Experiment and Experience (TW .7)

·7 Experiment and Experience

We can talk about ‘speaking from experience’ but we can't say what ‘experience’ is. We can talk about the causes or conditions for having some specific experience, or for experiencing generally; but like all talk it means nothing unless you are already acquainted with the subject. Semiotically, i.e. from inside of semiosis, that subject is the object of the sign; and the difference made by the operation of the sign is its interpretant. But the sign itself can't make a difference in the absence of ‘collateral experience’ (Peirce) on the interpreter's part.

There is no sign without an object and (at least a virtual) interpretant. The sign is really the triad of object, interpretant and whatever brings them into relation – which is also called the ‘sign’, unless we reserve that word for the whole instance of semiosis, in which case we might (following Peirce) call the mediating element of it the representamen. And, as Peirce pointed out, we must distinguish between two objects: the immediate object inside the sign, as it were, is an index to the dynamic object outside the sign – that is, the object which you and i can only take as being what it is independently of either of our minds.

An experiencing system is one to whom things happen. Now, as far as you can feel, everything that happens happens to you. But if you are only human, you can only have human experience. And part of the human experience is to speak or think of whatever happens to any system as experience, or even as feeling. John Gribbin (2004, 11) writes that ‘Newton's first law says that every object stays still or keeps moving in a straight line unless it experiences – or feels – a force.’ This usage of ‘experience’ (as a verb) in physics is not unusual. Whatever ‘feels’ a force is affected thereby, and we do not hesitate to say this of inanimate objects; yet ‘affect’ (as a noun, accent on the first syllable) refers in psychology to the realm of feeling, as opposed to ‘detached’ cognition or observable behavior.

Likewise, when Peirce speaks of Firstness as pure ‘feeling’, he is speaking in a human way – the only way we have – and therefore is not speaking only of the peculiarly human kind of feeling. He is speaking of happening viewed from within the entity to which it occurs. And when he speaks of Secondness as ‘reaction’, he is speaking of the opposition (or to put it more mildly, the difference) between Firsts, or ‘feelings’, each of which is Second to the other. This is the core of ‘experience’ as Peirce generally uses the word; feeling First, experience Second.

Experiencing is the appearing of things or the happening of events ‘before’ they are designated as things, events, processes, ..... Experience then is the appearance of phenomena – the noun forms here signalling that some‘thing’ has been identified as a single event in the ongoing, undifferentiated stream of experiencing. This formulation or ‘reification’ is a necessary step toward discourse or dialogue.

Experience itself does not appear; it is the channel through which things appear or happen. Afterwards, we call a remembered appearance or happening an experience.

The wholeness of experience is its presence – which is nothing other than the space opened by the difference between past and future, between the already-determined and the to-be-determined. This ever-evolving space is time, and semiosis brings forth meaning from this matrix.

Signs inform an organism by redirecting attention within its Umwelt, which includes only those entities with which the animal is equipped to interact. An animal without ears, or rather lacking any sense of hearing, lives in a silent world. For us humans, this external world is generally carved up into objects or things we can think and speak about; and when we do that, we say that the object out there is ‘intended’ by the term we use in reference to it. This ‘aboutness’ is called ‘intentionality’ by many philosophers; it is a universal feature of language, and of what Damasio calls ‘extended consciousness’. This very special kind of intentionality develops out of the more universal kind introduced in Chapter 4, which is characteristic of all life forms. But we humans are – as far as we know – unique on this planet in having developed an ability to talk about development, or about experience.

You could say that experiencing is living the difference between the inner world and the outer. Language, as a social institution, is adapted to reference to the world which we have in common because it is external to each of us. To speak of what is common to all experiencing, even the primal, we use metaphors which refer to that external world. Heraclitus for example says that ‘One cannot step twice into the same river.’ Think of any river you can find on a map of the world, and it's clear that if you can step into it once, then you can step into it twice. But you can't have the same experience twice, because the waters are always changing.

A revelation, or any learning experience, must come as a surprise, but that is only the beginning of its integration into the guidance system. It can make a lasting difference in your map of the world, and thus become a better habit, only to the extent that its representation is tested against your experience of the reality beyond the map. The surprise is the spark, the trigger, sending you out on the path of inquiry. In order to grow into meaning, seed-signs need the water of life, which is your current experience; it also requires the soil, which is the residue of all past experience, the accumulated habits of the biosphere. And like all of the learning, development and evolution taking place on this planet, it also requires the sun (energy) and the continuous turning-out of time.

Present awareness, or awareness of what is currently happening, cannot be separated from memory of past events, or from anticipation of future events. Time, as the presence of impermanence, is simply the means by which the future both differs and continues from the already-determined, unalterable past. Experience is memory, while experiencing is time.

Inquiry is driven by the difference between belief and truth, which represents the difference between appearance and reality.

Perception is always guided by a model; but inquiry, which generates the most acute forms of perception, is motivated by some tension between model (or expectation) and experience. Karl Popper remarks that

even in bacteria, theories and hypotheses come before the signals, the ‘sensations’. I need hardly stress that, especially in science, hypotheses come before what some scientists still call the ‘data’; misleadingly, because they are not given to us, but actively (and sometimes at great peril) sought and acquired by us.
— Popper (1990, 48)

‘Perception,’ it has been recently said, ‘may be regarded as primarily the modification of an anticipation.’ It is always an active process, conditioned by our expectations and adapted to situations. Instead of talking of seeing and knowing, we might do a little better to talk of seeing and noticing. We notice only when we look for something, and we look when our attention is aroused by some disequilibrium, a difference between our expectation and the incoming message.
— Gombrich (2002, 148)

The systematic testing of our hypotheses against experience is what we call science, and thus we construct ‘objective reality’ through social consensus.

But we all know that there's more to reality than that, so we don't really want our world to be too predictable. When the results of any activity are exactly what we expect, we lose interest. That's because our basic method of learning and navigating the world is trial and error, and trial without error is neither fun nor profitable. We all sense that behind the cocoon of our virtual world, and beyond the reach of present experience, lies the ultimate reality of the unknown. Now and then a bit of this vast unknown rises above my horizon, or maybe even crosses the border into the intimate realm of experience. Then my little world grows a little – and life is worth living.

Where there's surprise, there's no learning. Confront a confabulator or anosognosiac with a reality which contradicts his belief, and he will typically ‘admit it for a moment with no sign of surprise’ – and will revert in the next moment to his original belief or story (Hirstein 2005, 125).

When we consider learning as a constructive process, we think of experience and information as the material inputs to the process:

Learning is a natural process of pursuing personally meaningful goals, and it is active, volitional, and internally mediated; it is a process of discovering and constructing meaning from information and experience, filtered through the learner's unique perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.
— American Psychological Association, 1993 (in McCombs and Whisler 1997, 5)

However, it is equally germane to think of learning as a process of integrated differentiation, like development. We learn by making distinctions within the phaneron; and the ‘bits’ of information which appear as inputs in the construction model are really products of the analysis which we do in order to describe the process.

As Mary Catherine Bateson points out, human learning tends to follow a spiral path: ‘Lessons too complex to grasp in a single occurrence spiral past again and again, small examples gradually revealing greater and greater implications’ (Bateson 1994, 30). Thus it is that a scripture continues to gather meaning with each re-reading, as Gandhi said in his commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita:

If we do not feel a new interest in this every time we read it, the fault must lie with us, it cannot be that of the author of the Gita.
— Gandhi (1926/2000, 233)

But human learning has often been hampered by the ‘transmission’ model – the assumption that the teacher knows and sends, and the learner merely receives passively, and that learning can take place without trial and without incorporation of feedback from trials. The great teachers know better, as their methods show: Socrates led the learner through trial by dialog, and the Buddha encouraged his followers to apply his own trial-and-error method rather than claiming to have received an authoritative revelation. The sutras even record some of his failed experiments (see e.g. Thich Nhat Hanh 1998, 14).

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
— Thessalonians 5:21 [KJV]

The King James translation of this verse employs the primary sense of ‘prove’ in English, which according to the OED is ‘to make trial of, try, test’ – the meaning of the root Latin verb probare. To prove a statement or proposition in this sense is to investigate whether it really works as an act of meaning – whether it fits a niche in meaning space. Since context, occasion and meaning space are always transforming themselves with each act of meaning, the fit is always more or less temporary.

In recent centuries, the word prove in English most commonly invokes the secondary meaning, ‘to establish something as true’ – and ‘truth’ is taken to be a permanent and context-free quality of any ‘proven’ statement. ‘Proof’ in this sense is usually established by deduction from already-established principles or assumptions.

Scientific method is a matter of investigation, not of ‘proof’ in this secondary sense. ‘Science probes; it does not prove’ (Bateson 1979, 32). Its ‘conclusions’ are always tentative and probable, never established and certain. This is the only sensible approach to truth, which includes ‘proving’ the verses in scriptures. We try them out in practice and we learn from the results. Belief that one's investigations have ‘proven’ anything permanently and absolutely is nothing but arrogance. Belief that one knows ‘the truth’ without investigation is even more arrogant. The realistic and pragmatic path is to live by those principles we have tried, and ‘hold fast’ to them because we are still trying them, not because we think we have risen above all error.

Demonstrative proof is not to be thought of. The demonstrations of the metaphysicians are all moonshine.
— Peirce, CP 1.7

Contemporary science uses the word empirical with pride, to distinguish scientific knowledge from the untested and the untestable. Yet the word has also been applied disparagingly to those lacking theoretical knowledge, or those who use methods that have worked in the past without understanding why they work. To say that a physician uses empirical methods of healing is to say that he doesn't know what he's doing. This is understandable, because nobody wants to be the ‘guinea pig’ or the lab rat when it comes to medical care. We want access to the benefits produced by empirical methods without being subjected to the trial-and-error process. But theories which have not been tested empirically are even less trustworthy than methods which lack an established theoretical basis. This includes theories of how sense experience itself works; and the empirical evidence is strongly against one-way versions of empiricism.

If a message doesn't make a difference when you read it, your memory is not likely to retain it (although you can still use external media to store it for later perusal). Likewise, a possibility which occurs to you without affecting your actions or your habits does not count as an experience, as Peirce defines it here:

An “Experience” is a brutally produced conscious effect that contributes to a habit, self-controlled, yet so satisfying, on deliberation, as to be destructible by no positive exercise of internal vigour. … Take for illustration the sensation undergone by a child that puts its forefinger into a flame with the acquisition of a habit of keeping all its members out of all flames. A compulsion is “Brute,” whose immediate efficacy nowise consists in conformity to rule or reason.
— EP2:435 (1908)

This is followed, in Peirce's ‘Neglected Argument for the Reality of God’, by the explication of the ‘three Universes of Experience familiar to us all’ which is quoted in Chapter 7. The point here is that ‘mere Ideas’ do not count as ‘experience’ unless they affect your habits in some way beyond your control. Your memory of an event is itself a habit; and you can't count something as ‘an experience’ unless you at least remember it. (Your memory edits itself, as it were, in the very act of remembering, but this too is beyond your control – which makes it a real memory.)

Peirce writes (EP2:233) that ‘self-control of any kind is purely inhibitory. It originates nothing.’ All of our ideas, inferences, logical conclusions and conscious ‘practices’ must be grounded in the ‘given’ which is beyond our control, and which we normally notice only when it surprises us. Consciousness takes up the task of ‘taming’ it, harnessing it, but any power it has to accomplish this task must have a wild source. Peirce (same page): ‘Ultimately therefore it must come from the uncontrolled part of the mind, because a series of controlled acts must have a first’ – which, being first, is wild, spontaneous, free. Perhaps what Peirce called ‘firstness’ might be called the ‘original self’ by Buddhists, ‘God’ by theists and ‘nature’ by naturalists.

Peirce as a pragmaticist held

that man is so completely hemmed in by the bounds of his possible practical experience, his mind is so restricted to being the instrument of his needs, that he cannot, in the least, mean anything that transcends those limits. The strict consequence of this is, that it is all nonsense to tell him that he must not think in this or that way because to do so would be to transcend the limits of a possible experience. For let him try ever so hard to think anything about what is beyond that limit, it simply cannot be done. You might as well pass a law that no man shall jump over the moon; it wouldn't forbid him to jump just as high as he possibly could.
For much the same reason, I do not believe that man can have the idea of any cause or agency so stupendous that there is any more adequate way of conceiving it than as vaguely like a man. Therefore, whoever cannot look at the starry heaven without thinking that all this universe must have had an adequate cause, can in my opinion not otherwise think of that cause half so justly than by thinking it is God.
— (CP 5.536, c. 1905)

According to Peirce (CP 1.522, 1903), the first of seven ‘mental qualifications of a philosopher’ is the ‘ability to discern what is before one's consciousness.’ In other words, philosophy begins with phenomenology.

‘Phenomenology’ is often said to be the study of experience, but its name points rather to the logos of the phenonomenon (Heidegger 1927, 28). As Peirce puts it,

Phenomenology ascertains and studies the kinds of elements universally present in the phenomenon; meaning by the phenomenon, whatever is present at any time to the mind in any way.
— (CP 1.186)

I will so far follow Hegel as to call this science Phenomenology although I will not restrict it to the observation and analysis of experience but extend it to describing all the features that are common to whatever is experienced or might conceivably be experienced or become an object of study in any way direct or indirect.
— Peirce (CP 5.37)

For more of Peirce's writings on the subject, consult the ‘Peirce on phenomenology’ page on the gnoxic website.

Peirce wrote in ‘Phaneroscopy or the Natural History of Concepts’ (c. 1905):

It is more particularly to changes and contrasts of perception that we apply the word ‘experience.’ We experience vicissitudes, especially. We cannot experience the vicissitude without experiencing the perception which undergoes the change; but the concept of experience is broader than that of perception, and includes much that is not, strictly speaking, an object of perception. It is the compulsion, the absolute constraint upon us to think otherwise than we have been thinking that constitutes experience. Now constraint and compulsion cannot exist without resistance, and resistance is effort opposing change. Therefore there must be an element of effort in experience; and it is this which gives it its peculiar character.
— CP 1.336

In a letter to William James, Peirce wrote of his phenomenological categories as

three modes of consciousness, that of feeling, that of EXPERIENCE (experience meaning precisely that which the history of my life has FORCED me to think … and thirdly the consciousness of the future (whether veridical or not is aside from the question) in expectation, which enters into all general ideas according to my variety of pragmatism.
— (CP 8.291)

In this context, ‘experience’ as Secondness belongs to the past (because it is already determined), while Thirdness or generality is ‘of the future’ (that which is not yet fully determinate). ‘Feeling’ or Firstness could then be called ‘present’, but only in a sense not involving the passage of time at all (since that belongs properly to Thirdness). In the still earlier context of his cosmological writings, Peirce used ‘consciousness’ more in connection with Firstness or feeling, and thus could not speak of all three categories as ‘modes of consciousness’. This is just to illustrate the kind of polyversity which makes it so difficult to practice philosophy, and especially phenomenology, as a science – a difficulty of which Peirce was acutely aware, although (optimistically) he kept on trying.

The experience of effort cannot exist without the experience of resistance. Effort only is effort by virtue of its being opposed; and no third element enters. Note that I speak of the experience, not of the feeling, of effort.
— Peirce (SS, 12 Oct. 1904; CP 8.330)

In his ‘Neglected Argument for the Reality of God’ (1908), Peirce extended the reality of Secondness (and the name ‘Experience’) to the other two categories:

Of the three Universes of Experience familiar to us all, the first comprises all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name within that mind. Their very airy-nothingness, the fact that their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody's Actually thinking them, saves their Reality. The second Universe is that of the Brute Actuality of things and facts. I am confident that their Being consists in reactions against Brute forces, notwithstanding objections redoubtable until they are closely and fairly examined. The third Universe comprises everything whose being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects, especially between objects in different Universes. Such is everything which is essentially a Sign – not the mere body of the Sign, which is not essentially such, but, so to speak, the Sign's Soul, which has its Being in its power of serving as intermediary between its Object and a Mind. Such, too, is a living consciousness, and such the life, the power of growth, of a plant. Such is a living constitution – a daily newspaper, a great fortune, a social ‘movement.’
— EP2:435 (1908)

Even in that same essay, Peirce's definition of the word experience as ‘brutally produced’ emphasizes the element of Secondness. But in our common, everyday experience the three Universes are throughly entangled; they don't merely mix like the classical four ‘elements’. The ‘Trichotomic’ manuscript (EP I: 280) summarizes them as follows: ‘First is the beginning, that which is fresh, original, spontaneous, free. Second is that which is determined, terminated, ended, correlative, object, necessitated, reacting. Third is the medium, becoming, developing, bringing about.’ In MS L75 (1902), Peirce gave several sets of labels for the triad. One set calls Firstness quality, Secondness occurrence, and Thirdness meaning.

Experience may be defined as the sum of ideas which have been irresistibly borne in upon us, overwhelming all free-play of thought, by the tenor of our lives. The authority of experience consists in the fact that its power cannot be resisted; it is a flood against which nothing can stand. The maxim that we ought to be ‘guided’ by experience amounts to this, that what we have got to yield to at last we shall economically do well to be submissive to from the first. ‘Guided’ is too egotistical a word.
— Peirce (CP 7.437)

What Peirce called ‘the scientific method’ in ‘Fixation of Belief’, he later called ‘the method of experience’ – at least in this 1893 footnote to CP 5.384:

Changes of opinion are brought about by events beyond human control. All mankind were so firmly of opinion that heavy bodies must fall faster than light ones, that any other view was scouted as absurd, eccentric, and probably insincere. Yet as soon as some of the absurd and eccentric men could succeed in inducing some of the adherents of common sense to look at their experiments – no easy task – it became apparent that nature would not follow human opinion, however unanimous. So there was nothing for it but human opinion must move to nature's position. That was a lesson in humility. A few men, the small band of laboratory men, began to see that they had to abandon the pride of an opinion assumed absolutely final in any respect, and to use all their endeavors to yield as unresistingly as possible to the overwhelming tide of experience, which must master them at last, and to listen to what nature seems to be telling us. The trial of this method of experience in natural science for these three centuries – though bitterly detested by the majority of men – encourages us to hope that we are approaching nearer and nearer to an opinion which is not destined to be broken down – though we cannot expect ever quite to reach that ideal goal.

A belief or cognition can often be expressed as a proposition. Peirce maintained

that continuity governs the whole domain of experience in every element of it. Accordingly, every proposition, except so far as it relates to an unattainable limit of experience (which I call the Absolute), is to be taken with an indefinite qualification; for a proposition which has no relation whatever to experience is devoid of all meaning.
— EP2:1 (1893)

‘Science is a system of beliefs to which we are committed’ (Polanyi 1962, 171). Among the most fundamental of those beliefs are (first) that nature has a real order independent of what we think of it, and (second) that this order can be investigated. Logically, this implies that any specific belief is fallible.

You can test your hypothesis experimentally, but how do you test your method of testing?

‘Experience begins when objects come into existence’ (Deely 2004, 57) – which happens only in semiosis. Read in a Peircean way, this reinforces the element of Secondness in experience; for the existence of an object implies the actuality of a sign-relation. Objects as things existing outside of current semiosis are deposited in its wake, as it were. They are relics left behind by the act of meaning. As John Dewey put it:

Philosophy has only to state, to make explicit, the difference between events which are challenges to thought and events which have met the challenge and hence possess meaning. It has only to note that bare occurrence in the way of having, being, or undergoing is the provocation and invitation to thought – seeking and finding unapparent connections, so that thinking terminates when an object is present: namely, when a challenging event is endowed with stable meanings through relationship to something extrinsic but connected.
— Dewey (1929, 265)

In more Peircean terms, semiosis always involves an object, but it must also produce an interpretant: if the mediation of the sign were to finally accomplish its purpose of resolving the difference between object and interpretant, that would be the end of the process (as it is already the end in the sense of purpose). The dynamic, triadic relationship would then collapse into a simple static unit, which is what Dewey calls a ‘present’ object. Likewise Heidegger (1927) called such a relatively lifeless object vorhanden, ‘present-at-hand’.

Walter Freeman (1999a, 159) defined phenomenology as ‘the systematic study of experiences’. Another neurobiologist who invoked the term was Francisco Varela, who called for a more rigorous method of investigating the nature of experience from the inside (Varela 1996, Varela and Shear 1999). But he seemed ambivalent about the expertise required to implement the phenomenological program; he described the ‘reduction’ which (according to Husserl) lies at the heart of it is a kind of ‘unlearning’, and remarked that ‘I prefer to take my cues from Husserl's style as an eternal beginner, always willing to start anew; this is the hallmark of phenomenology itself (but it has not always been the case in practice)’ (Varela 1999, 266). Shunryu Suzuki (1970) takes the ‘beginner's mind’ to be the hallmark of Zen practice. Perhaps the point of these disciplines is simply to start anew, rather than repeat old habits; and the same could be said of Peirce's phaneroscopy.

Does ‘experience’ connote a subject/object distinction? Can the phenomenon be called the object of experience, or the mind the subject? Peirce does call it the ‘object of thought’ (CP 1.343, 1903). But he also declared in 1902 (CP 7.364) that ‘feeling is nothing but the inward aspect of things, while mind on the contrary is essentially an external phenomenon.’ He often makes ‘mind’ and ‘thought’ pretty much synonymous, as also are ‘feeling’ and ‘consciousness’. But it may be unwise to pin down the polyversity of such terms.

If experiencing is the interplay of subject and world, perception is the collision and/or collusion of subject and object. But when we speak of experience, we often think of it as internal, while the world consists of external objects. We say that your capacity to experience is your ‘inner life’. The image schema or root metaphor of the container seems to be involved here, but its role is ambigous (as Heidegger pointed out in Being and Time).

What sense does it make then to attach the prefix ex-, meaning ‘out’, to the original Greek root -peir-, as Latin did to produce the verb experior and the nouns experientia and experimentum? The ex- prefix can serve as a reminder that the view from within is naturally oriented outwards. It's like the e- of emotion:

The departure from a state of calm rest without anticipation is aptly named: e(x)motion (‘ex’ = ‘outward’). An emotional state need not be revealed in immediate overt actions, but it certainly implies the high probability of actions that will soon be directed outward from an individual into the world.
— Walter Freeman (2000, 213)

In his work on ‘Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition’, Leonard Talmy (2000, v.1, Chapter 7) explores various ways in which Secondness is expressed in conceptual structuring systems. The section on psychodynamics is especially interesting. According to his analysis,

language ascribes to the psychophysical nature of sentient entities the following particular force-dynamic concatenation: A more peripheral part of the psyche overcomes a more central part's intrinsic repose to animate the otherwise inert physical component into overt force manifestation against a further external force entity.
— Talmy (2000, v.1, 435)

If this describes the deep structure of language, it could help to explain why we think of the physical body as ‘inert’ unless ‘animated’ by a ‘more central part’ of the bodymind. It would also explain why the spiritual quest, as described in the Gospel of Thomas and many other scriptures, leads from a state of disturbance toward an intrinsic state of ‘repose’.

The element of Secondness enters into language mainly by means of indexical signs.

It is impossible to express what an assertion refers to except by means of an index. A pronoun is an index. A noun, on the other hand, does not indicate the object it denotes; and when a noun is used to show what one is talking about, the experience of the hearer is relied upon to make up for the incapacity of a noun for doing what the pronoun does at once. Thus, a noun is an imperfect substitute for a pronoun.
— Peirce (EP2:15 fn.)

Experience here refers to semantic memory – which, for us humans, includes all our knowledge of how to use language. There is no meaning without that kind of memory: ‘meeting the same man and noticing the same peculiarities … to the experienced man indicate a whole history, but to the inexperienced reveal nothing’ (EP2:8).

While writing and rewriting this book, i was in almost dialy dialog with a few other authors (such as Peirce, Dogen and Gendlin) with whom i was ‘experienced’ in this sense. To read a page of Peirce or a paragraph of Dogen was to evoke a whole way of seeing and living in the world – a way which remains fresh despite the familiarity which renders each expression of it so deeply significant. No book can transmit acquaintance with such a ‘whole history’ or whole system; yet i write in the hope that some future reader may be able to recreate or resurrect it.

Creation refers to the reality of Firstness.
Experience refers to the reality of Secondness.
Resurrection, or salvation, refers to the reality of Thirdness.

We are in the habit of attributing experience to other humans, to a lesser degree to other primates, and so on to other life forms in proportion to their similarity to us, and perhaps their complexity. We don't generally attribute experience to simple nonliving entities. But other than habit, there is no good reason why we shouldn't. When David Bohm (for instance) writes that a particle such as an electron ‘experiences the quantum potential’ (2003, 186), does he only mean that the particle's path is guided by the ‘quantum potential,’ or does he imply that the particle ‘feels’ something? Coming from Bohm, this implication would make more than the usual sense, because he attributes great internal complexity to particles. But even if we see them as simple, how could we know that they don't ‘feel’ something? How do we ‘know’ that other humans experience what happens to them? If we can't answer that question, we should admit that the question of whether other entities have experience is undecidable.

For you, someone else's experience is neither opaque nor transparent.

The untested theory is as lame as the unpracticed precept.

Experience and scientific understanding are like two legs without which we cannot walk.
— Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991, 14)

A special science such as biology or physics involves both theory and experiment, but often there is a division of labor between theorists and experimenters. A parallel division of labor seems to exist in many religions, between theologians and mystics – the former focus on explanation, the latter on direct experience. However, the two are complementary:

It is upon our experience of the world that all our logical operations concerned with significance must be based …
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 383)

Peirce's semiotics grew out of his logic of relatives (or of relations):

In reality, every fact is a relation. Thus, that an object is blue consists of the peculiar regular action of that object on human eyes. This is what should be understood by the ‘relativity of knowledge.’
— CP 3.416 (1892)

The great difference between the logic of relatives and ordinary logic is that the former regards the form of relation in all its generality and in its different possible species while the latter is tied down to the matter of the single special relation of similarity. The result is that every doctrine and conception of logic is wonderfully generalized, enriched, beautified, and completed in the logic of relatives.
Thus, the ordinary logic has a great deal to say about genera and species, or in our nineteenth century dialect, about classes. Now, a class is a set of objects comprising all that stand to one another in a special relation of similarity. But where ordinary logic talks of classes the logic of relatives talks of systems. A system is a set of objects comprising all that stand to one another in a group of connected relations. Induction according to ordinary logic rises from the contemplation of a sample of a class to that of the whole class; but according to the logic of relatives it rises from the contemplation of a fragment of a system to the envisagement of the complete system.
— CP 4.5 (1898)

The scientist tries his theory against the facts. The prophets test themselves against one another in ‘the battlefield of spiritual encounter, where the Buddhas gather’ (Hakuin (Cleary 2002, 81)).

Reading is recognition of experience as symbolized by the text in its context; meaning is experiencing prompted by the text. The recognition can always become more fine-grained (subtle, articulate, ..... ) as the reading proceeds, because experiencing is never complete as long as it lives. Habits on the other hand must simplify (reducing or eliminating subtleties) in order to actualize guidance.

The text is the instrument; the body is the player; meaning is the music.

Wisdom does not accumulate; it flows in continuous current through any open channel. However, the effects of the flow can accumulate (like sediment) as instructions, constructions, obstructions, records and habits. Of course the main effect of the flow is the channel itself. ‘The stream of water that wears a bed for itself is forming a habit’ (Peirce, EP2:418).

When the reading of a text bestows a feeling of insight into the deeper process of living, i call that text a scripture. – Only a feeling? What about real insight? – Only practice guided by the insight, and reflection on that practice, will decide whether the insight is real; but practice does not happen without feeling.

A scripture is a text that triggers the guidance system to restructure itself. The guidance emerging can only be evaluated recursively.

The range of experience expressed in a genuine scripture is always greater than any number of readings will reveal.

Can you act on scripture without understanding it? This would be like claiming to understand scripture without reading it. Reading it without understanding will not furnish guidance, and how can you know that your understanding is right? (Perhaps you feel you know because you simply can't imagine any other understandings.)

A reading or ‘recital’ of scripture is a performance; an actual interpretation of it is a more extended kind of performance. And the more compressed and seedlike the scripture, the more the performer has to improvise in the realization of its interpretant. However much faith we invest in the text, the true guide in the end is trial and error, experiment – as in science.

Crease points out that experiments have the character of ‘performances’. What enters into a performance is more than the script or score. It includes a whole background of intuitive practices. All sorts of trials and errors, hunches and wildly derived ideas enter into the design of experiments. In a laboratory many improvised moves occur. One may employ procedures that lack theory for years, as well as theory that lacks procedures.
— Gendlin (1997)

Dewey (1929) argued that an intelligent ethical (guidance) system treats every course of action as an experiment, i.e. considers every principle modifiable by experience.

Living systems are self-organizing; reasoning systems are self-critical. Both are texts which revise themselves in dialogue with context.

Whole-body real-time enactive reading – as opposed to merely sliding one's eye over the words, or mouthing them – requires intense concentration and effort (although it feels more like play than work when you're in the flow of it). It includes ‘direct reference’ to experience (Gendlin) and the anticipatory response that points toward further development or specification of meaning. To sustain this kind of performance, the reader needs to be challenged at every point, or at every turn of the page. Dogen is a master at providing this challenge, often doing so directly, in the second person. The fragments of Heraclitus and the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas are other examples.

Like Pagels (2003 – see Chapter 6), Stephen Patterson in 5G (42) recognizes that ‘the rough treatment Thomas receives in John 20:24-29’ may represent ‘a direct attack on the Gospel of Thomas and the particular form of Christianity associated with it.’ Yet even in the story as John tells it, the ‘doubting Thomas’ stands up for experience, resisting the temptation to ‘believe’ as motivated by wishful thinking or peer pressure. He does seem more interested in the physiology of the risen Christ than his behavior, but except for that, his ‘doubting’ has more of wisdom than weakness about it. It is comparable to Hamlet's plan (‘The Mouse-trap’) for testing the claims of his father's ghost, even though he is predisposed to believe what the ghost has told him. Hamlet is acutely aware that self- or spirit-deception is a real possibility, especially because of own traits and his deep-rooted prejudice against his uncle. So he looks for corroboration from the very person most unlikely to give it: his uncle himself, whose conscience will speak through observable behavior:

I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick. If a do blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil; and the devil hath power
T' assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds
More relative than this. The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.
— Hamlet, II.ii.590-601

Note here the usage of the word ‘relative’, suggesting both ‘relational’ and ‘relevant’. His ‘relative grounds’ amount to what a lawyer might call a ‘material witness’. Later on, he also calls upon another reliable witness (Horatio) to confirm his own observations. His method is sound enough, devious as it may be, and proves successful (though he indulges in manic glee at his own success and thus loses the advantage of it). Contrast all this with the words put into the mouth of Jesus at John 20:29, which exalt blind and ‘absolute’ faith over all ‘relative’ grounds for belief: ‘blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.’

‘Absolute’ beliefs and ‘literal’ readings are perversions of faith; the reading grounded in experience is the relative, relevant, material, pragmatic, integral reading: the one that integrates body, path and situation.

One of the enlightening night goddesses in the Gandhavyuha Sutra tells of a ‘knowledge’ beyond the cognitive bubble:

Because the sphere of knowledge of enlightening beings is utterly pure in its essential nature, it is outside the net of all conceptions, it is beyond the mountains of all obstructions. It appears in the mind and sheds light on beings who can be guided, according to their mentalities, when the time is ripe for their development.
— Cleary (1984, 1372)

The difference between experiencing and experience is parallel to the difference between the guidance system and the current guiding process which incorporates its prior structure in the act of restructuring. John Dewey's Experience and Nature presents the same difference in terms of consciousness and mind:

While on the psycho-physical level, consciousness denotes the totality of actualized immediate qualitative differences, or ‘feelings,’ it denotes, upon the plane of mind, actualized apprehensions of meanings, that is, ideas. There is thus an obvious difference between mind and consciousness; meaning and an idea. Mind denotes the whole system of meanings as they are embodied in the workings of organic life; consciousness in a being with language denotes awareness or perception of meanings; it is the perception of actual events, whether past, contemporary or future, in their meanings, the having of actual ideals. The greater part of mind is only implicit in any conscious act or state; the field of mind – of operative meanings – is enormously wider than that of consciousness. Mind is contextual and persistent; consciousness is focal and transitive. Mind is, so to speak, structural, substantial, a constant background and foreground; perceptive consciousness is process, a series of perceptive consciousness is process, a series of heres and nows. Mind is a constant luminosity; consciousness intermittent, a series of flashes of varying intensities. Consciousness is, as it were, the occasional interception of messages continually transmitted, as a mechanical receiving device selects a few of the vibrations with which the air is filled and renders them audible.
— Dewey (1929, 247)

Like all metaphors, that last one can either guide or misguide. It ignores the autopoietic nature of bodymind – as if the transmitter were external to the receiver. But it captures the ‘flashing’ sense of experiencing as time itself, or ‘being-time’ as Dogen (in translation) calls it. But then that metaphor in turn can slide into the ‘flashlight’ or ‘searchlight’ image of consciousness, which is misleading in another way, as Dewey explains (1929, 251) after offering a ‘formal definition of consciousness in relation to mind and meanings’:

Consciousness, an idea, is that phase of a system of meanings which at a given time is undergoing re-direction, transitive transformation. The current idealistic conception of consciousness as a power which modifies events, is an inverted statement of this fact. To treat consciousness as a power accomplishing the change, is but another instance of the common philosophic fallacy of converting an eventual function into an antecedent force or cause. Consciousness is the meaning of events in course of remaking; its ‘cause’ is only the fact that this is one of the ways in which nature goes on. In a proximate sense of causality, namely as place in a series history, its causation is the need and demand for filling out what is indeterminate.
There is a counterpart realist doctrine, according to which consciousness is like the eye running over a field of ready-make objects, or a light which illuminates now this and now that portion of a given field. These analogies ignore the indeterminateness of meaning when there is awareness; they fail to consider a basic consideration, namely, that while there exists an antecedent stock of meanings, these are just the ones which we take for granted and use: the ones of which we are not and do not need to be conscious.

Thus the flashlight metaphor ‘postulates, even though only implicitly, a preestablished harmony of the knower and things known, passing over the fact that such harmony is always an attained outcome of prior inferences and investigations’ (1929, 252). That ‘attained outcome’ is the structure of mind.

It is impossible to tell what immediate consciousness is – not because there is some mystery in or behind it, but for the same reason that we cannot tell just what sweet or red immediately is: it is something had, not communicated and known. But words, as means of directing action, may evoke a situation in which the thing in question is had in some particularly illuminating way.
— Dewey (1929, 250)

The distinction between ‘something had’ and something ‘communicated and known’ has been expressed as the difference between apprehension and comprehension respectively.

In the beginning (Genesis 1), God creates the world by uttering it: creation is a speech act. In Genesis 2 Adam, being created in the image of God, gives all creatures their true names (see Eco 1998, ‘Languages in Paradise’). The act of naming is the act of discovery, of revelation. ‘The denomination of objects does not follow upon recognition: it is itself recognition’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 206). A 1934 essay by Edward Sapir explains this in terms of a ‘psychological characteristic of language’:

while it may be looked upon as a symbolic system which reports or refers to or otherwise substitutes for direct experience, it does not as a matter of actual behavior stand apart from or run parallel to direct experience but completely interpenetrates with it. This is indicated by the widespread feeling, particularly among primitive people, of that virtual identity or close correspondence of word and thing which leads to the magic of spells. On our own level it is generally difficult to make a complete divorce between objective reality and our linguistic symbols of reference to it; and things, qualities, and events are on the whole felt to be what they are called.
— Sapir (1949, 8-9)

The indexical function of a name, especially a proper name – and even more especially a divine name – resists being swallowed up its symbolic function, because that function weakens the direct apprehension of the object (i.e. the experience) so named. When apprehension is diluted by comprehension, the name loses its ‘magic’ for the community which shares that apprehension; so they are naturally apprehensive about sharing the word with outsiders! (See James N. Baker, ‘The Presence of the Name: Reading Scripture in an Indonesian Village’, in Boyarin 1993.) This psychological tendency is probably at work in every esoteric tradition, as well as in the phenomenon of ‘taboo’.

The word ‘stochastic’ comes from a Greek verb meaning to aim or shoot at or guess. – But curiously, in the current jargon of statistics, the word refers explicitly to the element of randomness in a process, the idea of ‘aiming’ having dropped out entirely; thus a stochastic process is contrasted with a deterministic one. You could say that the final-cause concept has dropped out, as it has in most scientific discourse in modern times. The broader usage associated with guesswork implies both uncertainty and direction, or selection. For Bateson, the element of uncertainty does imply some contribution from randomness, just as Peirce's usage of experience (see above) implies ‘brute actuality’, i.e. the crossing or collision of the subject's imagination with something external to it; for the random element is relative to the control exercised by the subject's mind or will. The collision of the two is also their collusion in a single recursive ‘stochastic’ process.

The ‘brute actuality’ of ‘experience’ is the element of otherness in it which makes it into an ‘it’. My experience of you does not appear from within my relation with you; or as Martin Buber says in I and Thou,

The human being to whom I say You I do not experience. But I stand in relation to him, in the sacred basic word. Only when I step out of this do I experience him again. Experience is remoteness from You.
— Martin Buber (1970, 59-60)

Experience as an orderly set of deposits in the memory bank is what Buber called the It-world. The You-world, on the other hand, ‘does not hang together in space and time.’

The individual You must become an It when the event of relation has run its course.

The individual It can become a You by entering into the event of relation.
— Buber (1970, 84)

It was discovered long ago that direct electrical stimulation of a specific spot in the brain can evoke a vivid experience – for instance, stimulation of the temporal lobe can evoke visual hallucinations. You might guess that ‘experiences’ can thus be verifiably mapped to brain locations; but further investigation has shown that this is not the case. A later stimulus at the same spot often does not trigger the same experience, and

a given experience can first be evoked electrically, and then recur later as a spontaneous hallucination, even after the stimulation site which had first yielded it from the medial temporal lobe had already been surgically removed. This observation tells us that an ‘experience’ is widely distributed. How, then does the stimulation act? It seems to evoke the experience by tapping into its large network at one of several potential sites, and by doing so at one particularly responsive moment. Even then, each experience has been undergoing a substantial editing. Consider this singular fact: only one previous experience has been selected to take place at any one moment, whereas the electrical stimulus must have been passing across the links of many other potential memory circuits.
— Austin (1998, 384)

Tomasello (1999) begins his examination of The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition with a quotation from Peirce: ‘all the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals’ (EP1:369). Although it is always the first person speaking, yet a whole history speaks through that voice. One example: precursors of Tomasello's central ideas can be found in Merleau-Ponty (1964), ‘The Child's Relations with Others’. – Yet Tomasello does not cite Merleau-Ponty; nor is there any reason why he should. The deeper an idea, the more primary and pervasive it is, the less we are able to locate its origin.

People who attack the beliefs of others can be forgiven, if they do it in the presence of those others rather than behind their backs, for the attack may lead to a genuine exchange if each side is actively listening for experience. But anyone who cannot be trusted to speak from experience is thereby cast out from the realm of dialog.

Jesus said, ‘Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.’
— Thomas 44 (Lambdin)

Learning lives in the dynamic tention between the simplifying, classifying, framing work of memory and the perturbations of reality; ‘it is on the basis of this happily unstable equilibrium that our understanding proceeds’ (Eco 1997, 252).

The more stable you are, the more ‘set in your ways’, the less able you are to learn from new experiences; but the more open you are to new experience, the more it will destabilize you. In the study of neural networks this is called the stability-plasticity dilemma:

If new input is fully integrated, as the result of strong plasticity, then the representation of past experience must be degraded, producing catastrophic instability. Conversely, the network's developmental context (its stable connectional inertia) frames the recognition of each new input pattern, and the opportunity for plasticity that remains. Therefore, to the extent that the continuity of the self is maintained, new experiences can only be understood as they are organized and framed by the templates of past experience.
— Harkness and Tucker (in Lewis and Granic 2000, 198)

The greater the learning opportunity, the more it comes on like ‘the end of the world’.

Guidance systems are not propositional systems; ‘Truth’ in a guidance system is none other than its continuing viability. Batson (Katz 2000, 209) says ‘Any time a plausible alternative explanation can be made for data thought to support some hypothesis, the validity of that hypothesis is cast in doubt.’ But this can be true only if validity is exclusive by nature, which is not the case with viability: it is unaffected by the possibility of alternatives. If it works, it works. Theories do need to be simple and portable across situations, so they shouldn't be multiplied needlessly (Ockham's razor), but to waste time eliminating all the plausible alternatives would defeat the purpose of portability (Peirce's ‘economy of research’).

Neither science nor evolution progresses in the sense that we approach omniscience or a ‘final model’, but only in the sense that we learn from our mistakes. We progress only in the sense that we make new mistakes, which we later recognize as such when we learn from them. This – and not any measurable decrease of distance between where we are and some final destination – defines the direction in which we are heading.

Our actions, on the other hand, always have consequences beyond our intentions. This is why, when our acts do have the consequences we intend (or rather the results are close enough to be interesting), we feel the joy of ‘optimal experience’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). Thus learning and evolving are possible for us – but not for an omnipotent and omniscient God, whose acts cannot have unintended consequences. (Does God have experience??)

If we could know God's intentions, or God's will, then our actions could not make a difference – could not be informative – and we would be as gods, unable to learn.

Innocence is another word for the experience before experience, before meaning arrived to subdue and relegate it to the background. Annie Dillard (1974) writes of the ‘newly sighted’, people given a visual world by removal of cataracts after years or lifetimes of blindness: some refused the gift of sight and space because it was too disturbing. Likewise, mind-blind autistics may reject whatever interferes with their familiar routines, preferring to remain in oblivion unless dragged out of it by the concerted efforts of others (Baron-Cohen 1995, Park 2001).

Our whole experience of the external world arrives by way of perturbations, often accompanied by a sense of loss. As Dillard says, ‘Form is condemned to an eternal danse macabre with meaning’ (1974, 35). ‘The fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window – silver and green and shape-shifting blue – is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn’ (36). They are mute because they turned out to be what the fluttering patch had to say, and once this has been heard, the magic is gone. Innocence is condemned, we are driven out of the mythical Garden, when we feel this sense of loss. Yet the emergence of meaning is hardly less amazing, when we step back from that. And those condemned to live in a world of pure ‘magic’ undiluted by memory – like Zasetsky in Luria (1972), or amnesics like Clive in Restak (1998, 29-31) – feel an even greater sense of loss, feel as if they are dead or asleep.

In their introduction to Dogen's Eihei Shingi (the collection of his writings about the organization and standard practices in a Buddhist monastery), Leighton and Okumura explain that the practice of zazen ‘promotes active attentiveness to our present life experience just as it is.’ Zen monastic life is ‘directed at helping practitioners together to embody and actualize this awareness in every aspect of ordinary life’ (Leighton and Okumura 1996, 16). And of course the point is to spread this awareness beyond the monastery – ultimately, to save all sentient beings from delusion.

Phenomenology (and philosophy), as Peirce described it, begins with this same ‘attentiveness to our present life experience’, but then proceeds to a description or analysis of it, with the goal of articulating what is essential to it, quite apart from anything peculiar to any individual subject of that experience. In other words, it generalizes from present experience to Experience. The formulations arrived at in this way furnish ‘fundamental principles’ to philosophy and science (EP 2:258) in their quest for ultimate truth.

The artist recognizes the best verbal or visual expression of his experience. She may also believe that this experience is generically human, primal or universal. But there is no way to check conclusively whether the reader of the sign has recognized that experience as its object – let alone whether the next reader will come up with the proper interpretant.

The philosophical artist proposes a new system of connections between language and experience. It is up to the reader to actually make those connections, or rather to try whatever connections suggest themselves and see whether they make more or less sense of the system as a whole. Only then can the reader investigate whether the meaning which thus emerges from her reading makes more or less sense of the experiential universe – that is, whether the philosophical argument is valid and its conclusions true.

Ernst Cassirer traced back to Aristotle the idea that experience and knowledge have biological roots:

He attempts to explain the ideal world, the world of knowledge, in terms of life. In both realms, according to Aristotle, we find the same unbroken continuity. In nature as well as in human knowledge the higher forms develop from the lower forms. Sense perception, memory, experience, imagination, and reason are all linked together by a common bond; they are merely different stages and different expressions of one and the same fundamental activity, which attains its highest perfection in man, but which in a way is shared by the animals and all the forms of organic life.
— Cassirer (1944, 2-3)

Still, it is only beginning to ‘sink in’ that the human body is the subject of human experience. There has been as much resistance to this revelation as there was to Darwin's revelation that the human animal shares origin and ancestry with the other life forms of Earth. The rear-guard actions against recognition of the body as subject have been more subtle and subdued than those against evolution, but are still being fought on many fronts, e.g. the ‘hard problem’ in philosophy of mind.

Hard-problem philosophers appear to be asking neuroscience to tell them how to introspect (where to look within) in order to catch consciousness in the act, to confirm that it works in the manner specified; then they complain that no model offered so far by science fulfills this request. As Mark Turner says: ‘We expect our phenomenology to indicate the nature of neurobiology. But it does not’ (Turner 1996, 110, italics in original). Nor is there any reason why it should, except the rather arrogant insistence that all mental processes should be accessible to conscious attention. This in itself represents a failure of imagination; for once you look into neurological processes, you see the brain as an object made of millions of smaller objects interacting in complex ways, and in that frame of mind, it takes imagination to see that this object is simultaneously a subject with a world of its own. It takes as much imagination as it does to see the earth as a planet spinning and circling the sun – to see the ‘sunrise’ as an effect of the earth's rotation.

The controversy among philosophers over the connection between consciousness and biology is essentially a replay of the battles in early Christianity over the nature of resurrection (Pagels 1979). Even the language (i.e. the basic metaphor) is the same. A gnostic text says ‘Why do you not examine your own self, and see that you have arisen?’ If resurrection is not an experience, it's a dogma, a concept without percept, which may have political implications but not immediate organic meaning. It's the same with the emergence of consciousness from the body. Sheets-Johnstone (JCS 5.3, 260) quotes Nagel saying ‘We are still unable to form a conception of how consciousness arises from matter.’ But as she points out, ‘consciousness does not arise in matter; it arises in organic forms, forms that are animate.’

The abstraction matter here plays the role played by the grave, or the corpse, in early Christian discourse. The basic meaning of matter is ‘what something is made of’; if we're talking about the brain (as Nagel was), it's made of neurons and other cells; the cells are made of various complex molecules organized into structures; the molecules are made of atoms; the atoms are made of subatomic particles. To lump all these structural levels together as ‘matter’ is to deliberately ignore what makes the organism alive (and therefore capable of consciousness). Like Nagel, those who doubt the experience of ‘resurrection’ pretend that the body is dead, which entails that Jesus rising from the dead, or raising others, becomes a miracle, or ‘merely’ a metaphor.