Experience
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 thanbook-learning.
The interrogation of experience has a long tradition in continental philosophy. Experience plays an important role in the philosophy of Søren 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.
Types of experience
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, vicariousand virtual experience(s).
Physical
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
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 Erdős and Kurt Gödel. Gödel 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 thecontinuum hypothesis, might prove undecidable just on the basis of such principles. Gödel 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
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
Main article: Religious experience
Newberg and Newberg provide a view on spiritual experience.[6]
Religious
Main article: Religious experience
Mystics can describe their visions as "spiritual experiences". However, psychology andneuropsychology[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-controltechniques, 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 withentheogenic 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
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
Main articles: Virtual Reality and Simulation Game
Using computer simulations can enable a person or groups of persons to have virtual experiences invirtual 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 - calledexperience points or xp.
Subjective
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. Thesubjective 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 relativityetc.,[clarification needed] all of which affect our individual experience of any given situation in such a way as to render it subjective.