a perceived. What then of the idea of pure consciousness? Perhaps it is not pure but some internal relation of the mind of the ‘subject’ and its seeming isolation from matter seems to make it seem pure.

Tentative conclusions

(1) Experience is sufficiently fundamental as to not be properly definable in terms of something else. However, upon reflection we may conclude that it is so immediate as to not require anything more than ‘showing’.

(2) There is no such thing as pure experience—in general there are experience associated with afference and experience associated with efference and seeming pure experience is an internal relation.

(3) The material correlate of experience is not the ‘particle’ but the relation between particles. If so the experience at the level of particles is the inner effect (that we normally call affect) on a particle due to interaction. Notice that having a material correlate is not at all the same thing as a definition.

Departure

The reasoning leading up to the conclusions is tentative. It would be a good thing if we could firm up the conclusions as part of a comprehensive theory of experience. More can be done—such a ‘theory’ can be the foundation of a metaphysics. Narratives linked from http://www.horizons-2000.org do this. In what they do is more—the metaphysics of the narratives is shown to be a perfect, unique, and ultimate universal metaphysics.