The Private Dimensions of our Experiencing 


And speaking of talking about it, here is a reflection on consciousness as the center of the universe. 

I have a private world, and I assume that you do, too. I'm with Descartes here: Cogito, ergo sum. The most immediate proof that anything exists, our own thinking, is essentially a private experience.

Here come the hordes of logical empiricists to tell me that private worlds don't exist and that the only worthwhile knowledge is objective, scientific knowledge that can be "verified" by anyone with the right tools and training. I am treating these logical empiricists like willful, unruly children with a blind spot. You know: I love you, you are a good person, but you have missed the point. So if you don't want to come over here and see my point of view, fine. But you may be throwing several babies out with the only slightly murky bath water.

Now, to the point. It turns out that I can TELL you about some of my private experience. Because of natural language, every baby learns to "communicate." Without a language, however, we could not share very much of our private experience. Just think of your cat or dog. Now I do not question that cats and dogs communicate with their masters and with each other. It's just that they don't share a whole heck of a lot, except, like, pick me up, feed me, look here, etc.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that communication with human language is just some transparently effective process. What we mean with a given sentence at a given place and time is ALWAYS a matter of negotiation. Most of the time, we only think we understand, and further dialog will usually point out this fact: understanding actually broke down at some point or level.

Now let me return to the main point of this essay/blog, which is the essential privacy of our experience. I would assert this: YOU can NEVER experience MY consciousness, nor I YOURS. My consciousness is the MEANING I am giving to what I sense. It is a unique construct, built over a lifetime of unique experience, likewise, yours.

Now, perhaps we can INFER, or POSIT, the claim that for very limited domains of "shared" experience (say we are both stamp collectors or both prostitutes or both auto mechanics), our perceptual apparatus, our nervous systems, and the stuff we are talking about are similar enough that it is very likely that we hold a common meaning. However, the farther we get away from limited domans, or the farther we get away from sharing cultural and personal presuppositions, the less likely we are to have anything even akin to a common meaning.

I believe that the meaningfulness of a moment's experience (i.e. my consciousness), namely, what I, Jim Andris MAKE of an event, is almost always mostly private. Knowing more and more about me may help you to reconstruct what I MAKE of an event, but ONLY IF you choose to share most of my assumptions. That seems definitely not to be the case for human beings. There is a whole range of plausible but diverging assumptions across the board of human experience, and almost no two people share them all. So no matter how hard I try, what I MAKE of things at a given point in time is always the center of the universe in my world. It is essentially private, and can't be any other way.

I have made the point that communication is always negotiation. We are always trying to find out more about each other in an effort to understand, and we always stop short of complete understanding, because not to do so would be exhausting and a real waste of time. We stop because we think we know what we mean and we decide to live with the other person's reconstruction of our meaning.

There is a poignant conclusion to this essay. As it turns out, we live in a world where we simply cannot share the most important quality of our existence—our consciousness. But wait a minute! Sharing consciousness. What if we could do that directly, without the intervention of spoken or written language? Would that be, could that be—an answered prayer?

And with that thought-provoking thought, I will just say . . . more to come . . . 

Posted: Fri - March 31, 2006 at 11:10 AM          

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