1. The Experience

Author: O'Shaughnessy, Brian

Source: Consciousness and the World, January 2003 , pp. 37-68(32)

Publisher: Oxford Scholarship Online Monographs

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Abstract:

The experience is the most direct manifestation of the state of waking consciousness. This emerges in that being awake entails having experience, and it is experiences that constitute the stream of consciousness. The concept experience is a genus-concept rather than a species-concept, and is indefinable. Unlike mental events that are changes of state, experiences are the change of nothing, for experiential processes are constituted purely of lesser stretches of process and never out of mental states (there being no experience states). Experiences are therefore pure mental flux. The conscious experiencing subject is experientially directly aware of the immediate past, and of the actively intended immediate future, so that in experience we encounter the passage of time. Experience is our primary access to the reality of time.

Keywords: experience; consciousness; indefinability; flux; mental state; mental events; time; stream of consciousness

Document Type: Research article

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