Experience

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of the term "experience" can be stated as "a direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge." The term "experience" is associated with a variety of closely related meanings, which is why various different definitions of it are found in the academic literature. But in a wider sense, experience includes other types of conscious events besides perception and sensation. This is the case, for example, for the experience of thinking or the experience of dreaming. In a different sense, "experience" refers not to conscious events themselves but to the knowledge and practical familiarity they bring with them. According to this meaning, a person with job experience or an experienced hiker is someone who has a good practical familiarity in the respective field. In this sense, experience refers not to a conscious process but to the result of this process. As conscious event Experience is often understood as a conscious event in the widest sense. This includes various types of experiences, such as perception, bodily awareness, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, action and thought. But these views are not generally accepted. Critics often point out that experience involves various cognitive components that cannot be reduced to sensory consciousness. That the knowledge is direct means that it was obtained through immediate observation, i.e. without involving any inference. One may obtain all kinds of knowledge indirectly, for example, by reading books or watching movies about the topic. This type of knowledge does not constitute experience of the topic since the direct contact in question concerns only the books and movies but not the topic itself. The objects of this knowledge are often understood as public objects, which are open to observation by most regular people. The meaning of the term "experience" in everyday language usually sees the knowledge in question not merely as theoretical know-that or descriptive knowledge. Instead, it includes some form of practical know-how, i.e. familiarity with a certain practical matter. This familiarity rests on recurrent past acquaintance or performances. It often involves having learned something by heart and being able to skillfully practice it rather than having a mere theoretical understanding. But the knowledge and skills obtained directly this way are normally limited to generalized rules-of-thumb. As such, they lack behind the scientific certainty that comes about through a methodological analysis by scientists that condenses the corresponding insights into laws of nature. == Debates about the nature of experience ==

Intentionality Most experiences, especially the ones of the perceptual kind, aim at representing reality. This is usually expressed by stating that they have intentionality or are about their intentional object. If they are successful or veridical, they represent the world as it actually is. But they may also fail, in which case they give a false representation. It is traditionally held that all experience is intentional. In this context, it is often claimed that all mental states, not just experiences, are intentional. But special prominence is usually given to experiences in these debates since they seem to constitute the most fundamental form of intentionality. It is commonly accepted that all experiences have phenomenal features, i.e. that there is something it is like to live through them. Opponents of intentionalism claim that not all experiences have intentional features, i.e. that phenomenal features and intentional features can come apart. Some alleged counterexamples to intentionalism involve pure sensory experiences, like pain, of which it is claimed that they lack representational components. Mystical states of experience constitute another putative counterexample. In this context, it is claimed that it is possible to have experiences of pure consciousness in which awareness still exists but lacks any object. But evaluating this claim is difficult since such experiences are seen as extremely rare and therefore difficult to investigate. Conceptuality and myth of the given Another debate concerns the question of whether all experiences have conceptual contents. Concepts are general notions that constitute the fundamental building blocks of thought. Conceptual contents are usually contrasted with sensory contents, like seeing colors or hearing noises. This discussion is especially relevant for perceptual experience, of which some empiricists claim that it is made up only of sense data without any conceptual contents. The view that such a type of experience exists and plays an important role in epistemological issues has been termed the "myth of the given" by its opponents. The "given" refers to the immediate, uninterpreted sensory contents of such experiences. Underlying this discussion is the distinction between a "bare" or "immediate" experience in contrast to a more developed experience. One problem with this criticism is that it is difficult to see how any interpretation could get started if there was nothing there to be interpreted to begin with. This immediate given is by itself a chaotic undifferentiated mass that is then ordered through various mental processes, like association, memory and language, into the normal everyday objects we perceive, like trees, cars or spoons. Direct realists, on the other hand, hold that these material everyday objects themselves are the immediate given. It is the idea that we cannot be wrong about certain aspects of our experience. On this view, the subject may be wrong about inferences drawn from the experience about external reality, for example, that there is a green tree outside the window. But it cannot be wrong about certain more fundamental aspects of how things seem to us, for example, that the subject is presented with a green shape. It states that what it is like to undergo an experience only depends on the items presented in it. This would mean that two experiences are exactly alike if they have the same contents. Defenders of the transparency-thesis have pointed out that the difference between the experiences in such examples can be explained on the level of content: one experience presents the property of visual-roundness while the other presents felt-roundness. It has been argued that only the universals present in the experience determine the subjective character of the experience. On this view, two experiences involving different particulars that instantiate exactly the same universals would be subjectively identical. == Types of experience ==

Perception Perceptual experience refers to "an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside us". This representation of the external world happens through stimuli registered and transmitted by the senses. Perceptual experience occurs in different modalities corresponding to the different senses, e.g. as visual perception, auditory perception or haptic perception. It is usually held that the objects perceived this way are ordinary material objects, like stones, flowers, cats or airplanes that are presented as public objects existing independent of the mind perceiving them. They thereby deny that ordinary material things are the objects of perception. Other approaches include adverbialism and intentionalism. This is different from semantic memory, in which one has access to the knowledge of various facts concerning the event in question without any experiential component associated with this knowledge. But this re-experiencing is not an exact copy of the original experience since the experienced event is presented as something in the past seen from one's current perspective, which is associated with some kind of feeling of pastness or familiarity not present in the original experience. Imaginative experience involves a special form of representation in which objects are presented without aiming to show how things actually are. Like memory and unlike perception, the associated mental images are normally not caused by the stimulation of sensory organs. It is often held that both imagination and memory depend on previous perceptual acquaintance with the experienced contents. But unlike memory, more freedom is involved in most forms of imagination since the subject can freely vary, change and recombine various of the experienced contents while memory aims to preserve their original order. Despite its freedom and its lack of relation to actuality, imaginative experience can serve certain epistemological functions by representing what is possible or conceivable. This way, ideas or propositions are entertained, judged or connected. It is similar to memory and imagination in that the experience of thinking can arise internally without any stimulation of the sensory organs, in contrast to perception. But thinking is still further removed from sensory contents than memory and imagination since its contents belong to a more abstract level. It is closely related to the phenomenon of speech, with some theorists claiming that all thinking is a form of inner speech expressed in language. But this claim is controversial since there seem to be thoughts that are not linguistically fully articulated. But the more moderate claim is often accepted that thinking is associated with dispositions to perform speech acts. On this view, making a judgment in thought may happen non-linguistically but is associated with a disposition to linguistically affirm the judged proposition. Various types of thinking are discussed in the academic literature. They are sometimes divided into four categories: concept formation, problem solving, judgment and decision making, and reasoning. It involves the enjoyment of something, like eating a cake or having sex. When understood in the widest sense, this includes not just sensory pleasures but any form of pleasant experience, such as engaging in an intellectually satisfying activity or the joy of playing a game. Pleasure comes in degrees and exists in a dimension that includes negative degrees as well. These negative degrees are usually referred to as pain and suffering and stand in contrast to pleasure as forms of feeling bad. Discussions of this dimension often focus on its positive side but many of the theories and insights apply equally to its negative side. There is disagreement among philosophers and psychologists concerning what the nature of pleasure is. Some understand pleasure as a simple sensation. On this view, a pleasure experience is an experience that has a pleasure-sensation among its contents. Emotional experiences come in many forms, like fear, anger, excitement, surprise, grief or disgust. They usually include either pleasurable or unpleasurable aspects. For example, suddenly encountering a grizzly bear while hiking may evoke an emotional experience of fear in the hiker, which is experienced as unpleasant, which represents the bear as dangerous, which leads to an increase in the heart rate and which may provoke a fleeing reaction. While the experience of positive emotions is, to some extent, its own justification, and it is by these experiences or the desire for them that individuals tend to be motivated, the experience of negative emotions is sometimes claimed to cause personal growth; and, hence, to be either necessary for, or at least beneficial in, creating more productive and resilient people—though the necessity of resilience in the first place, or of negative experiences in re growth, has been questioned by others. Moods are closely related to emotions, but not identical to them. Like emotions, they can usually be categorized as either positive or negative depending on how it feels to have them. One core difference is that emotional experiences usually have a very specific object, like the fear of a bear. Mood experiences, on the other hand, often either have no object or their object is rather diffuse, like when a person is anxious that something bad might happen without being able to clearly articulate the source of their anxiety. Other differences include that emotions tend to be caused by specific events, whereas moods often lack a clearly identifiable cause, and that emotions are usually intensive, whereas moods tend to last longer. Examples of moods include anxiety, depression, euphoria, irritability, melancholy and giddiness. Desire and agency Desires comprise a wide class of mental states. They include unconscious desires, but only their conscious forms are directly relevant to experience. Conscious desires involve the experience of wanting or wishing something. This is often understood in a very wide sense, in which phenomena like love, intention, and thirst are seen as forms of desire. They are usually understood as attitudes toward conceivable states of affairs. They represent their objects as being valuable in some sense and aim to realize them by changing the world correspondingly. This can either happen in a positive or a negative sense. In the positive sense, the object is experienced as good and the aim is to create or maintain it. In the negative sense, the object is experienced as bad and the aim is to destroy it or to hinder it from coming into existence. In intrinsic desires, the object is desired for its own sake, whereas in extrinsic desires, the object is desired because of the positive consequences associated with it. Agency refers to the capacity to act and the manifestation of this capacity. Its experience involves various different aspects, including the formation of intentions, when planning possible courses of action, the decision between different alternatives, and the effort when trying to realize the intended course of action. But not all experiences of desire are accompanied by the experience of agency. This is the case, for example, when a desire is fulfilled without the agent trying to do so or when no possible course of action is available to the agent to fulfill the desire. In a more restricted sense, the term "sense of agency" refers to the impression of being in control and being the owner of one's action. It is often held that two components are the central sources of the sense of agency. On the one hand, the agent constantly makes predictions about how their intentions will influence their bodily movement and compares these predictions to the sensory feedback. On this view, a positive match generates a sense of agency while a negative match disrupts the sense of agency. Non-ordinary experience The terms "non-ordinary experience", "anomalous experience" or "altered state of consciousness" are used to describe a wide variety of rare experiences that significantly differ from the experience in the ordinary waking state. Examples of non-ordinary experiences are religious experiences, which are closely related to spiritual or mystical experiences, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, psychotic episodes, and psychedelic experiences. They often involve some kind of encounter with a divine person, for example, in the form of seeing God or hearing God's command. But they can also involve having an intensive feeling one believes to be caused by God or recognizing the divine in nature or in oneself. Some religious experiences are said to be ineffable, meaning that they are so far away from the ordinary that they cannot be described in words. Out-of-body experiences involve the impression of being detached from one's material body and perceiving the external world from this different perspective. In them, it often seems to the person that they are floating above their own body while seeing it from the outside. They can have various different causes, including traumatic brain injuries, psychedelic drugs, or sleep paralysis. They can also take the form of near-death experiences, which are usually provoked by life-threatening situations and include contents such as flying through a tunnel towards a light, talking to deceased relatives, or a life review, in which a person sees their whole life flash before their eyes. It is uncontroversial that these experiences occur sometimes for some people. In one study, for example, about 10% report having had at least one out-of-body experience in their life. But it is highly controversial how reliable these experiences are at accurately representing aspects of reality not accessible to ordinary experience. This is due to the fact that various wide-reaching claims are made based on non-ordinary experiences. Many of these claims cannot be verified by regular perception and frequently seem to contradict it or each other. Based on religious experience, for example, it has been claimed that a divine creator distinct from nature exists or that the divine exists in nature. Defenders of such claims often contend that we have no decisive reason to deny the reliability of such experiences, for example, because they are in important ways similar to regular sensory experience or because there is an additional cognitive faculty that provides us access to knowledge beyond the regular senses. Flow is of particular interest to positive psychology because its experience is pleasurable. Aesthetic experience is a central concept in the psychology of art and experimental aesthetics. It refers to the experience of aesthetic objects, in particular, concerning beauty and art. There is no general agreement on the fundamental features common to all aesthetic experiences. Some accounts focus on features like a fascination with an aesthetic object, a feeling of unity and intensity, whereas others emphasize a certain psychological distance from the aesthetic object in the sense that the aesthetic experience is disconnected from practical concerns. Transformative experiences are experiences involving a radical transformation that leaves the experiencer a different person from who they were before. Examples of transformative experiences include having a child, fighting in a war, or undergoing a religious conversion. They involve fundamental changes both in one's beliefs and in one's core preferences. == In various disciplines ==

Phenomenology Phenomenology is the science of the structure and contents of experience. It studies phenomena, i.e. the appearances of things from the first-person perspective. A great variety of experiences is investigated this way, including perception, memory, imagination, thought, desire, emotion and agency. According to traditional phenomenology, one important structure found in all the different types of experience is intentionality, meaning that all experience is experience of something. Hermeneutic phenomenology, by contrast, gives more importance to our pre-existing familiarity with experience. Neurophenomenology, on the other hand, aims at bridging the gap between the first-person perspective of traditional phenomenology and the third-person approach favored by the natural sciences. This happens by looking for connections between subjective experience and objective brain processes, for example, with the help of brain scans. Epistemology Experience, when understood in terms of sensation, is of special interest to epistemology. Knowledge based on this form of experience is termed "empirical knowledge" or "knowledge a posteriori". Another problem is to understand how it is possible for sensory experiences to justify beliefs. According to one view, sensory experiences are themselves belief-like in the sense that they involve the affirmation of propositional contents. Given this assumption, experiences can justify beliefs in the same way as beliefs can justify other beliefs: because their propositional contents stand in the appropriate logical and explanatory relations to each other. One problem for this non-conceptualist approach to perceptual experience is that it faces difficulties in explaining how sensory experiences can justify beliefs, as they apparently do. For example, astronomical observations made by Galileo Galilei concerning the orbits of planets were used as evidence in the Copernican Revolution, in which the traditional geocentric model was rejected in favor of the heliocentric model. One problem for this view is that it is essential for scientific evidence to be public and uncontroversial. The reason for this is that different scientists should be able to share the same evidence in order to come to an agreement about which hypothesis is correct. But experience is usually understood as a private mental state, not as a publicly observable phenomenon, thereby putting its role as scientific evidence into question. The idea that there is a "problem" to begin with is often traced back to how different matter and experience seem to be. Physical properties, like size, shape and weight, are public and are ascribed to objects. Experiences, on the other hand, are private and are ascribed to subjects. Another important distinctive feature is that experiences are intentional, i.e. that they are directed at objects different from themselves. This concerns both the way how physical events, like a rock falling on someone's foot, cause experiences, like a sharp pain, and how experiences, like the intention to make the pain stop, cause physical events, like pulling the foot from under the rock. Dualism is a traditionally important approach. It states that bodies and minds belong to distinct ontological categories and exist independently of each other. A central problem for dualists is to give a plausible explanation of how their interaction is possible or of why they seem to be interacting. Monists, on the other hand, deny this type of ontological bifurcation. Instead, they argue that, on the most fundamental level, only one type of entity exists. According to materialism, everything is ultimately material. On this view, minds either do not exist or exist as material aspects of bodies. According to idealism, everything is ultimately mental. On this view, material objects only exist in the form of ideas and depend thereby on experience and other mental states. Monists are faced with the problem of explaining how two types of entities that seem to be so different can belong to the same ontological category. This is especially relevant from the perspective of the natural sciences since it seems to be possible, at least in principle, to explain human behavior and cognition without reference to experience. Such an explanation can happen in relation to the processing of information in the form of electrical signals. In this sense, the hard problem of consciousness points to an explanatory gap between the physical world and conscious experience. == See also ==