Experience is a physical experience before being a mental experience. Understand this and all else falls into place. What we have is an embodied experience, and not an embodied mind, for there is no mind as an object as such, but only a mind as an entity as a series of experiences of a body, an object.
Tag: embodiment
-
I know reality through sense experiences and rationalization of sense and mental experiences. Reality is of things, space, and time. Rationality is of abstract entities: non-things, non-space, and non-time. Yet rationality is a reality-based process. Experience is therefore both sense and mental.
-
Referent is what goes on in the physical world. Concept is what goes on in the head. Symbol is what goes on in language. Both concept and symbol go on in physical world as processes.
-
I argue that the external experience is prime over the internal one.
While I never have full access to the external world (I am always learning something more about it) what I have is enough information and knowledge to navigate it.
The interplay of beings navigating the world with indirect and incomplete perception is the richness and challenge of living in harmony.
If any internal subjective world is taken to be prime we have conflict, because we are not all trying to navigate the external world in a cooperative manner.
Even then we may not be successful but we try to make the world a better place for all that share the space, the external world.
It is the external world that we share, not the internal one. Even so, the internal world (as I see it) is part of the external world by virtue of being housed (located) in the body with a brain. This we namely call the mind. So it is not wrong to say we share the internal worlds as well, but only as external world objects or entities.
-
Experience begins with the experience of objects. But such a first experience does not include the awareness of subject (the observer), only the awareness of objects (the observed).
It is only after the first experience that the observer becomes aware as an observer to begin to observe themselves reflexively, to become the observed subject.
It is at this point that duality falls away and one must decide is reality mind or matter.
-
Interesting and insightful that Descartes leaves material as the last to be understood in his meditations.
Indeed, there is nothing a priori about experience. We have to go through it (experience it) to reach a conclusion about what thinking is or what does thinking. For Descartes he decided by the second meditation that it was the mind. I also had thought it was the mind. Jeffrey Kaplan thought we have inherited this belief from Descartes and have continued to run with it as common sense. But common sense it is not.
Some time later I have come to believe this is wrong, that I am not a mind, but a body with mind processes (thinking). The thinking thing is not the mind but the body.
-
The body causes the mind.
Without the body there is no underlying mind action. The process of thinking is like any bodily process such as walking, sitting, sleeping.
-
There are two observations that inform us about the nature of reality.
One is that mind is always experienced within a body, an object of physical reality. If mind is experienced at any time outside of a body then mind can be said to be undoubtedly as another kind of substance. But since mind is always experienced within a body, mind must rely upon the body for it to be somehow emergent.
The other is that matter (objects) are always experienced together with space and time. Matter experienced without space and time would not be matter but something other than object.
-
My mind is tethered to the body. I have never had experienced my mind apart from my body. Not have observed minds apart from bodies. The only conclusion I can draw is that all that exists is material, and that I am my body.
-
The experience of reality is, first and foremost, of objects, space, and time. The experience of the mind or consciousness is always an embodied experience. The internal experience is always within a body within the external world, never outside or apart from it.
theoria 