A Moment Of Personal Experience

To begin, I would like you, the reader, to look around. Notice what you notice. Sunlight on the wall perhaps? The comfort of your chair? Ambient noise? Spend a moment with each object then look around again. Spend another moment then look again.

These impressions were moments of simple experience. What I write should be as relevant in quiet moments of simple reflection and furious moments of personal torment.

Now imagine looking over a sandy beach. Each time you notice an object, you grab a hand of proverbial sand. Each moment is a different handful of sand.

There is an infinite amount of sand on any sandy beach we might imagine. You perceive by the handful even if you can imagine infinity. There is an infinite number of possible impressions on your senses, yet only a handful have significance at any moment.

When we perceive something, we do not sense it first. Rather, we assign meaning to one of an infinite number of possible sensations. When we grab a handful, we assign meaning. We find an understanding, we comprehend, we apprehend. We tell a story of its significance. A very important question: How do we find the best meaning?

Why start with this thought exercise? To show it is a fallacy to suggest that experience starts with data. We are beset by an infinity of sensory data. Data are inert.

If we want to understand the data fallacy, then we ask, What gives data meaning?

If you have a strong belief in spirit, soul or some animating force, you believe your ghost within assigns meaning. The handful of sand we grab is a handful of sand we chose to grab. But the choice was already made, and our only purpose is to understand it, or so the ghost story goes.

The maker of this choice is the subject of most religion. The maker of this choice understands the essences of things and animals and peoples. Our ghost understands other ghosts.

These understandings are intuitive, innate, part of our nature, and found at the very root of our DNA. If our ghosts arise from our internal biology, what gives data meaning?

Think of an apple falling. Watch it fall. Don’t think of gravity... Or Newton... Or gravity... Thing only of the falling apple. Watch it rotate. Notice the autumn colors blur as you track its acceleration. When it hits the ground, what sound does it make? Does it thud or splat?

Newton’s law of universal gravitation details a context to understand the apple’s fall specifically and nature comprehensively. But if we focus on the apple’s fall, we see gravity as a ghostly force which we project into this moment to explain it.

Beach fantasies show it’s a fallacy to suggest our process of thought starts with data. A falling apple shows it is a fallacy to suggest it starts with context. Cognition - the process of thought - starts with neither data nor context.

It starts with behavior. Reality ‘behaves.’ Biology abstracts behavior into thought. Then we behave.

Biology expresses meaning as behavior. Behavior begets behavior. Experience starts and ends with behavior. In between, we process.

Comments

[Gianna]

I've missed you...good to see you back with another delightful post to think about...hope you'll be back on twitter too!

[Cole Bitting]

Thanks for the kind words, Gianna. I am back around :)