Are You Experienced? (Part 1)

What is experience?

Experience is the most fundamental thing of our existence. It is subjective, it is real, it is crucial to understand.

In the brain, neurons firing produce that which we call an experience; I am experiencing vision, sounds, thoughts, emotions, feelings. However when the neurons that produce these experiences stop firing, we experience nothing. For this reason, we clearly ARE NOT experiencing neurons, because if we were, we would continue to experience after they have stopped firing. You are not your neurons, you are not your body. You do however experience your body.

What is it exactly that we are experiencing, if it is not our neurons? We are experiencing the exchange and processing of information between neurons and the world outside of the neurons.

Information exchange is not a physical substance. The implication of this is that our existence is non-physical, with a physical substrate. The normal state of being disappears when the information exchange stops. You can't bottle it, you can't materialize it, you cannot measure it in terms of its mass, its volume, its charge.

You can, however, say that when you have an experience, a neuron fires at a certain frequency, with a certain voltage, for a certain time, but that says ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about what is being experienced by the firing of that neuron. It's like trying to decipher the meaning of the words on this blog, using only the length of the characters and the color of the font. By only observing neurons you will never, ever find what is being experienced there.

Experience has a physical manifestation, but this physical manifestation is NOT the experience itself. It's like a shadow. A shadow is what is cast from an object, but is not the object itself.

We really are living in Plato's allegory of the cave. Let's find what's outside of this cave.