[MD] Being-Aware

[Ham Priday]

Marsha --


> to expand a tiny bit...
>
> Right from the dictionary:  Experience
>
> 5. Philosophy. the totality of the cognitions given by
> perception; all that is perceived, understood, and
> remembered.
>
> http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/experience
>
> Why is this a problem?  Why don't you accept experience as reality?

I DO accept experience as existential reality.  But that's not the point.

To say "experience is reality" doesn't tell us anything about experience or 
reality.  It's like Pirsig's aphorism "some things are better than others", 
which doesn't tell us what morality is.

Your on-line "dictionary" is far too broad to be definitive.  No. 2  comes 
closer to defining what we're discussing: " the process ... of personally 
observing, encountering, or undergoing something".  Unfortunately, it's tied 
to "business experience" and raises questions as to whether the act of 
looking through a microscope is "observing" or participating in an economic 
recession is "undergoing something", thus qualifying as "personal 
experience".

Such lack of specificity makes our concept of experience fuzzy at best and 
subject to spurious interpretations.  For example, is the reality of 
experience illusionary?  Is experience the only reality?  And who's 
experience are we talking about -- mine, yours, or "the totality of ...all 
that is perceived and remembered?   How does experience differ from 
intellectual knowledge, or the accumulation of knowledge throughout all of 
human experience?  (A library is full of such knowledge, but it isn't 
experience.)  Don't you see the ambiguity here, and how it leads to models 
of reality constructed from loose assertions that have different meanings 
for different people?  That's an exercise in folly, not philosophy.

I submit that there is nothing vague or ambiguous about being-aware.  This 
definition
encompasses sentience, perception, cognition, and apprehension in the 
"immediate" sense, avoiding misconceived allusions to intellect, conception, 
memory, or behavior.  More significantly, it relates the individual subject 
(self) of experience to its objective content: Being.  This affords an 
epistemological foundation for philosophical development, without limiting 
"reality" to existence or forcing either a phenomenalistic or a 
materialistic ontology.

Words and phrases may evoke emotional responses, but they add nothing to 
ontology unless they express a concept or proposition.  The "problem" is one 
of communication and understanding.  The distinction I'm trying to draw here 
is between descriptive prose and dialectic principles.

But you still haven't answered my question, Marsha.  Can you accept 
"'being-aware" acceptable as a definition for experience?

Essentially yours,
Ham