Ah my haphazard filing

One of the perils of blogging is that you get into the bad habit of writing straight into the publication software (really that's all its designed for) and thus not saving a separate archive. Case in point, part three of something. Parts one and two? Who knows. Total mystery. From the looks of it? No great loss.

Parsing the layers of experience

Part Three in a Series

Where to begin. In the all-too-likely event that exactly what I’m about is unclear, what I’m about, here and now, is throwing down a few thoughts on the basis of identifying truth. My contention is that our identification of truth as a society is based almost entirely on rhetoric: that is, on the skill of using language to communicate or to persuade others to agree with one’s point of view. I’m not saying that rhetoric is useless or wrong. Just that it has two purposes: to communicate effectively (that is, to give another an approximation of your own thoughts, to accurately transmit an understanding of an abstract) and to persuade. These two purposes can operate independently and neither has anything to do with what is being communicated being true.

I’ll predicate for the moment that I’m operating on the belief that there is such a thing as truth, that it is not purely subjective, and that it can be discovered and communicated. I’m not altogether certain that I believe these assertions are, for want of a better word, true.

What I really want to talk about here distinguishing different layers of personal experience. Without necessarily claiming the distinctions are real in any but a conceptual sense I’m going to define three layers of experience, and think about how they differ. I think there is validity to the separation I suggest, but in reality I don’t think any component of experience can be separated from any other – our experience is a whole, continuous and instantaneous.

The first level of experience is that if immediate experience. There is a continuous procession of electrochemical events in our bodies caused by what happens to our skin, our eyes, our inner ears, our tongues, and our noses. Tens of thousands of individual receptors in the skin of one hand alone. Tens of thousands of hairs in the cochlea to absorb the tiny vibrations of sound. Ten thousand taste buds, forty million olfactory receptors, figuring out the chemistry of our environment in ways we don’t really understand very well at all. One hundred fifty million receptor cells in the retina.

One hundred billion neurons in the brain.

Whatever that experience is, it is. It is instantaneous, continuous, and ineffable. A moment of sensation cannot be stopped or retained. We are always in the flow.

For the most part I think we dwell in the second layer of experience. This is the narrative we construct around our continuous experience based on learned assumptions and guesswork. Example: my visual sensorium at this moment is compose almost entirely of a computer screen. A bit of periphery shows my hands at a keyboard, a couple of walls. In my mind, however, I have a map of my immediate surroundings based entirely on memory and an assumption of continuity. I have a few sensory perceptions, primarily auditory, to support this map. But for the most part it is purely based on the memory of past assumptions. This little environment is enclosed in a larger map of a particular region of the continent which is based much less on experience and much more on what others have told me. I have even less direct experience, even remembered, of the continent as a whole. I have even less experience of the planet as a whole. I’ve left this continent exactly three times. Most of the world exists, for me, purely as the memory of language and the memory of two-dimensional visual representations. I have a story in my mind about where I am and why. About where I might go and what might happen if I did so. About what I’m doing and why. About what the sensory perceptions I’m experiencing mean.

Most of the time we do not question this narrative. I think we seldom bother to even recognize that this narrative is a step of abstraction below sensory perception and that it is by necessity merely an approximation, as our experience is not in fact composed of words, while the elements of the narrative are. For much of my adolescence and young adulthood I kept a journal almost daily. One of the unexpected discoveries I made was that there were frequently profound differences in how I remembered things versus how I wrote them down at the time. Sometimes the order of events were different: often the remembered order made more narrative sense. Often what is emphasized in my memory has little or no presence in the journal archive.

I doubt we could survive without the narrative. Those who lose their ability to retain memories, for example, are destined to lives in institutions, Memento notwithstanding. But being so immersed in the narrative so as to not even see it is there, the state I think most of us spend most of our time in, may be an ultimately deeper error.

For myself, I think I spend more time than most, and far too much time period, dwelling in the third layer of experience. This is the layer of cognitive analysis of the second layer, the narrative. The narrative is about the immediate explanation, the how of the here and now. Analysis examines the why of the how, if you will. It is a world composed entirely of language and abstraction (the hybrid world of the narrative still has touchstones with immediate and remembered sensory experience). The realm of rhetoric, of attempting to proselytize a particular view of what is true, is carried out almost entirely at this layer.

Some examples, complications, and considerations next. For the curious, yes I am making this up as I go along and no, I don’t really know what I’m doing.


this is what is up with this.