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3 Criteria for Verification of Subjective Experience
person
Don't believe everything you thinkThe liminal space Veteran
1) Any personal experience or shared convention or language.
2) In order to prevent an anything goes approach a second criteria is needed. So its any convention or phenomena that doesn't contradict another valid convential experience.
3) Now in order to prevent merely a shared convention to be considered final a third criteria is used. The convention must not contradict an inquiry into the ultimate nature of reality.
*These are just my paraphrasing of a topic that arose in this mind and life discussion. The original question by Wolf Singer starts at 1:13:28 the actual explanation of the criteria starts at 1:21:18
Buddhist meditative experience deals with subjective experience so its important to understand how we can validate and understand our personal experiences.
This panel is with scientists so the parallel is drawn somwhat with the problem of the observer in quantum mechanics.
2) In order to prevent an anything goes approach a second criteria is needed. So its any convention or phenomena that doesn't contradict another valid convential experience.
3) Now in order to prevent merely a shared convention to be considered final a third criteria is used. The convention must not contradict an inquiry into the ultimate nature of reality.
*These are just my paraphrasing of a topic that arose in this mind and life discussion. The original question by Wolf Singer starts at 1:13:28 the actual explanation of the criteria starts at 1:21:18
Buddhist meditative experience deals with subjective experience so its important to understand how we can validate and understand our personal experiences.
This panel is with scientists so the parallel is drawn somwhat with the problem of the observer in quantum mechanics.
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Comments
It is too abstract for me. But it is intuitively a promising approach...
Could you bring up an example so there is an object to apply this on please?
/Victor
The overall point is that there is a subjective reality that needs a way to ascertain what is real and what is delusion. Kind of like science does with objective phenomena.
Another example I thought of that might help if you've seen the movie A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe, where he plays the schizophrenic economist John Nash. Anyway he learns to cope with his illness even though delusions persist and at the end of the film someone he's never met before approached him. Since he has delusions he can't trust his own experience so he verifies whether this new person is real or in his head by asking one of his students that he already knows is real if they see the person too. So this is an example of #2, in order to verify his experience as not a delusion and it being valid he confirms it with another person.
It is true because you experinced it.
It is true because others experienced it and can share with you.
And it is true because it fits into the framework you consider your world.
I think this is basically how we build the world around us. Each of these steps heighten our conviction in how we percieve the world.
But also sometimes we can be brave enough to challange nr 2. Saying that my experince is the one correct and the authority is incorrect! And then again I think if we are even braver we can say that experince I had is more profound than the ultimate reality we believed in before and therefore the understanding of the ultimate must change...
/Victor
I think there is a Zen saying.
"Everything is floating" It seems to apply pretty well here.
But maybe using these rules there is some pattern to the floating?
/Victor
He was good to his promise.
There was no word in the Associated Press report about the funeral arrangements subsequent to his oh-so-subjectively-verifiable experience.
If you want to get detailed you could look up qualia. But basically its raw experience or what something feels like. What it feels like to see red or what it feels like to be you. You could explain to someone else what its like to be you but the only one that will ever really know what its like to be you is you. This type of experience can only ever be known in the first person, its always entirely subjective.
Maybe trying to explain a bit what its not may help too.
I have the experience that spinach makes me stronger, in relation to the criteria in the OP maybe my friends do too. This isn't subjective experience this is objective reality. We can look and test scientifically to see if spinach makes people stronger.
Its also not meant as the stuff that happens to us. This is also called experience but I guess I would maybe classify this as objective experience. We can say maybe that I experienced a UFO land in my backyard. This is your experience but it isn't something that is totally unique to you, if anyone else was in your yard at the time then they should also be able to experience the UFO.
So if something is totally unique to an individual and can never be truely known by another how can we test it to tell if the experience is legitimate or delusion, that is what the criteria are meant for. Sorry for any confusion caused by the OP, I was trying to explain something I don't really understand well.