Experience

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Experience (disambiguation).
Experience is the knowledge or mastery of an event or subject gained through
involvement in or exposure to it.[1] Terms in philosophy such as "empirical
knowledge" or "a posteriori knowledge" are used to refer to knowledge based on
experience. A person with considerable experience in a specific field can gain a
reputation as an expert. The concept of experience generally refers to know-how or
procedural knowledge, rather than propositional knowledge: on-the-job training
rather than book-learning.

The interrogation of experience has a long term tradition in continental

philosophy. Experience plays an important role in the philosophy of Soren
Kierkegaard. The German term Erfahrung, often translated into English as
"experience", has a slightly different implication, connoting the coherency of
life's experiences.

Certain religious traditions (such as Buddhism, Surat Shabd Yoga, mysticism and
Pentecostalism) and educational paradigms with, for example, the conditioning of
military recruit-training (also known as "boot camps"), stress the experiential
nature of human epistemology. This stands in contrast to alternatives: traditions
of dogma, logic or reasoning. Participants in activities such as tourism, extreme
sports and recreational drug-use also tend to stress the importance of experience.

The history of the word experience aligns it closely with the concept of
experiment.

Contents [hide]
1 Types of experience
1.1 Physical
1.2 Mental
1.3 Emotional
1.4 Spiritual
1.5 Religious
1.6 Social
1.7 Virtual and simulation
1.8 Subjective
2 Immediacy of experience
3 Changes through history
3.1 Alternatives to experience
3.2 Writing
4 See also
5 References
Types of experience[edit]
The word "experience" may refer, somewhat ambiguously, both to mentally unprocessed
immediately perceived events as well as to the purported wisdom gained in
subsequent reflection on those events or interpretation of them.

Some wisdom-experience accumulates over a period of time,[2] though one can also
experience (and gain general wisdom-experience from) a single specific momentary
event.

One may also differentiate between (for example) physical, mental, emotional,
spiritual, vicarious and virtual experience(s).

Physical[edit]
Main article: Physical property
Physical experience occurs whenever an object or environment changes.[3] In other
words, physical experiences relate to observables. They need not involve modal
properties nor mental experiences.

Mental[edit]
Main article: Mind
Mental experience involves the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as
combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will[citation needed] and
imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term can refer, by
implication, to a thought process. Mental experience and its relation to the
physical brain form an area of philosophical debate: some identity theorists
originally argued that the identity of brain and mental states held only for a few
sensations. Most theorists, however, generalized the view to cover all mental
experience.[4]

Mathematicians can exemplify cumulative mental experience in the approaches and

skills with which they work. Mathematical realism, like realism in general, holds
that mathematical entities exist independently of the human mind. Thus humans do
not invent mathematics, but rather discover and experience it, and any other
intelligent beings in the universe would presumably do the same. This point of view
regards only one sort of mathematics as discoverable; it sees triangles, right
angles, and curves, for example, as real entities, not just the creations of the
human mind. Some working mathematicians have espoused mathematical realism as they
see themselves experiencing naturally occurring objects. Examples include Paul
Erd�s and Kurt G�del. G�del believed in an objective mathematical reality that
could be perceived in a manner analogous to sense perception. Certain principles
(for example: for any two objects, there is a collection of objects consisting of
precisely those two objects) could be directly seen to be true, but some
conjectures, like the continuum hypothesis, might prove undecidable just on the
basis of such principles. G�del suggested that quasi-empirical methodology such as
experience could provide sufficient evidence to be able to reasonably assume such a
conjecture. With experience, there are distinctions depending on what sort of
existence one takes mathematical entities to have, and how we know about them.
[citation needed]

Emotional[edit]
Main article: Emotion
Humans can rationalize falling in (and out) of love as "emotional experience".
Societies which lack institutional arranged marriages can call on emotional
experience in individuals to influence mate-selection.[5] The concept of emotional
experience also appears in the notion of empathy.

Spiritual[edit]
Main article: Religious experience
Newberg and Newberg provide a view on spiritual experience.[6]

Religious[edit]
Main article: Religious experience
Mystics can describe their visions as "spiritual experiences". However, psychology
and neuropsychology[7] may explain the same experiences in terms of altered states
of consciousness, which may come about accidentally through (for example) very high
fever, infections such as meningitis, sleep deprivation, fasting, oxygen
deprivation, nitrogen narcosis (deep diving), psychosis, temporal-lobe epilepsy, or
a traumatic accident. People can likewise achieve such experiences more
deliberately through recognized mystical practices such as sensory deprivation or
mind-control techniques, hypnosis, meditation, prayer, or mystical disciplines such
as mantra meditation, yoga, Sufism, dream yoga, or surat shabda yoga. Some
practices encourage spiritual experiences through the ingestion of psychoactive
drugs such as alcohol and opiates, but more commonly with entheogenic plants and
substances such as cannabis, salvia divinorum, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, DXM,
ayahuasca, or datura. Another way to induce spiritual experience through an altered
state of consciousness involves psychoacoustics, binaural beats, or light-and-sound
stimulation.

Social[edit]
Main article: Socialization
Growing up and living within a society can foster the development and observation
of social experience.[8]

Social experience provides individuals with the skills and habits necessary for
participating within their own societies, as a society itself is formed[citation
needed] through a plurality of shared experiences forming norms, customs, values,
traditions, social roles, symbols and languages. Experience plays an important role
in experiential groups.[9]

Virtual and simulation[edit]

Main articles: Virtual reality and Simulation game
Using computer simulations can enable a person or groups of persons to have virtual
experiences in virtual reality.[10] Role-playing games treat "experience" (and its
acquisition) as an important, measurable, and valuable commodity. Many role-playing
video games, for instance, feature units of measurement used to quantify or assist
a player-character's progression through the game - called experience points or XP.

Subjective[edit]
Subjective experience can involve a state of individual subjectivity, perception on
which one builds one's own state of reality; a reality based on one�s interaction
with one's environment. The subjective experience depends on one�s individual
ability to process data, to store and internalize it. For example: our senses
collect data, which we then process according to biological programming (genetics),
neurological network-relationships and other variables such as relativity etc.,
[clarification needed] all of which affect our individual experience of any given
situation in such a way as to render it subjective.

Immediacy of experience[edit]
Someone able to recount an event they witnessed or took part in has "first hand
experience". First hand experience of the "you had to be there" variety can seem
especially valuable and privileged, but it often remains potentially subject to
errors in sense-perception and in personal interpretation.

Second-hand experience can offer richer resources: recorded and/or summarised from
first-hand observers or experiencers or from instruments, and potentially
expressing multiple points of view.

Third-hand experience, based on indirect and possibly unreliable rumour or hearsay,

can (even given reliable accounts) potentially stray perilously close to blind
honouring of authority.

Changes through history[edit]

Some post-modernists suggest that the nature of human experiencing (quite apart
from the details of the experienced surrounds) has undergone qualitative change
during transition from the pre-modern through the modern to the post-modern.[11]

Alternatives to experience[edit]
Immanuel Kant contrasted experience with reason:

"Nothing, indeed, can be more harmful or more unworthy of the philosopher, than the
vulgar appeal to so-called experience. Such experience would never have existed at
all, if at the proper time, those institutions had been established in accordance
with ideas."[12]
These views of Kant are mirrored in the research of ideasthesia, which demonstrates
that one can experience the world only if one has the appropriate concepts (i.e.,
the ideas) about the objects that are being experienced.

Writing[edit]
American author Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay entitled "Experience" (published
in 1844), in which he asks readers to disregard emotions that could alienate them
from the divine; it provides a somewhat pessimistic representation of the
transcendentalism associated with Emerson.

See also[edit]
Philosophy portal
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Experience
Look up experience in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Customer experience
Empiricism
Experience economy
Experiential education
Experiential marketing
Ideasthesia
Perception
Thrill
Wisdom#Confucianism: Reflection � Imitation � Experience
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Compare various contemporary definitions given in the OED (2nd edition,
1989): "[...] 3. The actual observation of facts or events, considered as a source
of knowledge.[...] 4. a. The fact of being consciously the subject of a state or
condition, or of being consciously affected by an event. [...] b. In religious use:
A state of mind or feeling forming part of the inner religious life; the mental
history (of a person) with regard to religious emotion. [...] 6. What has been
experienced; the events that have taken place within the knowledge of an
individual, a community, mankind at large, either during a particular period or
generally. [...] 7. a. Knowledge resulting from actual observation or from what one
has undergone. [...] 8. The state of having been occupied in any department of
study or practice, in affairs generally, or in the intercourse of life; the extent
to which, or the length of time during which, one has been so occupied; the
aptitudes, skill, judgement, etc. thereby acquired."
Jump up ^ Note for example Levitt, Heidi M. (1999). "The Development of Wisdom: An
Analysis of Tibetan Buddhist Experience". Journal of Humanistic Psychology. 39 (2):
86�105. doi:10.1177/0022167899392006. Retrieved 2010-01-21. Instead of significant
events, however, they spoke of gradual experiences, such as learning through
teachings day by day.
Jump up ^ Compare: Popper, Karl R.; Eccles, John C. (1977). The self and its brain.
Berlin: Springer International. p. 425. ISBN 3-540-08307-3. You would agree, I
think, that in our experience of the world everything comes to us through the
senses [...]
Jump up ^ Christensen, Scott M.; Turner, Dale R. (1993). Folk psychology and the
philosophy of mind. Routledge. p. xxi. ISBN 978-0-8058-0931-2. Retrieved 2009-12-
01. Some identity theorists originally argued that the identity of brain and mental
states held only for a few sensations. Most theorists, however, generalized the
view to cover all mental experience.
Jump up ^ Kim, Jungsik; Elaine Hatfield (2004). "Love types and subjective well-
being: a cross-cultural study" (PDF). Social Behavior and Personality. Society for
Personality Research. 32 (2): 173�182. doi:10.2224/sbp.2004.32.2.173. Archived from
the original (PDF) on 2011-07-10. Retrieved 2009-12-01. Evolutionary theory
theorizes that love is just one of the emotional experiences which have been
selected during the evolution process since it has helped humans find mates for
reproduction [...]
Jump up ^ Newberg, Andrew B.; Newberg, Stephanie K. (2005), "The Neuropsychology of
Religious and Spiritual Experience", in Paloutzian, Raymond F.; Park, Crystal L.,
Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality, New York: Guilford Press,
pp. 199�215, ISBN 978-1-57230-922-7
Jump up ^ Handbook of the psychology of religion and spirituality, New York:
Guilford Press, pp. 199�215, ISBN 978-1-57230-922-7
Jump up ^ Compare: Blumin, Stuart M. (1989). The emergence of the middle class:
social experience in the American city, 1760-1900. Interdisciplinary perspectives
on modern history. Cambridge University Press. p. 434. ISBN 978-0-521-37612-9.
Retrieved 2009-12-02.
Jump up ^ Brown, Nina W. (2003) [1998]. Psychoeducational groups: process and
practice (2 ed.). Routledge. p. 103. ISBN 978-0-415-94602-5. Retrieved 2010-03-06.
Experiential group activities can be effective parts of psychoeducational groups.
Jump up ^ Compare: Popper, Karl R.; Eccles, John C. (1977). The self and its brain.
Berlin: Springer International. p. 401. ISBN 3-540-08307-3. With the advent of
computers, simulations can be done to provide for virtual reality [...]
Jump up ^ Compare: Nowotny, Helga; Plaice, Neville (1996). Time: The Modern and
Postmodern Experience. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 192. ISBN 978-0-7456-1837-1. Retrieved
2010-01-21.
Jump up ^ Kant, Immanuel (1781). "Book 1, Section 1". The Critique of Pure Reason.
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