Revision 203554168 of "Personal experience" on enwiki

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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]]