Difference between revisions 200844263 and 203554168 on enwiki

'''Personal experience''' of a [[human being]] is the actual moment-to-moment [[experience]] and [[sensory awareness]] of our being [[life|alive]] and [[cognition|noticing what is around us]].  There have been many different beliefs about it, and about how easy it is to exchange what is experienced:

[[Pain and nociception|Pain]] is normally thought to be a universal experience, but modern theories like the [[gate control theory of pain]] challenge that, as do traditional [[yoga|Yogi]] practices and other spiritual traditions that focus on simply "not feeling pain".

The [[Brahmin]] of [[Hinduism]] focus strictly on the experience of [[breath]]ing as the most basic experience of any person.  This was expanded into a broader philosophy of [[meditation]] and limiting experience that is allowed to be controlled or constrained from outside, notably in [[Buddhism]].

An early belief of some philosophers of [[Ancient Greece]] was that the [[mind]] was like a [[recording]] device and simply kept somehow-objective records of what the [[senses]] experienced.  This was believed in the Western world into the [[20th century]] until [[cognitive psychology]] experiments decisively proved that it was not true, and that many events were simply filled in by the mind, based on what "should be".  This among other things explained why [[eyewitness]] accounts of events often were so widely varied.

Another belief, still somewhat more credible, and associated with [[Ancient Rome]], was that personal experience was part of some divine or species-wide [[collective experience]].  This gave rise to notions of [[racial memory]], [[national mission]], and such notions as [[racism]] and [[patriotism]].  It was likely easier to create [[political movement]]s and military morale with such notions, than a strictly personal idea of experience.  [[Carl Jung]] and [[Joseph Campbell]] were notable investigators of these ideas of collective experience in the [[20th century]].

During [[The Enlightenment]], there was rigorous investigation of these ideas.  [[Immanuel Kant]] for instance noted that it was only possible to explain "experience and its objects" as a consequence of each other:  Either experience makes those objects possible, or those objects make experience possible.  This is seen today as [[dualism]], and denying the possibility of a third thing making both experience and whatever reality its objects have, both possible.  That thing could be a more universal [[cognition]], as proposed in some versions of [[Christianity]] or [[Gaia philosophy]].

However, by far the most cogent understanding of shared personal experience is in [[literature]], notably the [[diary]] and [[autobiography]] forms, where an [[author]] relates their personal experience in natural language to another.  In the Western world, this form is often credited to [[Augustine of Hippo|Augustine]]'s ''[[Confessions of Saint Augustine|Confessions]]'' as the earliest ([[4th century]]) example.

[[Poetry]], [[dance]], [[song]] and other more abstract forms are thought to relate personal experience better than [[prose]] or [[Play (theatre)|play]] by some.  It is not clear why this is, other than, the more abstract forms have no one explicit meaning, and experience is more negotiable between [[artist]] and [[audience]].  These works are often prized in Western literature above works of non-fiction that pretend to be "objective" or about something other than the author.  [[Postmodernism]] is a movement that denies that anything is objective.

The elements of universal personal experience is today explored rigorously in the [[cognitive science of mathematics]] which proposes that our notations and symbols, even the most formal, are rooted ultimately in the [[senses]] and [[habituation|habit]]s of exploring our surroundings.  [[Knowledge]] then strictly relies on experience, and is translated into symbols in an obvious way.  [[Truth]] is approached by transcription.  [[Baudrillard]] had a similar theory but did not relate it directly to [[mathematics]].

Subjective personal experience is also more widely spread on the [[Internet]] due to [[webcam]] and other means.  [[Steve Mann]] is a noted explorer of ways to share personal experience using the [[Internet]] - he makes his audiovisual experience shareable by wearing cameras and microphones literally all the time.

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'''Personal experience''' of a [[human being]] is the moment-to-moment [[experience]] and [[sensory awareness]] of internal and external events.

==History==
An early belief of some philosophers of [[Ancient Greece]] was that the [[mind]] was like a [[recording]] device and simply kept somehow-objective records of what the [[senses]] experienced.  This was believed in the Western world into the [[20th century]] until [[cognitive psychology]] experiments decisively proved that it was not true, and that many events were simply filled in by the mind, based on what "should be".  This among other things explained why [[eyewitness]] accounts of events often were so widely varied.

In [[Ancient Rome]] it was believed that personal experience was part of some divine or species-wide [[collective experience]].  This gave rise to notions of [[racial memory]], [[national mission]], and such notions as [[racism]] and [[patriotism]].  It was likely easier to create [[political movement]]s and military morale with such notions, than a strictly personal idea of experience.  [[Carl Jung]] and [[Joseph Campbell]] were notable investigators of these ideas of collective experience in the [[20th century]].

During [[The Enlightenment]], there was rigorous investigation of these ideas.  [[Immanuel Kant]] noted that it was only possible to explain "experience and its objects" as a consequence of each other:  either experience makes those objects possible, or those objects make experience possible.  This is seen today as [[dualism]], and denying the possibility of a third thing making both experience and whatever reality its objects have, both possible.  That thing could be a more universal [[cognition]], as proposed in some versions of [[Christianity]] or [[Gaia philosophy]].

==See also==
*[[Postmodernism]]

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[[Category:Thought]]