Revision 560151583 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 [[event (philosophy)|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 [[witness|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]]

[[Category:Thought]]
[[Category:Perception]]
[[Category:Mind]]
[[Category:Subjective experience]]

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