I have previously remarked on the merits of putting spontaneous
thoughts, or epiphanies, into written word. Here I attempt, briefly, to
describe and explain one such revelation; specifically, a thought on the
nature of experience.
It is without doubt that many before me
have expounded and many more after me will expound a theory of
experience. This may well have been and be a broader philosophical endeavour or a
narrower psychological one. What I have come to believe is more in line
with a transcendent perspective. Concisely, it is this: though what we
call experience can (quite cogently) be defined in psycho-physical
terms—i.e., with the help of cognitive neuroscience and like
disciplines—no amount of description of the nature of experience or its aetiology can ever be equatable to the experience of experience.
Perhaps
this at first sounds odd, but it is in fact curiously intuitive. An
example will serve well to elucidate this "non-equation": Take the idea
that experience (or consciousness) is the grand result of a high-functioning, highly evolutionarily developed, highly complex neurocortical
system, where the impressions of something called reality are realised,
in some unknown way, by interwoven psychophysiological processes. By all
accounts, a reasonable explanation, albeit one that is still
underdeveloped. Nevertheless, it says nothing of the experience of
experiencing: one may know all there is to know about the mind but
never, by this, know the intrinsic value of listening to Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" for the very first time.
I
now know that experiences are of the highest order; they are never to
be trivialised. Thus the revelation of my epiphany: how glorious it is
to have the quality of experience as part of our existence. All the more
so do the ambience of warm, golden autumn sunsets, the reveries of
cosmic explorations and the matchless pleasures inherent in love dwell in me in a
regard indescribable.
M.M. — Februarius MMX
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