[MD] Being-Aware

[MarshaV]

At 12:29 AM 9/25/2008, you wrote:

>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?


No, Ham.   Experience creates subject and object.

Marsha


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Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.........
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